Hello, and welcome to About Time.
Last weekend, in a Grade II-listed Arts and Crafts building in London’s Westminster, built by King Edward VII as a place for the Royal Horticultural Society to hold its shows, I watched as a young man in a green apron, red bandana and white chef’s hat moved patiently down a queue, taking orders with a pen and paper.
“What will you be having today?” he asked a couple in sensible coats and shoes. Like virtually everyone else, they would be having the pizza. “Extra cheese coming right up,” he grinned. The man’s name is Richard Benc and he is not a chef. He is the founder of the British watchmaker Studio Underd0g, a microbrand that bolted out of lockdown three years ago to become the most sought-after new name in watches, with waiting lists running to months and watches that retail for £500 being flipped on eBay for triple that amount.
With an eye for sharp design and an ear for canny marketing, Benc made Studio Underd0g’s name with a line of brightly coloured, food-themed watches – the Watermel0n, the Pink Lem0nade, the Mint Ch0c Chip. And today there was a special on the menu. |
"And if you could please make it out to 'Mr E Bay...'" |
The Series 01 Hawaiian Pizza-Party Special Edition was announced on 1 April last year, via ‘a cheesy video’ [the brand’s emphasis].
It was an April Fool gag, from a company known for its whimsical foodie-related watches. Surely everyone would get the joke?
Whether they did or not became a moot point – within hours Studio Underd0g’s website had added 20,000 new visitors and received 800 sales enquiries, all for a chronograph designed to look like a pepperoni pizza.
It’s a fine line between stupid and clever and Benc is a master at navigating it. And so the pizza watch – now in two options, Hawaiian and Pepper0ni – went into production. With a caveat. They would only be available to buy in person – at watch trade shows, basically – where they would be ‘hand-delivered’ in small cardboard pizza boxes – thereby guaranteeing a ravenous market appetite, ha ha. |
Studio Underd0g was one of 44 brands exhibiting at British Watchmakers’ Day, an inaugural fair hosted by the Alliance of British Watch and Clock Makers, a trade body aiming to promote British watches (and some clock-making) around the world, to encourage British supply chains and jobs.
In 1800, half the world’s watches, about 200,000 a year, were made in Britain (most major watchmaking innovations, including the balance spring, the chronograph and automatic winding are also British).
In the 21st century that number has dwindled to, effectively, none. Switzerland is king now. Plenty of British watch brands exist – nice ones – but their products are designed and possibly assembled here, from parts mostly made oversees. The last British watchmaker to produce at scale was Smiths of Cheltenham, who finally closed its doors in the 1970s, obliterated by competition from Switzerland, America and Japan. A familiar tale of British industry, then. |
Fears' 'Brunswick 38 ‘1924 Edition’. Ten were produced for British Watchmakers' Day |
Then again, the concept of what a Made in Britain watch actually means is, says my far more learned watch colleague, Tracey Llewellyn, “a hornets’ nest”.
The biggest British brand, Bremont, creates watches that are designed, manufactured and assembled in Henley-on-Thames. Its latest movement is designed in the UK and most of it is made in Britain, but parts are still Swiss-sourced. (And anyway, Switzerland isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be. Plenty of the big Swiss brands look to Asia for all but their flagship watches. But let's not go there...) The UK can, however, claim two of the greatest watchmakers alive anywhere today: Dr Roger W Smith, based on the Isle of Man, and Rebecca Struthers, of Birmingham’s Struthers watches, who make their watches by hand. That tends to put paid to any ideas of scale. The former produces up to 18 watches a year, the latter “two or three”.
British Watchmakers’ Day had been announced late last year, its 1,300 tickets selling out in weeks. Comparisons were instantly made to events like Watches & Wonders and the now-defunct Baselworld, multimillion-franc Swiss trade shows where the top-tier of luxury watchmaking – Rolex, Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin and dozens more – show off their latest wares in 10-metre-high ‘stands’ that are really more like pavilions, designed like Bond Street boutiques and costing more than the average British house.
The Swiss luxury sector is not shy of flexing its one-upmanship in its bid to demonstrate new and expensive ways to tell the time. For a while a stand owned by Breitling featured a built-in aquarium containing 650 jellyfish and weighing 28.5 tonnes. As the writer and Esquire contributor Simon Garfield points out in his terrific book Timekeepers: How The World Became Obsessed With Time, the strangest thing about the tank was that anyone who saw it just glanced up and moved on. Considering the location it didn’t seem that unusual at all. |
Well, British Watchmakers' Day was not like that.
