It’s hard to understand Budapest without being there. On its surface, it seems like any other major European capital, but in practice, Budapest is a singular experience. I was lucky enough to visit Budapest when I was 14, and what I encountered was a city replete with contradictions, one that wears its history on its sleeve, and which evokes a unique perspective. In other words, it’s exactly the sort of city where you would expect to find someone like Jake LeBoy. “I went there for vacation a few years ago and I thought, you know, I’m just going to get an apartment here,” he told me. “It’s pretty nice. And I’ve been enjoying it ever since.”
Jake LeBoy, the founder and designer behind the newly launched watch brand J.M. LeBoy, expresses a similar sort of contradiction. Talking to Jake, it would be hard to guess that the remarkably chipper native Californian had served as an enlisted Marine, or that he has spent much of the time since working as a military contractor all around the world. What wasn’t hard to see was his love of watches. Soft spoken and warm, Jake is a passionate watch enthusiast, driven by detail and with a strong sense of what it means to do right by the collectors whose attention he’s looking to grab.
“I’ve always been a huge watch nerd,” he explained. “Even from the time I was a little kid, I saw Goldfinger and the famous Submariner, and then I saw Jason Bourne, the first one with the TAG Heuer… that for me, dude — I finally got one of them. That was one of my grail watches. When you’re a kid and you see the action here with his watch you’re like ‘I gotta have the watch,’ you know? So I saw that, and I started collecting… it was just always something I was super into.”
Now, LeBoy is taking the big step from watch enthusiast, to watchmaker — or at least designer — with the launch of his eponymous brand J.M. LeBoy. “I remember sitting out in this Toyota Hilux in 130° weather,” he recalls, “and just sweating profusely in a suit with my AK-47 and sitting there looking at my cell phone, trying to like download on dial up [a watch] newsletter or something, and I just thought, I’d really rather do something that I really enjoy.
“I didn’t know anything about how to produce watches or any of that. I just knew that I really liked watches, and that I’d seen a lot of things in the industry where, as an enthusiast, you go ‘Oh, come on! They should have done this right, or they should have done that right, or whatever right. And I decided I’m going to get into this, so I started teaching myself about design and all the little pieces of it.”
Now, after several years, a lot of time spent going back and forth with factories all over the world, and a first watch that we’ll never see (“the first watch was called the Test Pilot, it was a pilot’s watch, and I only made a few of those,” he confided during our chat), LeBoy is ready to present his first major release, the Bedouin. “It’s inspired by the Bedouin tribes of the Middle East. I stayed with them, I worked with them in the military, and I was really inspired by them, especially since I travel so much, and they’re nomads.”
A Travel Watch Inspired By Travelers
The J.M. LeBoy Bedouin is, as one might expect for a watch inspired by a nomadic tribe, a take on a travel watch. Like Budapest, on its surface, the Bedouin might seem like yet another addition to the increasingly large stable of micro-brand GMTs that have cropped up in recent years, but a closer looks reveals a watch replete with details drawn from not only the Bedouin tribes of North Africa and the Middle East, but from the deserts in which they’ve lived for millennia.
The Bedouin’s steel case is 39mm across, 46mm lug-to-lug, and 12.7mm thick (of which 2mm is the domed sapphire crystal, the case itself is 10.7mm thick). Oh, and it’s 20mm between the lugs, which — let’s be honest — is probably the lug size we’re all best equipped to kit out. Though if I had one minor quibble with the Bedouin in my few hours with it, it would be that the exterior dimensions of the lugs feel a hair wide, but your mileage may vary on that, and it’s an issue that will likely be mitigated when the Bedouin is taken off the bracelet.
The Bedouin comes with both a bracelet equipped with on the fly micro adjust, and a leather strap available in three sizes, so getting the perfect fit won’t be an issue and, on wrist, the Bedouin wears predictably well — I say predictably because the dimensions of the Bedouin fall right into ‘enthusiast spec’ and match up nicely with watches like the Baltic Aquascaphe or the Lorier Neptune. Basically, it’s exactly the right size to appeal to a wide range of wrists.
Of course, that’s not to say the watch either looks or feels like something from one of these brands. On the contrary the J.M. LeBoy Bedouin has a decidedly unique character, a lot of which comes down to the visual flourishes that tie the watch and its namesake together. Faceted links evoke Bedouin textiles, while the ornate dial furniture and faceted lugs remind me clearly of Bedouin jewelry.
All that said, the first thing that will jump out at you picking up the watch is the dial. The Bedouin features a handsome blue and gold colorway, with a single dial configuration, but an option between Eastern and Western Arabic numerals. Each of these is executed similarly, with font style and implementation consistent across both variations. A nice touch here is that whichever option you choose is carried through the entire watch; including the bezel and date wheel. All of this is set against a textured gold wave dial. It’s a subtle effect, but the sand-inspired dial works, and really does look quite handsome in person.
“I really love dials like Grand Seiko, so I wanted to make an interesting dial, a watch with an interesting identity, and something that really represented travel, which is super important to me and the brand,” LeBoy told me. “And that’s how the Bedouin came to be… It originally wasn’t even going to be a textured dial, it was going to be a vertically brushed champagne dial, and then I had this idea one day ‘That’d be so cool if it kind of looked like waves of sand in the desert. And then I said, ‘You know what? Why do something that everybody else does? I’m just going to do the desert one,’ because I was thinking of offering it only as an option, and then I said, ‘No. Screw it — I’m going to make the whole thing like that.’”
Inside the Bedouin is a flyer-style Miyota 9075 GMT movement regulated to plus or minus eight seconds a day — not quite COSC, but certainly better than many watches at even twice the price of the Bedouin. “We were going to use the Soprod movement, and I went and visited their factory and everything, and then the 9075 came out. And I just thought, this is a superior movement — especially for the price. I don’t care if it’s not Swiss-made, this is just a better product. And I’m always trying to look at things through the lens of the enthusiast and so I would prefer that movement [the Miyota]. So that’s what we ended up going with.”
An added bit of function comes courtesy of the slightly unusual 96-click bezel, which allows the watch to account not only for the world’s standard time zones, but for every time zone and time zone offset found anywhere in the world (like Nepal, whose time zone is fixed at UTC +05:45).
Next Steps
Of course, despite what some would have you believe, one watch does not a brand make, and Jake LeBoy gets this intrinsically. So while the Bedouin is certainly an important release for the brand, Jake is looking far beyond his debut. LeBoy sees the brand as being a total expression of his views on functional items, with everything from knives and fountain pens to leather goods and even fragrances on the horizon. “I plan to make other objects that are not just watches… There’s quite a few things that are planned to be made, but at the core of the brand is watches. There will always be watches.”
And while the Bedouin won’t be around forever — LeBoy made it very clear that this configuration is a one and done, meant to be special for early supporters — it sets the tone for the future of the brand decisively. “All the watches are tool watches at heart, so every design I put out will have 200 meters water resistance, they all use Viton gaskets, and I really try to just make sure that they’re watches you can use anywhere, anytime… I’ve been wearing this [watch] for over a year. I’ve taken this in combat, I’ve taken it everywhere, and it’s literally survived everything. So the field testing has been thorough.”
The J.M. LeBoy Bedouin is available to pre-order beginning today from jmleboy.com for $750.
