Why the future of the wrist is modular

Somewhere between 1999 and now, a quiet shift happened in how the best consumer brands think about value. The shift was not technological. It was philosophical. The brands that grew fastest, defended their margins best, and built the most genuine fan communities all converged on the same observation: the product is more valuable when the customer is allowed to finish it. Lego figured this out first. Nike followed. MINI Cooper built an entire brand around it. The wrist, with a handful of honourable exceptions, has been notably slower than its consumer peers to follow. This is an essay about why that is changing, and where it is going next.

A quiet shift in who actually owns the product

I should say up front that I have spent the past three years thinking about modularity professionally, which gives me both the advantage of having looked at it closely and the disadvantage of being unable to claim detachment. I will be transparent about where my company fits into this story when we get there. For now, what interests me is the broader pattern, because it is genuinely larger than the watch industry that some of my readers will have arrived at this piece for.

The old way of thinking about a consumer product was relatively simple. The brand designed it. The customer bought it. If the customer wanted something different, they bought a different one. Choice happened at the moment of purchase. After that, the product was fixed. This worked beautifully for decades and still works for many categories. It is not wrong. It is just no longer the only model on the table.

The new model, which has been building for about a quarter of a century, treats the product as a structural starting point that the customer is invited to complete. The brand provides the architecture. The customer provides the configuration. The product that ends up in the home is, in some real sense, neither the brand's idea alone nor the customer's idea alone. It is the conversation between them, made tangible.

What strikes me about this model, looking at the brands that have made it work, is that the customers it serves do not experience it as customization. They experience it as ownership. The product feels more theirs because they had a hand in shaping it. That feeling, it turns out, is among the more durable competitive advantages a consumer brand can build, partly because it cannot easily be copied by undercutting price.

The Lego Saturn V was designed by a customer

The clearest example of where this can go is also one of the oldest. Lego has been a modular toy since its founding in 1949, but the brand's real breakthrough in customer-as-co-creator came much later, with the launch of the Lego Ideas platform.

Lego Ideas works as a structured invitation. Adult fans, known in the brand's own vocabulary as AFOLs (Adult Fans of Lego), submit their own set designs. If a submission reaches 10,000 supporter votes, Lego reviews it and may turn it into an official product. The Saturn V rocket, the Yellow Submarine, the Seinfeld apartment, and the Women of NASA set were all designed first by customers, then ratified by community vote, then produced by Lego with the original designer named on the box and receiving royalties.

What I find interesting about the Saturn V specifically is that it became a highly successful set despite the fact that no one inside the Lego design team had originally thought to build it. The customer who proposed it was not a Lego employee. He was, by all accounts, just someone who loved both space and Lego and wanted a thing that did not exist. He made it exist, with Lego's help, and tens of thousands of people bought it.

According to MarketWatch data cited by Renascence's CX analysis, Lego Ideas products reportedly see significantly faster sell-through rates than traditional Lego sets, often estimated at around fifty percent. The reason is not mysterious. The customers who supported the design during the voting phase have already committed to wanting it. By the time it launches, it has a small but devoted pre-built audience. Marketing that would otherwise have to be created and paid for has already happened, organically, inside the community itself.

The broader lesson, and the one that travels across industries, is that the customer who participated in the design becomes a different kind of customer at the moment of purchase. They are not buying a product. They are completing a process they helped start.

Nike learned this in 1999. The industry took twenty years to follow.

NikeID, launched in 1999 and now rebranded as Nike By You, is the other foundational case study, and the one with the longest track record of refinement.

The initial version was extraordinarily modest. According to Wikipedia's archive of the launch, customers could customize a single shoe model, the Air Force One, across thirty-one parts including base, overlay, accent, lining, stitching, outsole, laces, and the deubré at the top of the laces. Eighty-two material and option choices were available across those thirty-one parts. The combinations ran into the millions.