Alistair Audsley, who had co-founded the Alliance with Roger Smith and Mike France, CEO of Christopher Ward, had woken up that morning feeling, he said, “sheer, abject terror”. At 8.45am, with just over an hour to go before the doors opened, someone told Audsley that he might want to go and have a look outside. “I went out with Roger and oh my God, it was just incredible,” he told me. “The queue was 600 meters long.” (Smith duly filmed the cheerfully waving punters for his Instagram.) |
Clock around the block: the queue before opening |
Audsley’s next concern was what the guests – who had travelled from America, Egypt, Dubai, Norway, France, Germany, and Poland, as well as across Britain – would make of what was waiting for them. “They didn’t know what they were coming to,” he said. “You start thinking ‘Are they aware that Taylor Swift isn’t going to be inside?’”
Instead, what was inside most closely resembled a fete in a church hall.
Jellyfish-filled aquariums were conspicuous by their absence. Unlike the big Geneva shows, guests would struggle to find a champagne waiter to summon over, or have to weigh up whether to have the marinated potted prawns or the pokébowl gyoza from the complimentary lunch menu.
Instead, the homegrown watch brands had lined up their wares on tables, covered in dark cloths and illuminated with Anglepoise lamps. There were a lot of Union Jacks. Then again, perhaps that was the point.
“We don’t want to be a copy of Switzerland,” Roger Smith told me. “We don’t want the champagne, the glamour. It’s a very different industry. And we’ve got to be different from Day One.” |
"Are they aware that Taylor Swift isn't going to be inside?" |
In fact, British Watchmakers’ Day had more in common with the Windup Watch Fair, the free-and-open-to-all three-day event for seasoned collectors and newbies alike, that began in New York in 2014, and has become the most popular consumer watch event in the US.
The Alliance came about after Smith and Mike France “both felt that there was a lot happening in British watch and clock making that wasn’t being talked about in the media,” Smith said. “There were start-ups popping up all the time. But what was missing was a guiding hand, and a trade body.”
Their first task was to find out the size and scope of the sector, how big it might be – a figure they put at £200m and one they hope to build to £1bn. (According to its own data, the Swiss watch industry employees 60,000 people and generates around CHF 25 billion [£22m] in sales, or around 4 per cent of its GDP.)
In establishing British Watchmakers’ Day Audsley was inspired by Record Store Day.
“Yeah,” laughed Smith. “He’s a vinyl record collector. And Record Store Day has rebuilt the vinyl industry.” Just as bands put out one-off records or unique coloured vinyl versions of classic releases to encourage people to head to record shops each year, so participants at British Watchmakers’ Day were encouraged to produce a watch that would only be available at the event, for one-day only. Hence the queues around the block before the doors opened. Which may well pose the question ‘What makes a British watch, British?’ Moving from table to table at British Watchmakers’ Day didn’t necessarily provide a clear answer. |
A Perfectly Useless Afternoon by Mr Jones Watches |
There were design-forward start-ups like Isotope, who lean into pop and art deco, and Mr Jones Watches, whose dials mix cartoon graphics with a mordant enjoy-yourself-it’s-later-than-you-think humour. (On a watch called The Accurate, the hour hand reads ‘Remember’ and the minute hand reads ‘You Will Die’.)
There were brands like the excellent Fears, established in Bristol in 1849 and bought back to life post-pandemic by its founding family, who fuse modern and vintage styles to create something reassuringly classic. |
Jonny Garrett: William Wood watches are now sold in 55 countries |
And there was William Wood Watches, set up seven years ago by Northumberland-born Jonny Garrett, who in 2018 won a competition for entrepreneurs created by Esquire – first prize: a year’s use of a London WeWork, which now sounds more like the wooden spoon.
Garrett’s line in watches inspired by fire services, built from melted-down brass fireman’s helmets and upcycled fire hoses might be considered niche, were they not now sold in 55 countries, with America being the biggest market, and one of only four British brands stocked by the enormous luxury retail chain Watches of Switzerland. There was even Accurist, who readers of a certain age may remember for sponsoring the time on The Speaking Clock, still cheerfully trading into its 78th year. |
Then there were a couple of watch brands that had more than a whiff of Dad’s Army about them – including Zero West who have made models named for Spitfire planes and Lancaster bombers, and whose logo features a pin-up girl wearing a union jack dress and stockings and suspenders, cheerily giving the military salute while straddling a bomb. “We’ve done cars, boats, planes,” co-founder Graham Collins told me. “Always British! There’s enough British stories out there. We did a Dambuster watch. We were approached to commemorate The Flying Scotsman and made 100 watches out of a boiler tube.”
A different take on British pluck was being offered by Christopher Ward, a true homegrown success story, and cited as the first direct-to-consumer watch brand, after it set up shop in 2005 in a converted chicken shed on a farm in Berkshire, at a time when everyone was still in two minds about whether the internet would catch on, and who is on track to almost double sales this financial year to £30m.
