Elm Street Watches
Elm Street Watches
When Aiden Tumminello ’28 built his first watch, he was killing time in his bedroom in Phoenix the summer before starting at Yale, looking for something to give his little brother as a going away gift. Founding a watch company wasn’t exactly on his mind.
But during his first year as an architecture and mechanical engineering student, friends kept asking for their own versions of his handcrafted wrist candy. Two years later, Elm Street Watches has sold more than 70 pieces, each assembled by hand in Tumminello’s dorm room from individually sourced parts, and each rooted in a specific corner of Yale. “While the campus and its environs remain fundamental to my design process, the groups of people that make up Yale have become my greatest inspiration,” says Tumminello. “All of my upcoming designs have been inspired by conversations.”
The Rudolph has a face saturated in the same deep orange as the carpet of Haas Library. The exposed-mechanism Tool Watch evokes the windows that allow passersby to peer into the inner workings of the Center for Engineering Innovation and Design. And—inspired by a January 1936 cover of this magazine that featured polar explorer Lincoln Ellsworth ’03—Tumminello most recently designed a watch (above) based on the timepieces worn by the explorers and pilots of the turn of the 20th century. [Ed note: shameless plug, but take our survey and you can enter a drawing to win the prototype, crafted especially for one lucky YAM reader!]
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