What Nike learned, and refined relentlessly over the following two and a half decades, is that the modular customization service became valuable not because most customers used it, but because the option of using it changed the customer's relationship with the entire Nike catalog. The shoes you did not customize started to feel like Nike's, in a way that mattered less. The shoes you did customize felt like yours, in a way that mattered enormously.

Nike By You today, according to a recent industry analysis by Marpipe, offers customization across 134 shoes and cleats spanning 8 sports. There are 102 physical Nike By You studios worldwide. The text personalization options allow up to 28 characters in two sizes. The combinations are effectively endless.

The strategic insight, which I think is rarely articulated as cleanly as it deserves, is that the near-infinity of possible combinations is itself the value. When the customer knows that no two customized pairs will ever be identical, the resulting pair carries a different weight in their wardrobe. It is not interchangeable with anyone else's. It cannot be duplicated, even by the buyer themselves a year later. It is a singular object, made possible by a modular system the buyer never could have built alone.

This logic, I should note, is not specific to footwear. It is the same logic that explains why every car configurator in the premium automotive segment has expanded relentlessly over the past two decades. It is the same logic that explains the popularity of build-your-own-burrito chains. It is the same logic, underneath, that animates IKEA's relationship with its customers, even though IKEA arrived at it from a completely different direction.

IKEA arrived at the same insight from a completely different direction. The flat-pack model was originally an operational choice (smaller boxes, lower shipping cost), but customers turned it into a creative one, eventually spawning the IKEA Hackers community in 2006 around a blogger named Jules Yap. By the late 2010s, IKEA itself had quietly absorbed the lesson and started designing newer systems like the PAX wardrobe with explicit customer reconfiguration in mind. The company that had not intended to be modular discovered that its customers had been treating it as modular all along, and decided to lean in.

MINI, the car that arrives already half-yours

MINI Cooper is the example I find most useful for thinking about how modularity scales to higher price points. A Lego set costs fifty euros. A Nike By You pair costs two hundred. A MINI, configured, costs somewhere between thirty and fifty thousand euros. The same logic still works.

The MINI configurator, in its current form, allows the customer to choose body type (3-door, 5-door, convertible, John Cooper Works variants), engine, transmission, roof colour, mirror cap colour, body colour, stripe pattern, wheel design, interior trim, dashboard inserts, headlight rings, fog lights, infotainment package, sound system, and what feels like infinite combinations of optional packs. A MINI buyer rarely walks into a dealership and buys what is on the lot. They configure online, place an order, and wait six to ten weeks for the specific car they designed to arrive.

The car that shows up is, in a real sense, not a MINI in general. It is the MINI the buyer made. The roof colour matches their motorcycle. The stripes are the ones they always wanted on the toy car they had as a child. The interior trim was selected during a forty-five minute session on the configurator with their partner on a Sunday afternoon. By the time the car arrives, the buyer has lived with their version of it inside their head for two months.

What this does to ownership is significant. The MINI owner does not relate to their car the way a Volkswagen Golf owner relates to a Golf, even if the two cars are mechanically similar and similarly priced. The MINI is a singular object that the customer participated in creating. The Golf is, however well-built, a car that anyone could have ordered identically. This is not a critique of the Golf. It is a description of what modular configuration does to the psychology of ownership.

BMW, which owns MINI, has been quietly applying this same logic across its own brand for years, but MINI is where the customer-as-co-designer narrative is most explicitly cultivated. The configurator is positioned as a feature, not as a procurement tool. The Sunday afternoon spent designing your car is, in MINI's view, part of the product experience, not a step toward buying the product.

Why the watch industry has barely tried this

Across these four examples, one observation keeps coming back to me. The consumer industries that have most successfully embraced modular design as a customer-value strategy are the ones that started outside the luxury tradition. Lego started in toys. Nike started in athletic equipment. IKEA started in flat-pack home goods. MINI started in small budget cars. None of these brands had a deeply established codified language of "the customer must respect the designer's intent." They had, instead, business problems to solve. Modularity was the answer.

