There are watches that display time, and then there are watches that make you question what time-keeping even means. The Ressence TYPE 9 IKE, announced today, lands firmly in the second category. Limited to eight pieces, it brings together Antwerp’s most iconoclastic watchmaker and Kanazawa-based Japanese artist Terumasa Ikeda in a collaboration that feels less like a product launch and far closer to a philosophical statement.
A History of Meaningful Partnerships
Ressence, founded by Benoît Mintiens in 2010, has built a convincing record of collaborating with artists and designers who genuinely understand the brand’s mechanical language rather than simply decorating it. The list is impressive: graphic designer and typographer Stefan Sagmeister, illustrator Shantell Martin, the inimitable Alain Silberstein, and Munich-based painter Daniel Engelberg on the TYPE 8 DE series in 2025. Most recently, Marc Newson joined the roster with the TYPE 3 MN, a limited edition of 80 pieces that fused Newson’s industrial design vocabulary with Ressence’s oil-filled dial technology. What distinguishes the IKE from this lineage is the nature of the craft involved. Ikeda does not paint onto components, he transforms them through urushi lacquer and raden inlay, techniques rooted in centuries of Japanese decorative art that present extraordinary challenges when applied to a convex, moving surface.
The Dial: Ancient Craft on a Moving Canvas
Reading the TYPE 9 IKE dial is genuinely arresting. Ikeda’s concept draws on the idea of heliocentrism, the intellectual courage of astronomers who pursued truth against institutional resistance, and he translates this into a composition of ultra-fine raden (mother-of-pearl) fragments and black urushi lacquer applied to Grade 5 titanium discs coated in DLC. The full case architecture, including the bezel and caseback, wears the same black DLC finish, which makes the luminescent mother-of-pearl shift with hypnotic drama as the discs rotate under light.
The most technically demanding aspect was bending raden to fit the convex dial geometry. Raden naturally fractures when forced, so Ikeda’s workshop in Kanazawa soaked each ultra-thin shell fragment and bent it gradually on rubber sheets, coaxing it to follow the curvature. The result reads neither as decoration nor as marquetry in the traditional sense, it reads as a coded transmission, precisely what Mintiens described as “a signal from another civilisation, beamed back to us from the future.”
Movement: The ROCS 9 Engine
The TYPE 9 IKE runs on the patented ROCS 9 (Ressence Orbital Convex System) module, driven by the minute axle of a customised and reinforced ETA 2892/2 automatic base calibre. The ROCS receives a single input from the base movement, the minute, and from it derives all displayed information through a system of 20 gears, 31 jewels, and 4 ball bearings, beating at 28,800 vph with a 36-hour power reserve. This is genuinely clever engineering: rather than stacking hands over a static dial, ROCS drives rotating discs on a single convex plane, so both eyes read time from an identical two-dimensional image, eliminating the parallax error inherent in conventional hand-and-dial architecture.
On the TYPE 9, the minutes indicator sits outside the main disc on a fixed bezel, a first for the TYPE 9 platform that gives the overall composition a more compact and concentrated look. Setting and winding happen exclusively through the caseback, turn past 12° of resistance until a click confirms engagement, then rock the caseback back and forth about ten times to activate the movement. There is no crown. There has never been a crown on a Ressence. That is the point.
The Case
The 39 mm case in polished, DLC-coated Grade 5 titanium keeps the profile lean at 11 mm thickness and the total weight at just 43 grams including the strap. A domed sapphire crystal with an internal anti-reflective coating sits above the dial, and the caseback carries Ikeda’s personal signature. Water resistance sits at 1 ATM, which is consistent with the brand’s design philosophy, this is a watch for living, not diving. The strap is black shiny horse leather (20/18 mm lug width) with moisture-repellent interior lining, closed by a titanium ardillon buckle. At 182 total components for the whole assembly, the engineering density here is exceptional for a 39 mm case.
Why It Matters
I find the TYPE 9 IKE genuinely moving, and I do not say that casually. Benoît Mintiens has always argued that a Ressence should provoke wonder before it provokes admiration, and Ikeda’s contribution achieves exactly that, you feel the dial before you decode it. At CHF 32,000 excluding taxes, across only eight examples, this is as close to a private commission as a production watch gets. It goes on sale today, 26 February 2026, through select Ressence retailers worldwide. If you encounter one in a boutique, pick it up, rotating it under the light is the only way to understand what the word “orbital” truly means on a human wrist.
Ressence TYPE 9 IKE Technical Specifications
NAME: TYPE 9 IKE – CHF 32,000 (excluding taxes)
Functions
• Hours
• Minutes
Movement
• Patented ROCS 9 – Ressence Orbital Convex System – module driven by the minute axle of a customised automatic base calibre
• Self-winding
• 36 hours power reserve
• 28,800 vibrations per hour
• 31 jewels
• 20 gears
• 4 ball bearings
Dial
• Grade 5 Titanium with DLC coating.
• Manually applied Raden (mother-of-pearl) and Japanese Urushi (black lacquer)
Case
• Polished Grade 5 titanium – DLC coated
• Domed sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating inside
• 39 mm (diameter) x 11mm (thickness)
• 1 ATM splash-resistance
• Manual winding over 12°
• Set-up via case-back
Buckle & Strap
• Titanium ardillon buckle
• Black shiny horse leather strap (20/18mm)
• Inside lining in moisture repellent leather
Components & Weight
• 182 components. 43 Grams (strap included)
