Mario Jutronic’s marine-themed microbrand Marnaut is a breath of fresh ocean air. It was beginning to seem impossible that a retro-flavoured dive watch could bring anything new to the table, but one glimpse at a Marnaut dial and you must admit they’ve found a way. Having spent a large portion of his youth snorkelling around the Adriatic Sea, Croatian entrepreneur and watch collector Mario Jutronic decided that his own brand needed to break away from the endlessly recycled designs in the diving world. His solution? Evoking the strikingly symmetrical holes in a Sea Urchin’s exoskeleton by arranging no less than 43 Super-LumiNova filled steel indexes on the dial. Mario describes the watch’s inspiration, the Sea Urchin, as a mesmerising object. And that’s the right word to describe the dial, too. The glinting indexes beneath the gently doming sapphire of the Dark Surge draw the eye, and train it to the centre; it is in fact hard to believe something so symmetrical and perfectly designed comes from an organic being. The downside is the lack of numbers on the timing bezel. With not a minute marker to be seen, it loses a lot of traditional diving functionality. That is part of…
The post MICRO MONDAYS: Introducing Marnaut, the sub-$1k 300m dive watch with the sea urchin dot-pattern dial appeared first on Time and Tide Watches.