Luxury watchmaking, by contrast, evolved inside a tradition that takes the designer's intent extraordinarily seriously. A Patek Calatrava is the dial Patek's designers chose, the case shape Patek's designers chose, the hands Patek's designers chose, the bracelet Patek's designers chose. Buying a Patek is, in a meaningful sense, accepting Patek's expertise about what your wrist should look like. The whole point of the Geneva Seal, the Geneva stripes, the hand-finished movement is that you are paying for the maker's judgment, not your own.

This is not a criticism of high-end watchmaking. The case for the maker's judgment is genuinely strong, especially at the highest end of the market. But it has produced an unintended blind spot. The watch industry has done relatively little to invite the customer into the design process at any meaningful level, even though most of the technical preconditions for doing so have been in place for decades.

There are honorable exceptions worth naming. Bamford Watch Department has built an entire business around modifying existing Rolex and Tudor watches with proprietary case finishes and dial changes. MoonSwatch, the Omega and Swatch collaboration from 2022, sat closer to a curated colourway collection than a modular system in the strict sense, but it did show that watch buyers responded enthusiastically to choice at a scale Swiss watchmaking had not previously offered. Tudor's T-fit clasp and Cartier's QuickSwitch system are gestures toward strap modularity, although they are tied to single brands.

What has not really happened, until quite recently, is a system that treats the watch as one component in a wrist-level arrangement that the customer assembles themselves. Which is the territory my own company has been working in for the past three years.

Where Smartlet fits, and what we learned from doing this

I should declare an interest at this point, because the next few paragraphs would be dishonest without it. Smartlet is the modular wrist system I founded in 2023. The reason I am writing about modularity across other industries is partly because I find the broader pattern genuinely interesting, and partly because Smartlet sits in that broader pattern in a way that I think is worth being transparent about.

The original Smartlet question was narrow. A growing number of people wanted to wear a mechanical watch and a connected device on the same wrist, and there was no engineered way to do it. The conventional answer was to wear one on each wrist, which works for some people and not others. The alternative answers, mostly improvised, were uncomfortable. We engineered a modular adapter that sits between the lugs of nearly any compatible watch case, using our own SS316L spring bars with a proprietary quickfit mechanism, allowing a single strap to hold both a mechanical watch on top and a connected device on the underside.

What I did not fully understand at the start, and what I have come to understand by watching how customers actually use the system, is that the dual-wear case was only the first layer. The deeper layer was modular ownership. A Smartlet owner does not have a single configuration. They have a system. Today the watch on top is a Tudor and the connected device underneath is an Apple Watch. Tomorrow the watch on top is a vintage Speedmaster and the connected device underneath is a Whoop. Next month the connected device underneath is the Fitbit Air that we wrote about a few weeks ago. The same strap, the same adapter, the same arrangement. What changes is what the wearer decides to put in the slots.

This is structurally similar to what Lego does, what Nike By You does, and what MINI does. The customer is not buying a fixed configuration. They are buying access to a system that lets them reconfigure as their wrist preferences evolve.

What we have learned from doing this is that customers who arrive looking for the dual-wear answer often stay for the system. The first adapter solves the specific case they bought it for. Then they start imagining other configurations the same system could support. A different strap. A second adapter for a second watch. A material variant that matches a different mood. The system keeps paying off in ways the initial purchase did not promise.

This is also why we have invested heavily in compatibility across watch brands, with documented references covering the major makers and lug widths. A modular system that only works with one brand of watch is not really modular. It is a closed ecosystem with extra steps.

What modular products actually share

Stepping back from Smartlet specifically and looking at the broader pattern across Lego, Nike, IKEA, MINI, and the handful of other genuinely modular consumer brands, four common features keep showing up.

The first is that the system has to be technically open enough to be genuinely modular. Lego bricks fit other Lego bricks because Lego deliberately maintains backward compatibility across decades. A 1962 Lego brick still fits a 2026 Lego brick. Nike's customization is constrained to Nike shoes, but inside that constraint the choices are genuinely combinatorial. IKEA's PAX wardrobe accepts components from across the IKEA range. MINI's configurator allows combinations the brand may not have anticipated. The technical openness is what allows the customer to feel like a designer rather than a chooser between three preset bundles.

