We recently connected with Danilo Villanueva and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Danilo thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your business sooner or later

I wish I would have started earlier but not that much earlier. I was an Executive Creative Director at BBDO building advertising campaigns for Mercedes-Benz when I decided to take a sabbatical and build what Makina Watches is today. Advertising, on a more technical level, taught me how to launch effective marketing campaigns and even how to build brands from the ground up. It also taught me how to deal with people, how to sell work to clients and how to build relationships with clients. It taught me how and when to take risks and to always keep looking for something new, to always look at things from fresh perspectives, ensuring that I’m not always regurgitating the same thing over and over again. If I had left my career too early, I wouldn’t have been able to develop some of these values and disciplines that shape all decisions, big and small, at Makina.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m the owner of Makina Watches, a watch brand that designs and builds automatic timepieces and offers custom-made services to businesses and organizations. Before becoming a business owner, I spent years in the creative advertising industry building campaigns for major international brands like BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Emirates Airlines, VISA, General Motors, etc. But then I started questioning if there was more that I was capable of doing or building and if there are other skills I can acquire.

So in 2016, I took a gamble. I took a sabbatical and gave myself a one-year deadline to launch my own brand. I built concept designs, built a supply chain, built relationships with a few publications, built prototypes, and finally mass produced two models. I was able to launch Makina in 2017 with the help of news, style and watch centric publications like Esquire, Monochrome Watches and Entrepreneur Magazine. Ever since then, we’ve launched approximately 30+ designs including variants. We’ve won 10+ awards from international design and product design organizations. Some of the things we’re most proud of are the timepieces commissioned to us to mass produce by brands and organizations like Altria group, Philippine Heart Center, Philippine General Hospital, University of the Philippines College of Medicine, ABS-CBN and others.

Just this year, we’ve been commissioned by the Philippine Olympic Committee to produce timepieces for the Paris 2024 Olympics to be gifted to Filipino Olympians. The watch is limited to 100 pieces and marks the 100th year anniversary of the Philippines’ participation in the Olympics. This one is certainly a historical milestone for Makina.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I think my best example for this was some of the things we were able to accomplish during the pandemic. Covid was hurting economies and businesses everywhere with no end in sight. The future was uncertain, and it was obviously ill advised for businesses to take risks.

Rather than pause, we launched three pulsometer watches right in the middle of the pandemic in 2020 because, the way I saw it, there was no choice but to simply muscle through. People were stuck at home, bored, and so we were very active on our social platforms, entertaining our growing followers in our own way by putting out there as much watch content as we possibly can. Our content then made our followers happy. Surprisingly, the demand was there and higher than in previous years. This led us to mass producing three more new watches in 2021 when covid was still widespread. We launched one of our fastest selling models that year, Makina Raum_I, which really caught the attention of one of the Philippine’s largest news and entertainment broadcast networks, ABS-CBN. Ever since then, ABS-CBN has invited me for interviews in their news segments and has also used five of our watch models in two hit, action/thriller television series to be worn by celebrities in all episodes of both prime time shows.

The risks we took were worth it. We wouldn’t be where we’re at now if we hadn’t done those things back then.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

In 2016, crowd funding platforms were hot and really the way to go for start up companies. I, on the other hand, decided to self-fund Makina. At least for me, the higher the risk and the more there is at stake, the more effort I’m sure to put into it and the more it really must succeed. I took the risk of using only my savings to fund Makina so that I can create a brand that I have full control of in terms of vision, marketing, and product development.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.makinawatches.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/makinawatches/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/makinawatches/
• Linkedin: https://www.instagram.com/danilovvillanueva/
• Other: https://www.instagram.com/danilovvillanueva/

Image Credits

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