I've built Pedral around limitation. Twenty pieces per edition. When they're gone, they're gone. I wrote an entire journal post defending that number — and I stand by every word of it.
But it wasn't always like this.
In the early days, I did what most independent watchmakers do: I tried to make everyone happy. Longer runs. More options. A wider net. If someone wanted it, I wanted to be able to say yes. That instinct came from a good place — a genuine desire to put the work in as many hands as possible. But it cost me something I didn't immediately recognise I was losing: clarity. The watches became less deliberate. The decisions felt less weighted. When you can always make more, nothing you make feels final.
The shift to twenty pieces wasn't a marketing strategy. It was a confrontation with the truth of what I was actually doing. Limitation forced every design decision to matter. It made me ask, before committing anything to production: is this worth being one of twenty things that will exist in the world in this exact form? That question changed everything. Because the people I design for aren't looking for what everyone else has. They're looking for something that most people will never own, never notice, never even know exists — and that's precisely what makes it theirs.
But rules exist to serve a purpose. When the purpose is better served by breaking them, you break them.
Design is at the centre of everything I do at Pedral. Not design as decoration — design as a way of thinking, of solving, of feeling. Every proportion I choose, every material I select, every detail I let survive the editing process: it's all in service of something that should move the person wearing it. That's the only standard I hold myself to. Does it move you? Does it say something that couldn't be said any other way?
Some designs answer yes so completely that I don't know what to do with them.
There are sketches and prototypes in my Stockholm studio that have been sitting for years. Not because they're unfinished — but because they're too right for twenty pieces and too considered for a standard launch. Designs where the case geometry, the guilloché dial texture, the hand profile all arrived together, fully formed, like the watch already existed and I was just the one transcribing it. Those are the ones that keep me up at night. Those are the ones I can't shelve.
Occasionally I design something that doesn't fit the limited-edition model. Not because I ran out of ideas within the edition — but because the design itself demands a wider audience. Some watches feel like they were made for a specific kind of collector: the person who already knows what a guilloché dial is, who can read a case finishing at a glance. Others feel like they were made for anyone who has ever looked at a watch and felt something without knowing why. When a design lands in the second category, twenty starts to feel like the wrong answer.
Some of those designs will only ever exist on Kickstarter. They won't appear on pedral.eu. They won't carry an edition number. They live in a different space entirely — conceived for the campaign, fulfilled through it, and gone when it closes. If you only follow the site, you'll miss them. That's not accidental. Kickstarter has its own energy, its own kind of believer. Some designs belong there and nowhere else. The scarcity is different — not twenty, but time-limited. Back it or don't. The window closes.
I launched the original Okapi on Kickstarter in 2018. The design had been sitting with me for three years — refined, reconsidered, second-guessed. I finally took the leap of faith. And I needed to know: did strangers believe in the same thing I did? They did. That experience — watching people put real money behind a watch that didn't exist yet — changed how I think about who a Pedral is for.
There's also a pricing reality I can't ignore, and I'd rather say it plainly than package it as something else. At €1,500 and up, Pedral editions are accessible — but not to everyone. I think about this more than people might expect. Some of the most genuine watch enthusiasm I've encountered comes from people for whom that price point is simply out of reach — not because they don't feel the design, not because they don't understand what they're looking at, but because life doesn't always align with want. That's not a failure of taste. That's just the world.
A Kickstarter campaign lets me design toward a different price point without dismantling what makes a Pedral a Pedral. What changes is the economics — and with that, the freedom to explore. On Kickstarter I can offer something premium but accessible: non-Swiss movements paired with fumé dials, guilloché finishing, or materials I rarely get to work with at the standard edition price point. The craft is still there. The obsession over detail is still there. The watch just reaches someone who would otherwise never get the chance to own one.
The clearest proof of this is Artefact. I launched it on Kickstarter and it became something people are still asking about today. A quintessential sports watch — versatile, considered, the kind of thing you reach for without thinking. A true GADA. It will never appear on pedral.eu. That's intentional. It belongs to a different chapter of the studio, one that lives outside the edition model entirely. But the people who found it still message me. That doesn't happen with forgettable work.
The Boris Pjanić capsule collection proved something similar from a different angle. That collaboration drew collectors from across the world — people who had never heard of Pedral before but responded to the design on instinct. That's what good work does. It finds its people regardless of the channel it travels through.
Good design shouldn't only exist for people who can pay a premium for scarcity. A watch that moves you doesn't become less considered because more people can hold it. That's not a compromise — that's the point.
Twenty pieces is a promise I make when twenty is the honest answer. For the designs that are too alive to contain — I'd rather put them in more hands than let them sit in a drawer, waiting for a right moment that never comes.
Kevin Pedral
Founder & Designer, Pedral Watches