Last year its chiming and affordable C1 Bel Canto watch won big at Geneva’s prestigious GPHG Awards, beating out competition from Hublot, Tudor and Seiko.
Still, Christopher Ward is not Britain’s biggest watch company. That would be Bremont.
Founded by Nick and Giles English in 2002, the brothers said from early doors that their ambition was to bring industrial watchmaking back to Britain. In 2021, backed by investment of more than £20m, they opened Bremont’s Manufacturing & Technology Centre, also known as The Wing, a 35,000 sq ft, architecturally striking state-of-the-art complex, outfitted with the kind of bespoke machinery you expect to see in a Swiss manufacture, except it is in Henley. Bremont now produces about 10,000 watches a year, with capacity, Nick English has said, to scale up to 100,00. Also in 2021: The Wing began making its own ‘Bremont manufactured movement’, the ENG300, a fiendishly difficult and expensive undertaking.
Last January, the company announced it had secured a further $59m (£48.4m) from the American billionaire Bill Ackman, apparently after he took a shine to some Bremont watches he'd bought, alongside existing investors, Hellcat Acquisitions. After the announcement, the Financial Times valued the company at more than $100m.
This was followed by the appointment of a new CEO, the dapper and highly respected industry veteran Davide Cerrato, formerly of Tudor, Montblanc and Panerai. The first real fruits of Cerrato’s popular, and populist, design ethos will be unveiled next month, and Bremont has big ambitions to make proper headway in America.
So it seemed a shame that Bremont remained one notable absentee from both the Alliance of British Watch and Clock Makers, now comprised of 92 trade members, and the day celebrating the best of British horology. Audsley laughed. “I’m so fed up of being asked that question,” he said, not unkindly.
“And, conversely, I know we’ve been a thorn in [Bremont's] side because at the end of every interview, the Alliance comes up for them as well.” On the question of what makes a British watch ‘British’ and if that was even a thing, Audsley offered this: “I think it’s wit that really does help to define what’s British now. Until we can bring more making back to Britain, we are going to have to be defined by more design and creativity. And we’ve got that in spades, there’s no doubt about that. |
Hot stuff: Studio UnderdOg's PepperOni pizza watch |
“And when you see the likes of what [founder] Crispin [Jones] is achieving with Mr Jones, what Richard is achieving with Studio Underd0g, I think it’s starting to get the other brands to loosen up a little bit, have a bit more fun. Because there’s no doubt that they’re leading the way.”
“Our industry completely disappeared,” said Roger Smith. “We don’t have the depth of Switzerland. But, for me, watchmaking has never been about the value or the prestige. We make some really fun watches but there’s also some really good quality watches, at really affordable prices – a lot more affordable than you’ll find in the Swiss markets. Also, they all have unique stories, and interesting reasons for them to have formed their particular brands.” |
The man at the front of the queue outside had arrived a little after 8am and flown in from North Carolina especially. What did he like about British watches? “The brands are small, they’re different and they’re collectable,” he said.
Those brands producing one-off models for the day included Fears, who arrived with a handsome Brunswick 38 ‘1924 Edition’, in celebration of a cushion-cased model it had made a century ago and had now remade in an edition of 10.
Christopher Ward had created a version of its award-winning Bel Canto laser-etched with a Union Jack, also in a run of 10. |
William Wood's Fire Exit Man watch |
And William Wood Watches had created the Fire Exit Man Watch, an appropriately emergency green-coloured model with a date wheel, where each day of the week was replaced with the figure from the fire-exit sign in a variety of memorable poses (Monday: ‘late for work’; Saturday: ‘partying’). |
Roger Smith's one-off Series 1. Bidding opened at £275,000 |
In a category of its own was Roger W Smith, who had produced a special version of his Series 1 watch for the day, with a reserve price of £275,000, sold via closed auction on his website, with all proceeds beyond that reserve going to the Alliance. There was also Studio Underd0g who, in addition to its pizza watches, had made a 25-piece special edition of its more sober 02Series field watch – that one was top of the shopping list for our man from North Carolina.
When the doors finally opened at 10am, it didn’t take long to work out what the biggest draw was. Even before he’d donned his pizza apron and chef’s hat, the queue for the Studio Underd0g stand was stretching around the hall. “This event is like Studio Underd0g… and friends,” one exhibitor told me, as the queue shuffled past his space. |
Marloe Watch Company's upcoming Daytimer Madainn watch, out in June |
“All of us are in awe of Studio Underd0g,” said Oliver Goffe, co-founder of Marloe Watch Company, Oxfordshire-based makers of smartly designed sub-£800 models inspired by British landscapes and adventurers. “They’re doing amazing things. They’ve hit the zeitgeist.”
