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Hello and welcome back to About Time,
The other day I caught the train up to Maidenhead and rang the bell on the bright yellow front door of 1 Park Street. That is the home of Christopher Ward watches. This year the brand is celebrating its 20th anniversary. The company was founded by three friends with successful backgrounds in retail, Mike France, Peter Ellis and Christopher Ward. France and Ellis were on the board of directors at the Early Learning Centre, the children’s toys company they sold in 2004 for £62m.
Christopher Ward watches – the name was chosen because it was the most English-sounding of the three – set out to sell the best watches it could for the cheapest price. To help it do so, it was direct-to-consumer – one of the first retail businesses, in any market, to do so. An admirable pursuit, and a successful one. But not one that always won Christopher Ward friends in the luxury watch business, where cheap watches through the post aren’t really a thing.
By the brand’s own admission, it has always attracted a bit of sniffiness. Too cheap, too derivative.
That has changed somewhat in the last 18 months, following a run of hit releases, including the chiming C1 Bel Canto, the aventurine-dialed C1 Moonphase and the skeletonized Twelve X (Ti), all of which have shown-off techniques normally the preserve of much fancier brands, while selling them at Christopher Ward’s famously good value prices.
Watch critics – incredibly, such a job does exist – have handed out rave reviews. Last year the Bel Canto won at the GPHG watch awards in Geneva, the annual ceremony where other winners included Audemars Piguet, Piaget and Tudor. Sales grew 80 per cent last year, and are on course to do so again in 2024/5.
Mike France is also responsible for founding the Alliance of British Watch and Clockmakers, with the revered watchmaker Roger Smith. The Alliance was founded to shine a light on the once mighty British businesses, as well as to lobby government for more favorable trading terms aboard.
In March, it staged the first British Watchmakers’ Day – a trade fair in London’s Lindley Hall – where more than 30 British brands, including Fears, Studio Under0g and William Wood, exhibited to great success and global media coverage. In their 20th year, then, there is much for Christopher Ward to celebrate. It also showed me their next watch, coming out in a couple of weeks, that should prove another attention-grabber. With its narrow corridors and upstairs-downstairs quality, Christopher Ward HQ resembled a high-street solicitor’s office, because that is what it used to be.
After a tour – quality control in one room, design department in another, customer service, a booked-out showroom downstairs, CW’s only ‘shop’– and a lunch with the affable team by the Thames nearby, I sat down for a chat with Mike France. He was immediately keen to show me two things. A signed piece of paper on which the advertising guru John Hegarty had drawn his celebrated guide to creativity – a triangle with the words ‘Memorable’, ‘Truthful’ and ‘Motivating’ on it.
“All communications, if they’re going to be worth doing, should be that,” France said. “I’m going to get that framed.”
And also a flipboard where he and his staff had mapped out a sort of Malcom Gladwell-style chart of customer behavior, showing how watch buyers influence one another. Status seekers were ‘peacocks’, influencers were ‘herons’, and so on.
He'd refer to this throughout our chat.
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Mike France's 20-year-old gamble pays off |
About Time: Congratulations on 20 years. What were your hopes when you started? Mike France: I don’t know if anyone really says they have a masterplan. But it’s probably worked out better than we might have imagined. I think there’s reason to be reasonably satisfied with what we’re done. But – lots more to do. You’d already made your fortune. Why bother? I’m one of those people that can’t just lie on a beach for too long.
How long did you lie on the beach for? About a month. Not long, then.
I really believe that we’re on this Earth to be productive. So, yeah, I was lucky enough to never need to work again, but it never even entered my head that that would be the case. So, what [business] were we going to do next? We landed on watches. Circuitously, in some senses. I mean, I liked watches, but I wasn’t a nerd. Peter and Chris, less so. And so why watches?
At the Early Learning Centre we were one of the first retailers in the UK to have a website. Everything that we sold at the stores, we sold online. Including climbing frames. People used to say to me ‘People aren’t going to buy climbing frames online’. But they did. So, we developed a view that [online retail] was probably not going to go away. We sold [the Early Learning Centre] in April of 2004. In May 2004 we developed the idea of a watch brand. Online only. We thought that was the future. It allowed us to have a really lean economic model, if we could make it work. We wanted something that had global reach. It needed to be something relatively easy to move around the world. So, it wasn’t gonna be sofas. And nothing is as universal as time.
