OOO Shaker GMT Happy Hour Hand Painted Auto 40mm

Out Of Order Shaker Happy Hour

Some watches tell you what time it is.

The Shaker Happy Hour reminds you of the time you stopped caring.

Created as the first collaboration between Out Of Order and IFL Watches, Happy Hour takes the Italian brand's Shaker Automatic GMT and turns its dial into the aftermath of a very good evening.

Look closely and the party begins to reveal itself.

A skeleton in a party hat raises a beer despite having long since exhausted the conventional disadvantages of drinking. A woman in red dances through the night. Cocktails meet beneath falling confetti. An eight ball and playing card have been abandoned somewhere along the way. And at the centre of it all sits a yellow face with red eyes and its tongue out — the unmistakable expression of somebody who confidently said “just one more” several drinks ago.

It is mischievous, irreverent and wonderfully inappropriate for anyone who believes watches should always take themselves seriously.

But the real pleasure lies in how it is made.

Each dial is painted by hand by the artists at IFL Watches, meaning the tiny variations created by the human hand make every example subtly different. This is not a printed illustration pretending to be art; someone has actually worked on the dial individually, turning every watch into its own miniature scene.

And the canvas itself could hardly be more appropriate.

Out Of Order created the Shaker collection around cocktails, travel and the memories associated with both. Even the presentation case is a real cocktail shaker. For Happy Hour, IFL has taken that idea one step further: instead of celebrating a particular drink, it celebrates that magical part of an evening when one drink becomes two, plans become suggestions and nobody is particularly interested in going home anymore.

Around this wonderfully chaotic dial sits a 24-hour GMT bezel.

Ordinarily, a GMT exists to tell you the time somewhere else in the world.

Here, it provides a much better excuse:

wherever you are, somewhere it is already Happy Hour.

Behind the humour is a surprisingly serious watch. The 40mm stainless-steel case houses the dependable Seiko NH34A automatic GMT movement, offering an independently readable second time zone. A screw-down crown and impressive 300 metres of water resistance give the Shaker genuine everyday robustness, while Super-LumiNova illumination keeps the party visible when the lights go down.

Limited to 200 individually hand-painted pieces worldwide, the Shaker Happy Hour is not designed for everybody.

And thank goodness for that.

Why buy it?

Because watches do not always need to whisper about tradition, restraint and good taste. Sometimes they can simply be fun.

The Happy Hour combines something we particularly enjoy at Sincrono: mechanical watchmaking with imagination. You have a proper automatic GMT, serious 300-metre water resistance and a substantial stainless-steel construction — and then somebody has painted a drunken skeleton onto the dial.

That contrast is irresistible. More importantly, every hand-painted dial has its own tiny differences. You are not simply buying one example from an industrial production run; you are buying one of only 200 pieces that has passed through the hands of an artist.

It is a watch for holidays, weekends, dinners that become late nights and those occasions when wearing something sensible would simply be a missed opportunity.

A GMT tells you the time somewhere else. Happy Hour tells you where you'd rather be.