Fatboy EDC

The signature — a great many objects in this category take a cultural image and apply it: an engraving, a colourway, a name. The object underneath would work identically without it. Fatboy’s better pieces do not survive the removal of the reference, because the reference is the structure.

The classical line is named for 大六壬 — Dà Liù Rén, pronounced roughly dah lyoh ren, literally “great six ren”, a classical Chinese divination system with twelve heavenly generals at its core. He is working through them, one general per object, reading what that general governs and building the object out of it. 太常 — Tài Cháng, roughly tie chahng, “the great constant” — is in the source material a minister: chief of the Nine Ministers, keeper of rites and music, master of the sacrificial calendar. The name also carries the way of constancy.

Fatboy takes that and goes to Spring-and-Autumn knife money for the form. The old bronze coin is round on the outside and square within: heaven round, earth square. So the object’s centre is a round rotor with a square index mark at its middle, sitting where the coin’s square hole would be — and where your fingerpad sits when you hold the object still. The outline is a triangle, answering the 三才 — sān cái, roughly sahn tsigh, “the three powers”, heaven, earth and humanity. The three swept wings take their profile from the blade of the knife coin.

None of that is graphics. The square mark is where your finger goes. The triangle is the mass distribution. The wing profile is the sweep. The same discipline runs into the innovation line: the DITTO zodiac edition matches each sign to its traditional double-hour and engraves that hour’s glyph in oracle-bone script around the bearing bore. That is not where you put a decoration. That is where you put a claim.

Origin — he began as a player, specifically an enthusiast of three-body spinners, which is worth noting, because the three-lobed body never leaves his work. The idea that took hold, and by his own account would not let go, was to make something his fellow players would genuinely value. He describes this as romantic and is not being ironic about it.

He has never, he says, been interested in making objects that are perfectly optimised or groundbreaking in every dimension. What matters more is that each piece carries a distilled understanding of one specific idea, thought through at length, made physical so someone else can pick it up and meet it. The studio was founded on 16 February 2025. Its first object went on sale five weeks later.

He works as 番茄 — Fān Qié, pronounced roughly fahn chyeh, literally “tomato” — and is known to collectors as Don. The brand name comes from two places at once: from the maker himself, 178 cm and 95 kg, self-described fat boy, and from a favourite ice cream truck at the port, also called FATBOY. Honest, warm, unpretentious. The mascot is a capybara, and it is doing the same work as the name. That is all the biography the objects require. The rest of it is in the geometry.

Position — there is one rule the maker refuses to compromise on, and he calls it cohesion. By it he means something specific and expensive. The product, for him, is not the toy. It is the toy plus the ID card, the packaging, the accessory, the gift, and the cultural story — and every one of those elements has to speak the same design language. He proves it three times, and the proof is that he solved it differently each time.

腾蛇 — Téng Shé, roughly tung shuh, “soaring serpent”, one of the twelve generals — was drawn from the horns of the Chinese dragon. The design language was grand, so the package was a premium gift box; because it was his first release and he wanted to thank the players who took the risk, the accessory was a digital scale, a nod to the dragon’s weight and status, with the ID card in a gold envelope. DITTO was the first liquid-flow object of its kind in the scene, built on innovation, so its paper box was deliberately not the most luxurious material available — the packaging had to feel creative and surprising, because the packaging was itself part of the innovation. Tai-Chang went back to ancient coinage, so: a traditional sandalwood collector’s box and a certificate of authenticity, deepening the historical claim rather than dressing it up.

Three objects, three completely different packaging decisions, one rule. He is explicit that holding this line costs time, money and sometimes sales. That is the definition of a principle: it is only a principle when it is expensive. The system extends further than most collectors realise — behind the studio sits a membership architecture with physical identity tags and a three-tier structure earned through Fatboy objects, seeded from the very first release, where one card in each of the four Teng-She materials was printed with red numerals and functions as a permanent tier upgrade. He was building the membership before he had the membership.

Underneath sits a tension he states plainly. He does not believe a spinner needs constant functional reinvention; there is something he wants to protect in an object that is balanced, restrained, content to simply exist. But the market has moved, and a saturated market rewards the maker who does something new. His question, asked with every product, is how to make something fresh without sacrificing elegance and identity. The motif is his answer: a cultural source imposes constraints from outside the market, and tells you what the geometry has to be before novelty gets a vote.

Mechanism — both objects are three-lobed, both are built around stability in rotation, and they get there by opposite means. Tai-Chang adds: its stated design intent is triangular symmetry combined with mass driven outward, pushing weight to the extremities to maximise stability, spin duration and the range of tricks the object will tolerate. That is ordinary flywheel reasoning and it is sound — mass at the rim raises the moment of inertia. Teng-She subtracts: its 镚空 openwork — lòu kōng, roughly loh kohng, “hollowed-out carving” — is credited in the launch text with making the object light and portable while retaining superior stability when spinning. Material is removed and the object is claimed to hold its axis better for it.