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The home of British watchmaking |
What did you know about watches?
Not a lot, really. But we knew people. We weren’t 23-year-olds starting up for the first time. There was a guy called Woody Lam. His father had a textile business in Taiwan. Woody had wanted to be a watchmaker and was one of 32 Asians that the Swiss watch industry took to their bosom around the mid-60s. They only ever did it once. They taught them the dark arts of horology. And then many of these guys went off and set up in competition against them. And Woody had intended to go into the watch business, but then his father died – so it was expected that he would take over the family business, which he did. He turned a reasonably successful textile business in Taiwan to Adidas’s second-largest worldwide supplier. And when I was in fashion, and Chris was in fashion, we would occasionally go and see Woody and create things with him. So, when we decided to go into watches – well, ‘Who do we know who knows about watches? Ah, Woody!’ And within days a truck turns up with about 20 or 30 Mintel reports on the watch market. For some reason, Woody had bought every single Mintel report on the watch industry – just out of curiosity.
And you read them?
Yeah. We used them to position the business. It became very clear that there was a gap in the market, if we could hit prices that were better than the typical watches in that price point. Then we got to meet the CEOs because they were friends of Woody's – influential people, guys heading up Cartier Asia, for example. People no one normally gets to meet. We learned that we could access the same components as all the other brands. That certainly wasn’t the case in fashion or toys. Everyone was using ETA [popular Swiss movement makers] – some of them were badging them slightly differently, smoke and mirrors in the watch industry. But we realised we could create watches that were comparable to some of the big brands that we knew.
Why hadn’t anyone thought of doing that before?
It’s a combination of things. Essentially, the watch industry is a wholesale distribution industry. That’s the same today. So virtually everybody is selling their products through third-party resellers. And back in 2004 nobody had the internet. There were no mono boutiques [ie: watch brand shops]. No one had thought of that. So, with our model, you had a choice. You can either make huge, huge margins. Or you could do what we did. Which was to pass the savings and the economic model onto the customer.
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Christopher Ward's single in-house shop |
The Christopher Ward model has always been ‘x3’, right? You sell watches for three times as much as it costs to make them? And you’re open about that.
Most retail brands – be they Marks & Spencer, or anyone who has their own product – typically, they’re operating at times three margins. It’s a pretty simple formula. And the watch business uses a different formula? In 2004, with watches, the lowest multiple that we discovered was times eight, or nine. The highest multiple was 34.
Wow. So, if that band was making a watch for £100… It would sell it for £3,400, yeah. And that brand is still around. Would we know that brand?
You would know that brand very well. That’s an outlier, but still today [the average] is probably around the same – eight to nine times. But there’s several elements to that. Let’s say they start with the cost price, and they want to make a reasonable margin. So, they’re multiplying times three. But then they’re selling it through a retailer. And the retailer also wants times three. So that’s times six. And then [a brand ambassador like] George Clooney doesn’t come cheap. And then there’s the brand halo. So, what’s the brand worth? If you’re Rolex, there’s clearly a value to the brand. Conversely, some of the brands that have the biggest markups probably have the least reason to have it. They think that by charging a fortune it makes them seem that they’re a bigger brand than they are.
‘These shoes must be good, they’re really expensive.’
That was very much the approach of a lot of brands. We discovered that we could essentially buy the same stuff and manufacture it in the same sorts of places. But with our model of x3 and giving it back to the consumer, we could find a place in the market. With any brand it’s always ‘What can we do that’s different?’ Today there are 500 Swiss watch brands alone.
So, that was the start point. We’ve had various pieces of good fortune, some good decisions. Lots of luck. Today, 20 years later, we find that we’re the largest British watch brand. We never called ourselves ‘disruptors’. Other people described us as that. All we wanted to do was take away the bullshit. And put great watches at unbelievable value in front of the consumer. I remember when online retailers like Mr Porter started testing the waters with watches. It was considered a real risk. And still today, there are some people who will not buy a watch unseen. I get that. But back in 2004 people didn’t think they’d sell clothes online. People rang me people and said ‘You must be mad. You've really smoked the dope this time, Michael’. |
Watch designer Will Brackfield
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Do you think you’d still have still taken the chance, if you didn’t have all that money in the bank? We were never in the business of flipping [ie: making a fast buck]. Also, the three of us were Northern lads. And our mums were on our shoulders, going ‘How much?’ You know, knowing the true value of things as opposed to price of things. |
2004's C5 Malvern Automatic |
Conversely, no one wants to be known as ‘the brand that makes cheap watches’. That’s not very aspirational.
