Out of Order x IFL Watches Shaker Happy Hour: A Very Different Kind of GMT

There are many ways to decorate a watch dial. A new colour. A different texture. But IFL Watches takes a slightly different approach.

For its collaboration with Out of Order, the customisation studio has painted an entire night out across the dial of the Shaker Happy Hour. There is a skeleton still raising a drink, a dancer in red, abandoned playing cards and an eight ball, two cocktails meeting in the middle and a particularly 'exhausted' yellow face.

There is quite a lot going on. Which, given the name, feels appropriate. Underneath all of it is Out of Order's Shaker Automatic GMT, a 40mm automatic watch whose entire collection was already built around cocktails, travel and the idea that somewhere in the world it is always a reasonable time for a drink.

IFL has simply taken that idea considerably further.

Who Are IFL Watches?

If you have spent any time looking at customised watches online, there is a reasonable chance you have come across IFL. Founded in 2019, IFL Watches is an independent design and customisation studio best known for taking existing watches and turning their dials into miniature pieces of hand-painted artwork.

Citizen Tsuyosas, Casio G-Shocks, Oris, Seiko and plenty of others have all provided the starting point over the years. The important word is hand-painted. Rather than printing an illustration onto a dial, IFL's artists work directly on the small surface itself. The company describes its process as painting at actual size, building the artwork in layers before the watch is reassembled and tested by its watchmakers.

That means the little differences between one dial and another are part of the process. No two are completely identical.

Usually, that process is independent of the manufacturer whose watch provides the base. The Shaker Happy Hour is different. This is an official collaboration between IFL Watches and Out of Order, with both companies involved in the release. And Out of Order may be one of the more natural brands IFL could have chosen.

Out of Order Has Never Been Particularly Interested in Perfection

Out of Order was founded near Venice in 2013 and made its name with a fairly unusual proposition. The brand calls the idea of how watches look and are made as “Damaged in Italy”: cases and other components are deliberately given a worn, aged character before the watch reaches its owner.

The thinking is quite straightforward. A good leather jacket often looks better once it has been worn. Denim fades. Objects pick up marks and stories as they are used. So why should a watch have to remain pristine?

It gave Out of Order a recognisable identity in a market where brands normally spend a considerable amount of effort making sure every polished surface leaves the factory completely untouched. The Shaker is a more recent part of that story. And it is where this collaboration starts to make much more sense.

The Shaker is a Watch Based on Cocktails

Out of Order introduced the Shaker Automatic GMT collection in 2022, alongside the arrival of Seiko's NH34 automatic GMT movement. Rather than simply build another travel watch around the new movement, the brand linked the collection to cocktails and the places it had visited over its first decade.

Individual models have names including Negroni, Paloma, Midori, After Eight and Limoncello, and even the packaging commits to the idea. The Shaker is supplied inside an actual patented cocktail shaker that acts as the presentation case and can also be used to wind the automatic watch inside.

So when IFL wanted a dial on which to paint the aftermath of a particularly successful happy hour, there probably was not a better starting point.

A Whole Night on One Dial

At first glance, the Happy Hour dial looks chaotic. Towards one side, a skeleton wearing a party hat raises a drink despite being somewhat past the point at which drinking should still be possible. Elsewhere, a woman in red is dancing. There are playing cards, an eight ball, cocktails, confetti and club-style lighting. In the centre there's the yellow face that probably tells you everything you need to know about how late the evening has become.

The artwork is painted by hand onto each dial by IFL's artists. That matters because this is not simply a graphic reproduced hundreds of times with perfect uniformity. Small variations in the brushwork mean every example will be slightly different.

Hand-Painted Means Exactly That

It is worth returning to the dial, because this is the part that separates the Happy Hour from an ordinary limited-edition colourway. IFL does not simply create the illustration and send a digital file to a dial manufacturer. Each dial is individually worked on by an artist.

The watch needs to be disassembled, the dial removed, the artwork applied and the completed watch put back together. It is a considerably slower process than printing the same design at production scale. It also means accepting that tiny variations will exist between pieces.

Perhaps the Most Out of Order Shaker Yet

It would be easy for something like this to become a novelty. The mechanical specification prevents that. Likewise, it would be easy for a technically capable GMT to become another fairly anonymous sports watch. The dial deals with that problem rather comprehensively.

Perhaps that is why Out of Order and IFL work so well together. Neither seems particularly interested in making the safest version of a watch. And the Shaker Happy Hour is certainly not that. The Happy Hour is being produced as a small limited edition, with 200 pieces globally. It's available now in limited numbers at WatchNation.