Apple hired industrial designer Marc Newson. Newson joined his friend and Senior Vice President of Design, Jony Ive on the company’s design team creating future Apple products.

Meanwhile Apple introduced its first watch. Marc Newson however has a longer history with the watch brand Ikepod. Together with Oliver Ike, a Swiss entrepreneur, he designed his Pod line of watches. This is where the name came from. Ikepod really began in 1993-1994, when Oliver Ike, a Swiss businessman who also worked in the furniture industry, hired Marc Newson to design wrist watches for a new “unconventional brand.” Ike had become familiar with Newson as a designer because of some of his furniture design work.

The “Ikepod” name was not only a simple contraction between Oliver Ike’s last name and Newson’s first watch, the Pod, but also a reference to Newson’s design obsession with “pod” and “capsule” style designs that define much of his work as well as many names of Ikepod products.

When we look at earlier Ikepod models, the resemblance with the Apple Watch is striking:

Similarities are even more clear when we look at straps:

What happened with Ikepod?

Ikepod is technically still around, but it is a shadow of what it was in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Ikepod had a very successful first couple of years but the business of watches slowly eroded the relationship between the people running the brand and Newson. Ikepod went bankrupt in 2004 after just 10 years. The brand was later purchased by new investors. Marc Newson and Ikepod finally parted ways in 2012.