That was something we had to overcome. We’ve been very lucky. When we initially put a watch together – the C5 Malvern Automatic – and sold it for £179 back in 2004, it had a [Swiss] ETA 2824-2 movement in it. And we took out one ad in The Independent newspaper. Somebody in the UK saw that ad and sent it to somebody in Tasmania. A chap called David Malone, who turned out was a lecturer at Tasmania university, and also a watch nerd. Though we didn’t know any of this. He was an early influencer, because he was one of the major posters on timezone.com. In 2004 timezone.com was the largest watch forum. YouTube didn’t exist back then [it launched in 2005]. A friend sent our Independent ad to him. He ordered a watch because he was determined to expose us. Because nobody who says that this watch has got all this in it can possibly be selling it for £179.
He was trying to call you out.
He was trying to call us out. And so he orders watch. We thought: ‘We must be marketing geniuses! We’ve got people in Tasmania interested’. He starts investigating the watch and discovers, actually, it is a genuine Swiss-made ETA 2824-2. And to our eternal good fortune and his eternal credit, he writes the longest post you've ever seen on timezone.com. The heading of which is ‘I have discovered the best value mechanical watch the world has ever known’. That led to a huge amount of excitement on timezone.com. Because Dave was a respected poster. We started getting orders from all over the world.
You must have thought you’d cracked it.
Absolutely. ‘We’re geniuses!’ ‘The Independent has a bigger reach than we thought!’ So, in February 2005, six or seven months after we've launched the first watch, a guy called Hans van Hoogstraten in Holland phones is up and says ‘You'll be aware of the furor you've created on in timezone? Go and have a look, because you're being talked about more then Rolex’. The senior moderator had assumed all these people, who were then following Dave Malone, were in our pay. You were spamming them.
You’re a shill, right? Hans was so indignant that he’d been thrown off this forum that he rings up, and says ‘Can I set up a forum devoted to you?’ So, he set up the Christopher Ward Forum that today has tens of thousands of people. That was the start of the 'herons' beginning to respect what we do. This sort of [customer behaviour] ecosystem exists outside the world of watches. But watches are a particularly deep-rooted interest, particularly for men. This is cars. This is wine. This is whisky. This is hi-fi. This is vinyl. You’ll know better than me – This is Esquire! These guys, who are entering the market, look for validation about a brand they've never heard of. And the good news for us is that the herons have always been complimentary about Christopher Ward. Because they know watches. ‘Christ, that’s a well-built watch’. ‘That’s a great movement’. ‘That’s an interesting complication’. ‘That’s an incredible price’. They validate.
This sounds like Day One at Marketing School.
Possibly! But that’s been the bedrock of what's happened at CW. We couldn’t have existed without the internet. There was no social media to speak of. But there was still this subterranean world that existed that we discovered and learned about. Where the level of interest in watches was astonishing. And they would talk and they would post and they would argue, and they would fight. So, we learned very quickly that a very different world existed – from the consumers’ perspective. It’s very nuanced and sophisticated. People said ‘You'll never have a close relationship with people online’.
And the reverse is often the case.
It’s closer. We were way ahead of people in understanding that. So, we’ve grown organically, because we haven't had millions and millions of marketing dollars. Which at times has been frustrating. Because we’ve known for many years that we’ve had, in our view, products that deserved a wider audience. But to reach that wider audience, by and large, you need to get a whole load of marketing dollars. And for the first 16 years of this business Peter and I funded the whole thing. Which Christopher Ward watches should have had more love?
In 2010, we started creating [movements known as] the JJ calibers. We had come across a [Swiss manufacturing] company called Syngergies Horlogères. We ultimately merged with them in 2014 and made them our sole supplier. What they brought to us was genuine expertise in watches. We always felt that if you're really going to develop as a true watch brand, as opposed to just being a microbrand that’s got some nice designs, you need expertise.
Do you like the term ‘microbrand’? People talk about us now as ‘The Granddaddy of Microbrands…’ It sounds like you don’t care either way.
Not really. It’s part of this growing intertest. I think it’s essentially good news for the whole of the watch industry. More people talking about watches is better news for watches overall?
