Behind Lorier's Acquisition by Worn & Wound
The updated core collection is now available for pre-order.
Last fall, I was having dinner at a Thai place on the Lower East Side, and stopped to compliment a 1016 I thought I saw on someone’s wrist. As I began my sentence, I looked down and realized the guy was actually wearing a Lorier Falcon. For $500, it was tough to beat.
Lorier is beloved by a certain segment of enthusiasts for its well-made homages to the past that aren’t too on-the-nose, many priced around 500 bucks.
But Lorier had its problems, the biggest one being that it was always sold out. Lorier had been curiously quiet over the past few months. Then in June, news leaked that it’d been acquired by Worn & Wound, and the official announcement came earlier this week. Husband-and-wife founders Lauren and Lorenzo Ortega remain partial owners, and Lorenzo is staying on as Creative Director.
I’ve met Lorenzo and Lauren Ortega a couple of times. I appreciate their design sense, their steadfast commitment to Hesalite crystals, even if this put me in the minority (and this is one of the changes to its revamped lineup of watches).
Following its acquisition by Worn & Wound, Lorier is re-releasing its core collection of watches, with pre-orders opening on Monday July 27 at 1pm. Learn more on Lorier’s website.
The Astra, Falcon, Neptune, and Hyperion will all be available. They start at $699, with the Hyperion GMT at $799. A slight bump in prices, but Worn & Wound says it’s made refinements to materials and construction. As we get into in our conversation below, that also means a change in crystals.
A few weeks ago, I spoke with Worn & Wound co-founder Blake Malin about the acquisition. Our conversation, below.
Unpolished (U): Why Lorier, and why now?
Blake Malin (BM): We’ve been working with Lorier for years now. We released our first limited edition with them in 2020. We were catching up at Windup New York last year, and they’d said they were looking for an exit or a strategic partner to scale the business beyond where they were. We weren’t proactively looking for a business to acquire. But given our relationship, we were able to work something out that made sense for everybody.
We think Lorier’s an incredible brand. Our audience is really over the moon with them. When you go to Windup, obviously every booth is pretty busy, but some booths are pretty ravenous—I think about Brew or Christopher Ward. Lauren and Lorenzo are one of those teams that the community has a very close relationship with. It’s something we’ve admired for a long time, so it was really exciting to hear it was something we could be involved in.
U: Is there something that makes you confident this will be a good fit, or that you could grow the brand together?
Anytime you get into business with anybody, it’s kind of like a marriage. We already like them a lot, so strictly from a personality fit, it made sense.
From the brand perspective: the challenge Lorier had faced historically is keeping inventory and ironing out logistics to supply the watches their customers demanded. Over the last 10–15 years, Worn & Wound has developed a set of skills, from logistics to customer service to warehousing, shipping, marketing, and communication. So it presented a perfect opportunity to take this brand that has a ravenous fan base demanding more watches and pair it with an organization that can really be helpful in scaling the business to meet that demand.
In a recent podcast episode on Hodinkee, Lorenzo says that at its peak, Lorier was delivering 5,000 to 6,000 watches per year. All while Lauren and Lorenzo remained the only full-time employees, running logistics, shipment, QC, all on their own.
Q: What’s the vision for the brand going forward?
The plan for the brand is to do more of the same as what they were already doing. We’re not looking to change it. They have such a strong brand to begin with. The products are great, and they have a really great community. We just want to do more of it. We want to iron out the pipeline of inventory to make sure there aren’t long periods when they’re sold out of everything and provide more opportunities for people to buy their watches.
For the relaunch, we’ll have four of their core watches: the Falcon, Astra, Hyperion, and Neptune. Those will all be re-released with minor changes. Little tweaks to improve the case or the materials. Not radical departures from what they’ve done in the past.
Q: Anything big in the pipeline you want to tease? New models?
Right now we’re just trying to meet demand, releasing the core models people have been asking for.
We’re actually moving away from acrylic crystals to sapphire. I don’t know if the community will be torn on it, but I think it’s going to be a material improvement.
U: I do love brands that still use acrylic, and I’d always appreciated Lorier using it. One of the first times I ever talked to Lorenzo was for a story about sapphire and acrylic crystals.
I’ve been in the same boat. I love acrylic crystals. It’s challenging—some people who buy them don’t know how to maintain them or what to expect, and it can create education issues. And with sapphire crystals, a lot of manufacturers have gotten so good at replicating the acrylic look. So that’s what we’re going for. But we’ll see—I’m sure some diehards will wish it was still acrylic.
Q: Anything you’ve learned about taking over a brand like this that you hadn’t expected?
We’ve taken over the customer service aspects for the brand since the acquisition, and getting that ramped up—their audience, their customers have a very close, very personal relationship with them.
Observing a lot of these micro brands from afar—a Brew or Baltic or Autodromo—I assumed it was a very different relationship to what we have with our customers in the Windup Shop. But it’s clear there’s a deep and meaningful relationship with their customers. A big part of their fandom of the brand is the people behind it. So the depth of that relationship was a little bit more than I even anticipated.
Q: Favorite Lorier watch?
Other than the limited editions, I have the Hydra Zulu. It’s one of the few watches that mixes traditional lume color with a creamy faux-lume color. That’s probably my favorite one.
The move from acrylic to sapphire feels like the first real test of the acquisition. Sapphire may be easier to own, but acrylic was part of what made Lorier feel like Lorier. How do you decide which customer frictions are problems to eliminate and which are part of the brand’s character?