Watch enthusiasts launch own brand in Malaysia, and it’s an instant hit
Ming was started by a bunch of friends to make watches of the sort they would want to buy. Their first model sold out within hours; their second is in line for a prize at the Oscars of watchmaking
Ming Thein did his time in sovereign wealth, private equity and management consulting before co-founding Ming watches, a “Malaysian horological collective” – ironic in a country with a less than firm grasp of punctuality.
“This is nobody’s retirement plan,” he says, referring to himself and the five other enthusiasts from around the world who founded the collective.
Thein, who studied theoretical physics at the University of Oxford, worked in the corporate world until 2012, when he switched professions to become a photographer, shooting for watchmakers such as Jaeger-LeCoultre, Speake-Marin, Maitres du Temps, Andreas Strehler and Romain Gauthier. He was then made chief of strategy at photography company Hasselblad, a position he held until September.
It was a bad experience at a luxury watch fair that was the catalyst for the formation of the Ming watch brand. Ming and his friends were “duly horrified by the tactics used by some of the brands on potential customers” at a Hong Kong watch fair. “It was more like a flea market with six-figure entry prices,” he says. As a result, they decided to make the watches they would want to buy, and offer them to fellow enthusiasts.
Their goal was to revive the unadulterated joys of discovery, without the shock of the prices the luxury watch industry charges. “Ten years ago, nobody would have thought about a US$200,000-US$300,000 watch as being normal. And [the price tags are] now into the millions,” says Ming Thein.