I think that’s fantastic. And we’re particularly supportive of British microbrands. But if they’re going to become more than microbrands, at some point, they have to [step up]. Not all of them are interested [in doing so]. And they’ll tend to fade away when the interest moves on. But there will be some that become really strong brands in their own right. And to do that, you need expertise. |
'Close to being a genius'. Johannes Jahnke |
And this came with Syngergies Horlogères?
They had a master watchmaker, a young guy called Johannes Jahnke. Johannes is East German, and many of the best engineers and watchmakers are East German. They had to understand mechanics because they had to repair things. They couldn’t whip into the store and buy a replacement. Over the last 20 years, I’ve learned a lot about East German engineers! He was only 27 when we first came across him. He’s as close to being a genius as I’ve ever worked with. He’d worked with [revered top-tier brand] A. Lange & Söhne. He’d created a number of watches for them. The last one I think was retailing at CHF 95,000 [£83,000] back in 2007. But he was dissatisfied because (a) very few of them were being bought because of the price. And (b) people might buy them but then they would put them in a safe. And Johannes’ desire, as he explained to me, was he wanted to walk down the aisle of a plane and see some of his creations on people’s wrists. So, when this weird British brand we came along and said ‘Our mission is to try and put high quality watches on everybody's wrists’, it struck a chord.
Why was he a genius?
There are lots of great watchmakers out there. And some hugely impressive watches. But there are very few able to create something outstanding using minimal parts. And less is often more, in all walks of life. The really impressive stuff to me is when people take the very complex and make it simple. And by making it simple, if you have a philosophy like we have, that means that you can sell it for less. |
Because there’s less parts to buy.
The very first watch the created for us was the jumping hour [the C9 Harrison Jumping Hour. A jumping hour watch being one that replaces the sweeping hour hand with an aperture at 12 o’clock. Inside is a disc that jumps to the next hour every 60 minutes]. We called it the JJo1 because I wanted to celebrate him. It’s the father of the Bel Canto. Because the Bel Canto is a further complication from the jumping hour. |
The Bel Carto uses the same movement? With 60 further pieces. It’s called the FS01 because [Christopher Ward’s current technical director] is called Frank Stelzer. Frank was Johannes’s apprentice, and he’s the architect of the Bel Canto.
I understand you’ll be doing more things with that Bel Canto movement later this year?
Yeah. Maybe next. But with our first jumping hour in 2010, we weren't just interested in a jumping hour. And Johannes wasn’t. We wanted the most accurate jumping hour in the world. And what that means, in jumping hour terms, is when it is precisely – precisely – on the hour, it moves. Well, we went and checked every single jumping hour that existed – and none of them met it. And by golly, he delivered. So that’s what I mean by a genius. And then we went on to develop JJ02, which a single-pusher chronograph. There’s a hugely impressive story behind that. There was an 84-year-old French-Swiss watchmaker called Jean Fillon, who was a specialist in chronographs. And he had spent the last 20 years of his life trying to develop a single-pusher chronograph using a Unitas base [Unitas was a Swiss movement manufacturer, it is now part of the Swatch Group] and he couldn’t crack it. Johannes met him. So, there’s this 27- year-old this 84-year-old and they just gelled, with this common passion and understanding of horology. Johannes came to us and said, ‘I think I can do it’. So, we bought all of Jean Fillon's componentry off him. And a year later, we had a single-pusher chronograph, which is amazing.
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C1 Grand Malvern World Timer |
What came next?
A really interesting world timer [the C1 Worldtimer] where everything was run on a 24-hour-clock rather than 12 hours. Very clever. Then he developed the JJ04, the moonphase was – and still is – just an outstanding piece of mechanical engineering. [A moonphase is a watch that’s able to track the cycle between full moons.] There’s a lot of moonphases out there. This are one of two in the world that track the moon perfectly. And ours is accurate, if it’s fully wound, for 128 years. And we’re selling that for less than £2,000. And along the way we developed our own in-house movement, the SH21…
‘British made’. ‘Swiss made’. ‘In-house movement’. People get very tetchy about these terms. How do you define them?
We’re proud to be an Anglo-Swiss brand. Our watches are Swiss made. But I mean, the twin flag logo, for instance, celebrates the fact that we’re Anglo-Swiss. [Christoper Ward’s logo ‘+ ::’ uses elements from both country’s flags.] It’s transparent as well. Do you think customer attitudes have changed around this stuff?
