Jake Kassan and Kramer LaPlante are not your average college dropouts. At just 22 years old, the pair pulled off a near impossible feat – one only matched by names like Jobs, Zuckerberg and Gates.

Like many men, the roommates had grown tired of the only way to find a quality watch being to spend hundreds, if not thousands on name brands, knowing most only cost a fraction of the price to make. “We would constantly talk about how other watch companies lacked strong branding and reasonable price points that appealed to our demographic,” says Kassan. “We wanted a watch that was made with high-quality materials but didn’t have the retail mark-up like so many others.” Having decided it was high-time to offer a low-cost alternative, they set out to do just that. Kassan and LaPlante soon quit school without a single degree between them to launch MVMT and in the process became the stuff of millennial legend.

Pronounced ‘movement’, the brand is based on the idea that a stylish timepiece shouldn’t break the bank. For obvious reason, it didn’t take long for this simple belief to catch on. Shortly after launching, MVMT became the second most-funded fashion startup in Indiegogo history at the time and is today the world’s fastest-growing watch brand. In just a few short years, the company has sold more than 1m watches to customers in over 160 countries, amassed 3.5m collective followers on social media and banked around £46m in 2016 (doubling from £23m in 2015 and projected to hit almost £70m in 2017). “We’d be nowhere if it weren’t for Indiegogo,” adds Kassan. “Kickstarter had actually declined our campaign twice, which not many people know.

From what we could infer, they claimed our idea ‘lacked originality’. They’ve since loosened up their approval process, from what we’ve seen.” But cheap watches usually look, well, cheap, right? No so. By taking a direct-to-consumer approach and avoiding traditional wholesale, MVMT is able to use the same premium materials (brushed stainless steel, genuine leather, hardened mineral crystal) as its high-end counterparts while keeping costs down. The brand’s offering, which now also includes sunglasses, spans five collections, each with their own signature aesthetic but all rooted in offering impeccable quality and style at an affordable price point. With an exclusive 15% off all orders for FashionBeans readers with the code BEANS15, there’s never been a better time to join the MVMT.