This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When DC Vintage Watch?s Nick Ferrell announced he was launching a watch line, I took notice. Ferrell has made a name as one of the foremost Seiko dealers around, and the first pics he released of the Sycamore line were gorgeous?the Wolf and the Hunter, a matte black GMT and a matte black dress watch, respectively, both with Hindu-Arabic numeral dials that seemed to anticipate the Hindu-Arabic dial craze the watch world has entered. Ferrell?s watch cred and the success of his design are reason enough to be interested in the Sycamore line, but there?s something more about it that fascinated me. With the Wolf and the Hunter, Ferrell has gotten to live the watch enthusiast’s dream: he had an idea for a watch and he actually got to make it. ?Some of it was not seeing out there what I wanted myself,? Ferrell recalled in an interview. ?And another thing was, there’s that black PVD [Seiko] 6139, it’s kind of like an oval, it’s the 6139-8010 and I took the dial off and I put the 6139 military dial with the Arabic numbers on it. Playing around with this, and I was like, ?I really like this.??

A Seiko 6139-8010 which served as inspiration for the Sycamore Collection

That was about nine months ago?a fitting length of time between the conception of an idea and its birth. Since then, Ferrell has taken that inspiration and produced watches that, while they contain some of the DNA of that initial Seiko mod,...