Shop Talk: Community leader focuses on Cadence Rowing performance wristwatch business

The Vo3 is Cadence Rowing's flagship stroke rate watch, the first in an expanding series.

In 2002, Vanja Buvac choose a path that would affect the next seven years of his life.

To create a product he had envisioned as an amateur rower in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he would have to become an engineer to design it or a patent attorney to protect it.

Buvac wanted to make it easier for rowers to track performance and saw an opportunity to create a portable device that could record stroke rate, unlike traditional in-cockpit stroke counters. He had a simple solution: incorporate the technology into a wristwatch. Rowers could wear it as a status symbol or strap the timepiece directly onto an oar.

“I thought, ‘do I hire an engineer to help me concoct this thing, or a patent attorney to help me patent it,” the tall, thin entrepreneur says, seated on a couch in his East Arch Street office, overlooking a spacial view of Center City. “I looked at the price of both. Engineers I could get for $40 an hour, patent attorneys were $300. So I said ‘alright, I better learn patent law instead of engineering,’ he says, laughing.

Cadence Rowing was born.

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