Springfield watchmaker designs iridescent timepieces

Celeste Wong looks through a microscope as she uses a pair of tweezers to place laser cut pieces of abalone shell onto a watch face.

The engineer turned watchmaker owns Celeste Watch Company on Main Street in downtown Springfield. Her handcrafted timepieces are intricate works of art expressing what’s meaningful to the wearer.

“That’s the whole point of them, it’s about expression,” Wong, 60, told Lookout Eugene-Springfield. “It’s about connecting to what matters to you.”

She opened her shop in 2017, but Wong’s watchmaking story starts long before that. 

“I can remember being eight years old, and I wanted to be a watchmaker,” she said.

A call from NASA

Wong grew up in Berkeley, California, and completed a degree in electronic engineering technology at Heald College in San Francisco. She went to work for a startup in the Silicon Valley designing microchips before taking a job in tech support for a computer distributor. 

Feeling inspired by the bionic character in the 1970s television show “The Six Million Dollar Man,” she moved to Louisiana in the 1990s to pursue a degree in biomedical engineering. 

“The South is very boys club, you know, and there weren’t very many women in engineering,” she said.

During Wong’s junior year at Louisiana Tech University, at a meeting with a professor after failing a test, she was lamenting about her struggles in the course. And the professor remarked to her, “Well, you know, women don’t make very good engineers.”

“And it was kind of a life-changing moment for me,” Wong said. “Because I decided that this could not go on and I needed to fight this whole thing.”

A technical writing professor had told her that she was a good writer. 

“So I went home and started writing about how mad I was,” Wong said. “Eventually that writing became a book about engineering that I wish I had had before I even signed up to go.”

Her book, “Is There an Engineer Inside You?” is a guide to careers in engineering and asks the reader what their dreams are and then describes the kind of engineers that do that.

Her efforts to find a publisher for the book were unsuccessful. For her graduation in 1998, her parents gave her enough money to print 1,500 copies. She would sell two books and use the money she made to buy a roll of stamps to send letters to libraries and engineering organizations about her publication, repeating the process until she got results.

“And then about six months into doing that, one day, I’m just sitting there and the phone’s ringing, and I’m looking at the caller ID, and the caller ID says ‘NASA,’” she said.

NASA’s education department invited her to speak about her book and purchased copies. 

“And it became the beginning of a snowball for me,” Wong said. “It became the number one engineering career book on Amazon.”

In 2002, she moved to Springfield and started the Engineering Education Service Center, which provided resources to help middle and high school educators teach engineering.

“There was no other company like it in the U.S., and all I wanted to do was figure out any kind of way possible to get kids interested in engineering,” Wong said. 

She wrote books of engineering curriculum and sold kits that supported projects in the books. She penned additional books about careers in engineering. She also ran a workshop for mothers and daughters to learn about the field and worked with the state of Oregon to design an engineering curriculum. 

In all, Wong published 18 books during her career in engineering education.

“I just kind of got burned out,” she said. “I did it for 18 years. I was running hard, traveling a lot. I think I spoke at almost every engineering school in the country.”

“I wanted color”

Wong heard that Rolex had opened a watch school in Seattle, and she remembered her childhood dream. She made the trip north, but the school wasn’t what she was looking for and was geared toward servicing Rolex watches.

“I wanted way more than that,” Wong said. “I wanted color. I wanted feeling.”

She started going to Goodwill Stores and buying watches in bulk. At home she took them apart and organized the pieces and then rebuilt them as different watches. And then she started trying to make her own timepieces from scratch. 

In 2013, she thought she had made her first watch. 

Called Nostalgia, it had a wood background and a purple abalone inlay inside a rose gold case. (She still sells the design.) Her parents were born and raised in Hawaii, and the design evoked the ocean and the trees she remembers from her visits. 

“I was so excited about it,” she said. “I was running around showing all my friends, ‘Look, I made a watch.’ And then it rained, and the watch stopped working.”

It took her two more years to perfect the design, and in 2015, she decided to see if she could sell them. She set up a booth at the Eugene Saturday Market with four watches. She sold two on her first day. 

“That’s how it started, people in Eugene supported it,” Wong said. 

When she opened her brick and mortar store she had 15 designs. Today she has more than 100. She makes all of them by hand in her studio, completing about 500 watches a year.

“I just absolutely love doing this,” she said. “I’m going to do it until I’m 85. You know, until I can’t see anymore or my hands shake too much.”

Wong sources her shells from a Maryland-based company called Duke of Pearl, which collects scrap abalone from fishing boats. She applies an automotive clear coat to the abalone, sometimes mixing in paint to create new colors.

She uses Adobe Illustrator to create the design for the dial. She determines what colors of shell she needs and uses a laser cutter to make the pieces. Wong then goes to work with her microscope and tweezers to put the pieces together. 

“I couldn’t have even begun to figure out how to put this kind of art on a dial without that engineering background,” she said.

She said biomedical engineering trained her to work with very small parts, such as putting a catheter in a mouse. That translates to the work she does putting her watches together, as the pieces have to be assembled precisely, up to the micromillimeter. 

“And yet I get all this color and the fun of how the shell lights up under different conditions,” Wong said. “And so it’s really a wonderful merging of science and art.”

A watch design she calls “Song Bird” features a chickadee and a hibiscus flower. The watch, which sells for $445, has 14 pieces of colorful abalone shell inlaid into a mother of pearl background. 

“No two ever turn out alike,” she said, due to natural variations in the shells. 

She also makes custom watchfaces, often of pets. Customers send pictures of their dogs and cats, and Wong uses a printer that applies translucent ink to mother of pearl and cures it with light. 

She completes the watchfaces with Swiss-made movements, which are notable for their accuracy, before attaching watchhands and scratch-proof sapphire glass. The goat leather for her watch bands comes from a tannery in upstate New York that dyes the hides using vegetables. Wong conditions the leather and then sends it to a business in Florida that sews the bands. 

She has two favorite designs. One is the 20-piece “Pearl Dragon,” which uses four different types of abalone and sells for more than $2,000.

“That’s my masterpiece,” she said. 

Her other favorite is a design she calls “Summer Wind,” which features a metal cutout of a girl riding a bicycle placed upon a beach scene printed on mother of pearl. The layered technique represented a new level of making watches for Wong.  

“And she just reminds me of days when life was a little easier, like all you cared about was the wind blowing through your hair,” she said. 

Wong services and repairs her watches and replaces their batteries for life. 

“I have a lot of collectors now who come in and they buy a new watch every year,” Wong said, “Because it is so much about connecting to yourself. It’s about wearing something that’s meaningful, and we don’t stay the same year after year.”

Mary Quick has seven Celeste watches. Her first was a gift from her husband, who discovered Wong at an Art and the Vineyard event in Eugene before the watchmaker opened her shop. He purchased the “Nostalgia” design, with emerald green shell and a brown band to match his wife’s eyes.

After Wong’s shop opened, Quick visited for a new watch battery. The two became friends, and Quick now helps in the shop putting buckles on bands.

“I’ve really enjoyed that she’s allowed me into her world to see this dream of hers come to life,” Quick said.

If you go:

What: Celeste Watch Company

Address: 335 Main St. Springfield, OR 97477

Hours: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday