Photograph by Jeremy Kramer
It started simply enough: his friends started to buy fancy watches.
Josh Jacob, of Newport, hadn’t seen a Rolex or Omega before, and he became enamored with, of all things, the second hand. On a mechanical watch, it sweeps smoothly, compared to a quartz watch, where it ticks with staccato, battery-powered movement. “It’s this whole little engine inside this case on your wrist,” he says.
Photograph by Jeremy Kramer
Jacob is the brains—and the watchmaker—behind Faux, which specializes in one-of-a-kind watches. Buyers can customize everything from the watch face to that mesmerizing little second hand. He sells Faux at fauxwrist.com or on Instagram under @fauxwrist; customers can message him, and he will work with them through the personalization process. If a buyer lives nearby, he’ll even hand-deliver.
He first got the idea to make a watch about four years ago, right after COVID, when he saw a build-your-own-watch kit. “I think the first thing I ever built [said], ‘This should take you about an hour,’ and I think it took me four hours,” he says.
Photograph by Josh Jacob
Around the time Jacob bought that first kit, he was in AA, and found that working with his hands helped ensure he wouldn’t relapse. It also gave him a place to put his grief. In summer 2023, Jacob’s mother died of aphasia, a type of dementia. The decline is slow and then, at the end, very fast—she had the disease for about seven years. During that time, she lost the ability to speak.
Photograph by Josh Jacob
Three months before her death, Jacob lost his dog King, whom he’d had for 14 years.
Between COVID and the deaths of his mother and his long-time pet, Jacob saw his drinking grow out of control. When he tried to stop on his own, he had a seizure. He fell and broke his humerus, a bone in the upper arm. He was in the hospital for a month. He started to go to AA meetings and work on his mental health. And he turned to a hobby, something to pass the time. “Because you notice, when you’re not drinking yourself to numb, time moves way slower.”
Hence, the watches. He incorporated black designs, to mirror black armbands worn to acknowledge tragedy, and he named a line of watches the King series.
“It was this beautiful, weird, hobby that was there in my life exactly when I needed it to be,” he says.
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