These are not the same argument, and it is worth resisting the urge to merge them into one house style. One object is tuned by where the mass sits; the other by how much of it there is. Teng-She’s published figures are 56 mm rotating diameter, 14 mm across the lock, 70 g in stainless — and the maker notes in the same breath that only the stainless weight is confirmed, because production capacity had not yet settled the others. That is a sales post declaring its own missing data.

The more interesting move is what he puts inside the body. Teng-She could take 6 mm beads seated in the blades; Tai-Chang carries three free-rolling 12 mm beads, one per wing, held loose in the structure. One product apart, the bead doubled. They are not decoration and they are not fixed: when the object spins they move with it, a second motion riding on the first, visible through the open wings. At 12 mm the bead is large enough to be seen turning, large enough to refract, and as far as the maker is aware larger than anything else in the category has carried. Separately, and by hand, the studio makes beads with a flowing luminescent liquid sealed inside them — a moving element, inside a moving element, inside a spinning body.

DITTO pushes the same principle to the point of failure. Its signature is 流麻 — liú má, roughly lyoh mah, literally “flowing hemp-speckle”, the scene’s name for a liquid-flow chamber: suspended particulate in oil, driven by the spin. In theory the flow is continuous. In practice, the finished pieces juddered.

Material — ask Fatboy for one material and he chooses tungsten, and his reason is behavioural, not visual. Density, he argues, is the most immediate difference a material makes: the mass is obvious the moment the object is lifted, and that mass propagates into spin, stability and momentum. What fascinates him is that an identical design in PEI, titanium and tungsten is not one object in three finishes. It is three different objects, communicating through weight, balance and motion in ways that have nothing to do with how they look.

He does not have to argue this. His own release data proves it. The second Teng-She release put the same body into four Damascus-family materials.

The four Chinese names all end in 马 — mǎ, pronounced roughly mah, literally “horse”, here the scene’s clipped shorthand for Damascus pattern-welded stock, prefixed by the base metal: 大 dà great, 钦 tài titanium, 锦 gào zirconium, 铜 tóng copper.

Forty-five grams to eighty-two grams in the same geometry. The Timascus piece and the Coppermascus piece share every dimension and are not the same object in the hand. One is quick and skittish; the other has to be respected. That is what he means, and it is measurable. The tungsten claim is not rhetorical either: twenty-two tungsten pieces went into the Tai-Chang production run, the largest single material block in the release, with the surface finish still undecided at announcement.

The exotic materials are not chosen only for the photograph. The single superconductor piece made for the Tai-Chang release shows its internal filament structure across the entire face — a pattern that exists because of how the material is built, not because anyone drew it. Machining is what exposes it. The surface is a cross-section.

Process — Fatboy published the DITTO diagnosis, and it is worth reading as engineering rather than as content. The team ruled out settling as the cause and concluded the judder was most likely coarse grains seizing under the 2 mm cover plate — the suspended medium binding rather than flowing once the plate fixed it in place. At the same time they had a second complaint about the same part: a 2 mm plate made the whole object feel thick in the hand, which is wrong for a triangular body that wants to sit lightly between the fingers. One part, two failures. So they made one change: the cover plate went from 2 mm to 1 mm. The medium read more cleanly, the fill was more restrained, and the handfeel measurably improved. A motion fault, correctly attributed to a thickness fault, and only discoverable in the hand.

The rest of the diary is a year of process failure published with photographs of the studio’s own reject parts — 残次品, cán cì pǐn, pronounced roughly tsahn tsuh pin, “defective seconds”. The object began as steel with a coloured flow chamber, and the flow version was not even the original concept: it was the B variant, where A was a chip inlay. The material moved from steel to titanium to carry more surface expression, and they filed a patent.

The finishing process is where it came apart. The original recipe was polish, anodise, engrave. It could not be made to work, for a reason that has nothing to do with skill: handwork on this object inevitably marks the surface, and a mirror polish has nowhere to hide a mark. Masking the surface during resin injection became unmanageable under the pour. And each pour of the flow chamber needs roughly seven days of settling to clear bubbles — if a bubble appears anyway, the piece must be stripped, refilled, re-encapsulated and re-settled. Every rework is another week and another chance to mark the surface. The error tolerance of the process compounds against itself. So they made the trade: polish out, blast in. Blasting softens and hides the micro-marks that polish exposes; stone-wash was tested and found less stable under subsequent anodising. It is a downgrade in one register and a survival decision in another, and they say so. The constellation edition took roughly six months and six or seven sample rounds, and sold out on release day, before the studio had managed to shoot the video explaining any of this.

The same reflex shows up elsewhere. When the first Damascus batch for Teng-She came back with severe pattern-bonding defects, the studio classified the entire batch as scrap rather than sell it, then gave the pieces away to the community as a gift with purchase. When the special-material release met a cooling market and moved slowly, he said so, and named what he got wrong: he had planned around enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is temporary. And there is an object he has wanted to make and has not made, because the manufacturing will not currently support it — one that reaches past touch into the visual and even the olfactory. He would rather wait than ship something incomplete. The scrapped Damascus batch is the demonstration that this is not just a sentence.