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PARTNERSHIP | Spring 2020 08 Interview with Epoché’s CEO, Alessandro Felaco Luxury is timeless and now even smart I n the panorama of the luxury world, the watch market plays a fundamental role. With a four-century long history, the sector has experienced several changes in both style and technology. 1880 marked the first revolution, a cultural change: the transition from pocket watch to wristwatch. Watches were no longer considered just an object of common use but became an icon for businessmen and of their hectic lives, the symbol of city life and of the wealthy social class. Although the luxury watch market has always been an industry that maintained quite a traditional style, it has opened its doors to the advent of technology, revolutionising their classic concept into the one of a “smart” watch. In this new fashion-tech era, Epoché, a Neapolitan start-up, developed their business idea from the winning formula of maintaining the distinctive features of luxury watches without sacrificing the technology appeal. Alessandro Felaco, Epoché’s CEO & Founder, tells the story of this business intuition. ICC: How did Epoché start? AF: Epoché was born from a simple, spontaneous and intrinsic concept of human nature: intuition. Walking around Baselworld in Basel, Switzerland, in 2017, and peeking at the products on display at the world’s largest watch fair, I realised the lack of a link between analog and digital, between watch and smartwatch. A bridge between tradition and innovation. This type of watch is called “hybrid” and is the fashionable evolution of smartwatches, with a more beautiful design and style that resemble analog and mechanical watches as much as possible. Our start-up wanted to modify the concept of wristwatch thought as a simple aesthetic object, redesigning and integrating a special dial and a technology called Invisible Smart Connect®, which allows to have a traditional watch aesthetic with a smartwatch soul. It is possible to connect the analog watch via Bluetooth to a dedicated app to configure appointments and set various settings such as vibration’s intensity, time-zone for travellers, applications to display, heart rate monitor, oxygen saturation, contactless payments and notification