Horologer MING blazed its way into the watchmaking scene in 2017, rising above a field crowded with would-be disruptors and fascinating watch collectors thanks to its daring aesthetics, obsessive design, and maximal features at an accessible price. The driving force behind the company is Ming Thein, a man of many talents but who had, at that point, been best known for his career as a photographer.
Armed with no watchmaking training or relevant engineering background, but fuelled principally by the knowledge and passion that come with being an enthusiast for a couple of decades, Thein set out to make his vision a reality. That he is Malaysian gave MING the distinction of being an outsider in a conservative, Euro-centric industry—the watches might be made in Switzerland, but the operations and design office are in Thein’s home city of Kuala Lumpur. In 2019, the brand’s impact was acknowledged by winning a prize at the prestigious Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Gèneve (GPHG) awards—just in time for the Covid-19 pandemic to upend the world economy.
It has been eight years since its founding. MING is still a coveted micro-brand, still turning heads, and picked up another GPHG in 2024. Some things have not changed—Thein still does all the design work out of Kuala Lumpur. Other things, however, have evolved, like how his aesthetic sensibilities have grown more deliberate and precise. Aside from the usual challenges that come with running a small business, Thein has had to navigate a supply chain dominated by titans, a fickle horological audience, and a global watch market that has been very unpromising since the second quarter of this year. None of these factors seems to have dampened his vision or ambition—MING still operates at a breakneck pace, with more than 70 watches in its portfolio, so far, and some innovation or other lurking in each one.
“Winning the GPHG in 2019 was a mixed bag because, at that point, we still had to make things in batches. Lead times were so long that, by the time we restocked, we would have been one design generation ahead already. So, it wasn’t as helpful as it could have been. But I think it gave us some legitimacy that, at that point, we needed. The perception was that we’re an Asian brand out of nowhere, and all of the usual post-colonial mentality that is attached to it, right? So, we got some legitimacy out of that. Maybe it helped to some degree, maybe it didn’t. It got people to pay silly money on the secondary market, which makes me very uncomfortable—because you come away from what may be your first interaction with us, directly or indirectly, and go, ‘this isn’t worth the money’. And I’ll tell you, yeah, it’s not, because it was never designed to be priced that way. We’re supposed to be good value at the price we set up, and we’ll compete with things maybe twice our price, but not 12 times.
“At some point, we transitioned to being incumbent. Then, you go from being the underdog everybody wants to root for to ‘oh, you’re part of the establishment, so let’s throw rocks at you’. Every company goes through that, and we realised that, at some point, you have to take a step back and realise that you can’t win this. So, just do your own thing and ignore it.
“If you only ever listen to external opinions, you won’t make interesting products. Everybody has a different opinion, but not everybody can flesh out that opinion adequately to justify why it exists.
“We’ve come to the conclusion that we still need to go back to making things that we like—because that is where the defensibility and the coherence come in. I’m making this because I believe this whole thing, as an idea, works, and these are all of the subsequent choices that I’ve made to keep that idea coherent. We try to put one miracle into every piece. Anything more than that becomes a bit of a dangerous crapshoot.
“The company has not changed the way we envision [our products], but it’s definitely changed. In the early days, I had my fingers in every aspect of the pie, because we didn’t have the size to do it. And I needed to understand what was going on in order to feed everything back into creating an overall holistic experience for the customer that makes sense. In the intervening time, I’ve handed off finance, operations, and customer service. Basically, the more we’ve grown, the less of the external-facing stuff I do. There’s just no time.
“We’re also trying to expand into more retail. Very early on, we said we’d do direct-to-customer and direct-to-customer only. I think it positioned us well for the online sales pre-Covid, but not so well post-Covid, when people actually wanted to experience stuff and play with things in person. So, recognising that (for example) there are a fixed number of events we can go to, there are a fixed number of people we can see. And the only way around this is to find the right retail partners to do that going forward.
“I think there’s some satisfaction that comes from figuring out solutions to things. The more engineering I do, the better understanding I have of how to find solutions. There have been some early frustrations, where the ideas didn’t translate because I didn’t know how to find the solution. There have been some intermediate ones where we’ve had to push our suppliers and basically say, ‘no, it can be done.’ And some have resulted in very nice solutions.
“[On the challenging economic climate]… there’s a lot of the self-fulfilling prophecy stuff. I think you have to continue and just believe that it’s not as bad as you think. Because, on an absolute scale, the amount of money in circulation remains the same. So, the question is, what can you do that’s interesting enough that make people want to spend that? Then, it becomes our job to make a more interesting product.”
Illustration by Tan Eng Huat
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