This story appears in the March 2021 issue of
Vortic is a watch company. But in 2015, that description was overly generous. It was more like two guys working out of a storage closet with $40,000 from a Kickstarter. To make ends meet, one of those guys also had a corporate job at Walmart. They aspired to make watches, sure, but they’d never actually
done it.
That’s why when a cease-and-desist letter arrived from one of the largest watch companies in the world, they thought it was a joke.
The sender was Swatch Group. “I had to google it,” Vortic cofounder R.T. Custer