Escape Distraction

You want to know the time. You check your phone. Then notifications. Then email. Then a "quick scroll." Twenty minutes later, you've forgotten why you picked your phone up.

Apps are designed to pull you in. Algorithms compete for your attention. Every screen is a potential rabbit hole.

Once, information lived in the world

On clocks. On walls. Now it lives inside our devices, submerged by feeds.

Vanessa and Martin at a red-covered table with a tablet showing a pop-art portrait of Debbie Harry, a keyboard, art books and floppy disks.

Our shameless homage to Allan Tannenbaum’s photo of Andy Warhol painting Debbie Harry at the 1985 Amiga launch. (Martin claims to be less underwhelmed than he looks. Vanessa doesn't agree.)

Origin Story

VEEB is Vanessa and Martin, working from Basel since 2020. It's the result of two creative and nerdy people figuring out what to do while the pandemic did its world tour.

We restore vintage electric clocks: Inducta, Moser-Baer, FAVAG and others that kept time in stations and factories for decades before everything moved to screens. We find them in auction lots, station waiting rooms and attics, and bring them back without erasing the marks of their previous life. Each one ships with our own driver, which does the job the mother clock once did, without modifying the original movement.

We also build small ePaper displays: a calendar that updates itself, a rotating quote, an affirmation screen. Information that sits on your desk, readable at a glance, not buried in an app.

The connection? Each one does one job, and none of them wants your attention.

Three intersecting circles labeled 1, 2, and 3, forming a Venn diagram with an overlapping area labeled 'Sweet Spot' containing a letter 'V.'

Our 3 Rules

  1. Solve and Share - Open source our designs, document our process

  2. One Design, One Purpose - Every object does one thing well

  3. Learn From The Past - Quality engineering never goes out of date

The same logic applies to how and where we share our work.

Rather than spreading across every platform, we put our work where it belongs: video on our YouTube channel, code on our GitHub repository, visuals on our Are.na channel.

Each of them, for now, the right tool for the job.

We think life's better when you choose your own rabbit holes. This site documents the rabbit holes we've been down. Sometimes we find things down there that are worth bringing back and putting in our shop.

Browse the things we sell.