TGR Staff – 1/18/2022
ProTek launched its first-ever watch collection today at SHOT Show in Las Vegas. Designed with the military, law enforcement, and first responders in mind. ProTek’s party piece is the self-powered illumination technology enabling the lume to glow continuously for 25 years, allowing wearers to read their watch even in complete darkness
Designed to be rugged, ProTek describes their watches as “All-Terrain” and designed for an active lifestyle. The first series includes three collections, which include a carbon composite case diver rated at 300-meters, a steel case diver rated at 200-meters, and a titanium case field watch rated at 100-meters. Unlike most watch startups, ProTek is led by a team of watch industry veterans, headed by Barry Cohen who pioneered tritium tubes illumination and launched the brand Luminox in the 1980s. Cohen took Luminox to the Navy and eventually secured a contract to produce watches for the Navy SEALs in the early ’90s, that special forces connection turned Luminox into an international brand known for battle-proven performance. Eventually, Cohen left Luminox and moved into developing watch collections and private label production for lifestyle brands, through his company Time Concepts.
I spoke with ProTek founder Barry Cohen at Shot Show who said; “I missed being in the law enforcement space I had worked in for decades, so a couple years ago I worked on a few designs that I was going to add to Time Concepts’ offerings, but I just had too much on my plate at the time so it never got done. We have gotten superb performance from the superluminova lume we were using in our brands and had very satisfied customers, so they were going to use that lume. But when I found out in the fall I could get a booth at the sold-out SHOT Show and recognized I’d be clear to use tritium lume again soon, I made the decision to rework the designs I had already to include tritium lume and began on this in November. It is only because we had designs that could be adapted in a day or two, that we were able to have some handmade prototypes ready to be shown at SHOT.”
ProTek watches are focused on quality, using top-tier materials, Swiss design, Swiss illumination, and a quality Japanese quartz movement. We are looking forward to getting our hands on a production model for a review in the near future. But even the pre-production prototypes on display at the show were built to the same high standards as the other Time Concepts watches we have reviewed in the past from in-house brands
Szanto and their collaboration with
Roland Sands Designs.
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Michael Satterfield
