A Bright Orange Braun Clock Is So Wrong, Yet So Right
Braun’s BC02X alarm clock only comes in black, white, and grey. The second hand is yellow, making it easy to see, while small hits of olive green demarcate which buttons and hands control the alarm. It’s a simple, practical color system that’s emblematic of Braun’s simple, pragmatic design philosophy.
“I have always been against the use of bright colors at Braun,” Dieter Rams, the industrial designer behind Braun’s most famous designs, once said. “The main colors were always white, light grey, black, or metallic colors.”
But BEAMS isn’t sticking to the rules of the design master who shaped Braun’s minimalist vision.
Instead, for its 50th anniversary, the Japanese mega-retailer is messing with that time-honored system designed for maximum efficiency. The BEAMS logo is orange; naturally, the BEAMS x Braun alarm clock is also varying degrees of orange.
The clock features orange detailing that punctuates a white and a black body while the entire body of another alarm is orange, similar to Virgil Abloh’s Braun clock collaboration from 2021. The black hour and minute hands have also changed; they now appear in green and red hues lifted from Braun’s archives.
The Japanese retailer’s approach extends to Braun’s BN0279 watch, featuring a Swiss mechanical movement and keeping with Ram’s preferred color scheme — except for the green, red, and yellow watch hands.
The watch comes in limited white and black editions, with only 50 of each available and numbered via engraving on the back of the case.
While the watch’s updates are more subtle than that of the alarm clock, the anniversary collection still toys with Braun’s famously function-first design language. And while Rams might not be a personal fan, there’s something undeniably fun about a no-nonsense clock with a bright orange paint job.
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