Over at Roger W Smith’s exhibiting space – tagline, simply: ‘The Watchmaker’ – three of his museum-grade, six-figure creations were on display behind glass.
One of his newest watchmakers, Benji Lerigo, was gamely fielding jokey questions from a small crowd gawping into the display case, of the ‘I-don’t-suppose-I-could-try-it-on?’ variety when a man who had been standing quietly back introduced himself. He had flown over from Alaska both to attend the fair and to visit the Isle of Man.
On Monday, he would be collecting his own Roger W Smith watch – after putting his name down six years ago. “Are you actually?” said Lerigo.
After confirming the order number – 25 – it was established that the client was meeting the watchmaker who had painstakingly created his watch, from beginning to end. “I would send them occasional emails saying, ‘I'm still alive’,” the American said.
They shook hands. It was quite a moment. Later, Alistair Audsley walked two ministers from the Department of Business and Trade around, having lobbied them “for quite a while” about the need to take the UK’s watch export efforts more seriously.
“They stayed for nearly two hours,” he said. “For them to walk in and see all the energy, the full diversity of this business… they really got sight that there is this resurgence in the British watch sector.” |
"See you next year!" Bremont's CEO Davide Cerrato |
At 6pm, a voice came over the Tannoy to announce the fair was now closed. Everyone broke into loud applause. “What a massive positive advert for the British watchmaking industry,” Marloe’s Oliver Goffee said. “The people have been unbelievable. Not only that, but we’d made the assumption that it was going to be a room full of watch geeks. But there were young people, old people, men, women and everything in between. It was just unbelievable.”
“They pulled off a blinder,” said William Wood’s Jonny Garrett. “We’ve done so many shows and sometimes you can fly in, book a hotel and put all your resource behind it, but the customer is not wanting to come in and be educated. But here people wanted to learn, and they wanted to buy. Which is a big deal.” And what of the sales? Mr Jones Watches had done £12,000 worth of business by 11.30am and dispatched someone back to the office to restock. Roger W Smith won’t reveal how much his special Series 1 sold for at the closed auction, only to say it was “significantly more than double its reserve price of £297, 500”. |
What's the colour of money? A good week for Studio Underd0g |
In keeping with its whimsical nature, brand-of-the-hour Studio Underdog has no such qualms about revealing its sales – it builds them into joyfully coloured pie-charts then posts them onto Instagram. (Similarly, it creates little videos seeking out the flippers on eBay… and then gleefully cancelling their orders.)
On Tuesday the industry trade magazine WatchPro took the pie charts and did the maths, to an eyebrow-raising conclusion. It deduced that ‘after selling 5,930 watches in nine hours with an implied retail value of £3.5 million… that’s double the daily average revenue for Rolex in the UK’. In fact, the story was better than that. “They’ve got some things a bit muddled,” Richard Benc told me that day, explaining that the near-6,000 figure was taken from the previous week, the results of a sales window it had opened when it restocked its core range. You could add another 172 watches sold on British Watchmakers’ Day on top. "With," Benc noted, "PepperOni being the most popular.”
“Bear in mind at most events we sell, at max, 25 pieces in a single day. So, this is unlike anything we’ve ever experienced.” Whatever the sums, no one could say they hadn't had a good week. “A combination of the two figures is an accurate reflection,” Benc said. “Yeah. Quite a headline!”
On Wednesday afternoon the British Watchmakers’ Alliance emailed me to say they had confirmed a venue for next year – and would announce it shortly. Alistair Audsley had talked of the possibility of running the event over a whole weekend.
“One thing I’ve realised is you cannot build an industry with people like me,” Roger Smith said. “You need people who are producing larger numbers, more variety, more interest. This event is the real embryonic phase of a rebirth in British watchmaking.”
“I heard someone say ,‘This is Day One for British watchmaking’,” Audsley agreed. “That was quite a profound thing to hear.” |
Shout out to my watchy compadre Mike Christensen over at up-and-coming men's magazine GQ for getting the real Oscars’ wrist-scoop this week. When John Cena took to the Dolby Theatre stage with an outsize envelope to present best Costume Design, the actor and insanely buff WWE star wasn’t completely naked. Mike had clocked that strapped to his left arm was a Rolex Explorer II, the model introduced for more warmly dressed polar explorers in 1971 and quite literally the second-best Explorer that Rolex makes. ‘The winner is… well, Holly Waddington for her Costume Design in Poor Things,” Mike wrote, himself no stranger to a budgie-smuggling selfie. “But also Rolex, unwittingly or not.”
Hats, and indeed, everything else, off. |
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Images: Johnny Davis; Stephen Daniels; Studio Underd0g; Getty |
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