HMS

Presented in April 2017 together with the Bicompax chronograph, the HMS was one of the two founding models funded through Baltic's Kickstarter campaign. Its name is the watchmaking abbreviation for the three basic functions — hours, minutes, seconds — summarizing a simple, complication-free three-hander designed to showcase the dial rather than the movement.

The design explicitly looks to 1940s European watches: a stepped case, a clean dial with contrasting railroad-track minute markings, and only four discreet hour indices, laid out in a graphic style deliberately more minimal than that of the Bicompax launched alongside it. The domed acrylic crystal, left without anti-reflective treatment, evokes the optical softness of period plexiglass.

Although the first generation is no longer in production, the HMS played a founding role in shaping Baltic's aesthetic language: the layered case construction and the attention to minute-track detail were later reused, in updated forms, across most of the brand's subsequent collections.