The second is that the brand has to be willing to step back from absolute design control. This is where many luxury and premium brands struggle. The brand has typically built its reputation on the singular authority of its design point of view. Modular customization requires loosening that grip. The customer's combinations will sometimes look, to the brand's designers, like mistakes. The brand has to accept that, or the modularity is theatrical rather than real.

The third is that the system must defend its own quality at the component level. The customer is allowed to combine the components freely, but the components themselves must hold up. A Lego brick that breaks ruins the whole experience. A Nike By You shoe whose stitching fails ruins both the customization and the trust. A MINI whose configured colour fades after two summers undermines the entire premise. Modular systems live or die on whether each component, in isolation, is genuinely excellent.

The fourth, and the one I think is least appreciated, is that modular products tend to build communities around themselves. The IKEA Hackers community, the AFOL community, the MINI owner clubs, the sneaker culture around Nike are not accidents. They emerge because modular products give customers something to share. The configuration is the story. The Sunday afternoon spent on the configurator, the Saturday morning building the Lego set, the weekend modifying the IKEA shelves are all things customers want to talk about. The product is the conversation starter. The community is the long-term value.

The brands that get modularity right do not give the customer fewer choices, dressed up as configuration. They give the customer a system, and trust the customer to know what they want from it. The trust is the product.

FAQ

Why does modular design create more customer value than fixed-design products?

Modular design transforms the customer's relationship with the product. Instead of receiving a designer's complete vision, the customer participates in finishing it. The result is a singular configuration the customer can identify as theirs in a way that a mass-produced product, however well-designed, cannot quite replicate. Brands like Lego, Nike By You, IKEA, and MINI have all built significant long-term customer attachment on this dynamic.

What is the difference between customization and modularity?

Customization typically means selecting from a finite menu of preset options at the moment of purchase. Modularity means the product itself is built from interchangeable components that the customer can recombine over time, often well after the initial purchase. Customization happens once. Modularity is ongoing. A Lego set, a Nike By You shoe, an IKEA PAX wardrobe, a MINI Cooper, and a Smartlet strap system are all modular. Choosing a car colour from a fixed dealership menu is customization.

Why has the luxury watch industry been slow to adopt modular design?

Luxury watchmaking evolved inside a tradition that places exceptional value on the designer's singular intent. The Geneva Seal, hand-finished movements, and codified design languages of brands like Patek Philippe or Vacheron Constantin are all signals that the buyer is paying for the maker's expertise. Modularity, which invites the customer into the design process, sits in tension with that tradition. There are exceptions (Bamford, Tudor's T-fit, Cartier QuickSwitch, MoonSwatch) but the broader industry has not yet adopted modular customization as a primary value proposition.

Is Smartlet truly modular or is it just customization?

Smartlet is modular in the structural sense. The adapter, the strap, the connected device on the underside, and the mechanical watch on top are all interchangeable components that work as a system. An owner can keep the same adapter while changing watches, change the connected device as new screenless trackers reach the market, swap straps for different occasions, or move the system across watch brands as long as the lug width is within the supported range. The system is what stays constant. What occupies it is what the owner decides.

What makes modular products defensible against competition?

Modular products tend to build communities, deeper customer attachment, and higher repurchase rates than fixed products at comparable price points. Once a customer has invested in a system (whether Lego, IKEA, Nike, or any other modular brand), the switching cost to a competitor is meaningfully higher than the price of any single component. The customer is not just attached to the product. They are attached to the configuration they have built and the future configurations they might still build.

Can luxury watchmaking adopt modularity without losing its identity?

Probably yes, although it will require some adjustment to the conventional designer-first framing. The Smartlet model, where the mechanical watch remains intact and the modularity sits in the strap system around it, is one path that preserves the watchmaker's authority over the watch itself while allowing the customer modularity at the wrist level. Other paths are possible. The category is still very early.