akim El Kadiri of Elka Watch Company and Alon Ben Joseph of Ace Jewelers teamed up to design and create a set of four highly unique watches that together form the Diversity Series. Celebrating diversity and friendship, the four limited edition wristwatches each use a different numeric script for their gradient blue dials: Western Arabic, Eastern Arabic/Hindi, Chinese, and finally Hebrew. Each model is limited to 25 pieces, with the first seven editions reserved to be sold as sets of four to discerning collectors.

Read on to learn how the Diversity Series came to be, plus brief introductions of the Elka Watch Company and Ace Jewelers.

The Ace x Elka Watch Company Diversity Series was born out of shared ties to the original ELKA Watch Company. Hakim El Kadiri discovered that his childhood nickname –which became the name of his brand-new watch brand - was once operated by an Amsterdam-based jewelers family by the name of Kiek. Alon Ben Joseph on the other hand had, together with his brother and father, bought one of the Kiek boutiques in the year 2000 in a bid to expand their family-owned jewelers business. This in turn sparked his personal obsession with the ELKA brand, which over the years lead to a sizeable collection of pocket, wrist, and stopwatches. One of the most prized items? A rare ELKA watch dial with Hebrew numerals in lieu of the conventional Arabic numerals.

When Hakim designed the watches for his Elka Watch Company, one of the collections – the X-Series- was inspired by an aviation instrument created by Heuer for ELKA, which featured oversized Arabic numerals from 00 to 55. Whilst discussing ideas for a possible collaboration, Alon pitched the idea to create a set of four watches based on this design but using different numerical scripts. Indeed, just like the ELKA of old once did with Alon’s highly-coveted Hebrew script dial. This resulted in Diversity Series, with dials in Eastern Arabic / Hindi, Chinese, and Hebrew, complimented by one using classical Western Arabic numerals.

Of these four types of numbering, three use the double 0 at twelve o’clock, like the standard production X-Series. Only the Hebrew version has the number 60 instead of the double 0, as in the numeric system of the Hebrew alphabet there is no zero.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

CASE DIMENSIONS: 40,8 mm diameter / 10,8 thickness / 46,50 mm from lug to lug

CALIBER: La Joux Perret G100 automatic 4 Hz / 28’800 A/h, stop second 68-hour power reserve

CASE MATERIAL: Stainless steel

GLASS: Chevé Box sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating.

FUNCTIONS: Hours, minutes, central seconds

STRAP: Beige nubuck with microfiber back