I think it’s a very interesting question. And one that we’ve been discussing internally, recently. In the most recent research we’ve done – talking about 'herons' and 'owls', and also 'peacocks' and 'cuckoos' – Swiss made is nowhere in the Top 10 things that they look for. |
What’s in the top five? Number one is always the dial. So, what it looks like? ‘Is it attractive’? ‘What colour is it’? Then it’s the movement. Then case design. Swiss Made comes way down there. Would you ever not be ‘Swiss made’? It’s funny you ask. Because I posed it to the team last week. I said, ‘Are we bothered about it?’ We go wherever we need to go wherever we need to go to get the best in the world. Does it matter where it comes from? And the answer probably is ‘no’.
What about ‘Made in China’? Many things that are the best in the world these days are Chinese made. Our cases come from China. We proudly tell people that. I’m asking because there’s some great Chinese watch brands around just now.
Yeah. There are some really great Chinese microbrands developing. Seagull, for instance, who are the fifth-largest movement maker in the world. If you were talking about Seagull movements 10 years ago, they were they were so unreliable, you would not want them anywhere near your watch. Like most things in the world, there is good and there is bad. And some of the worst quality that we get comes out of Switzerland. Our [Chinese] case manufacturer is one of the best in the world. There are some very, very famous brands that he produces for, but they will never tell you that. You can tell which are his cases in their collections because they’ll be the better ones. The level of finishing is just absolutely super. And I think Seagull, for instance, are increasingly producing some very interesting movements. We’re not watch snobs here, we never were.
So, there could be a CW Anglo-Chinese watch? I wouldn’t rule anything out. ‘Why?’ is the question. It sounds a bit pretentious – it is a bit pretentious! – but we genuinely try and push barriers. If Rolex said they were making in Japan – do you think anybody would care? Er…
So long as there’s good reason for it, right? Because what you're buying into is Rolex. There’s the watch industry, and then there’s Rolex. They’re at a completely different level. I mean, what not many people realise is the reason Rolex is so good is because every single part is machined within an inch of its life. That’s why they’re so reliable and so brilliant. I think their watches are fantastic. I think you keep an open mind about all of these things. The consumer these days is far savvier than we ever give them credit for. They’re interested in authenticity, they’re interested in the story, they’re interested in transparency.
Why isn’t the watch industry more transparent?
Because it thinks the mythology is good for the industry. It perpetuates the smoke and mirrors. We take the opposite view. Watches are an amazing, amazing thing to have on your wrist. Mankind has yet to produce a piece of microengineering that is more precise and better engineered than a wristwatch. It’s bloody incredible, really. We think that the more you know about it, the more enticing and magical it becomes. When we showed the then-CEO of Breitling, well before [current CEO] Georges Kern sorted it out, we showed him the SH21 and he went ‘What gives you the license to do that?’ And that sort of typifies the attitude. ‘Who are you?’
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Watches like the Bel Canto and the C1 Moonphase have brought you a new level of respect. They definitely have. They’ve brought us to new audiences. I’d heard that now 60 per cent of your customers come for the Bel Canto. Then they realise you make all these other watches, too. Yeah. And if people were dismissive of the brand, in any way, shape, or form – or they just weren’t interested – then the Bel Canto has made them look at us in a different way. What does that feel like? It feels like an opportunity. We’re not without ambition. I honestly believe if we can get this right, it’s a quarter of a billion-pound brand. What is it now?
This year we’ll do £55m. Which makes us, by some way, the largest in the UK. What do you what do you do first year? £400,000. That’s not bad!
It was alright. It was on budget! So, what’s the plan? What will the brand look like in another 20 years? Well, I probably won’t be here. Sell up to the Swatch Group?
[Laughs.] Oh yeah. What we’re genuinely trying to do is create a great business. And the definition of a great business in our terms, is something that stands the test of time – if you’ll forgive the pun. So, when my time is up, it will be a success if we pass it on to the next generation. Who can take it to a quarter-billion. We’ll get to 100m quite soon. We’re growing at a very fast rate. I think we’ve got some of the finest young minds in watchmaking. Our new product development team is just extraordinary. And as long as we keep creating great product, keep pushing those boundaries. If you’re not making some mistakes, you’re not trying. But as long as we keep making more good decisions than poor, then this can be a huge, huge, huge business.
Are the Bel Canto and the C1 Moonphase examples of a path you’re going to follow? Make more complicated watches? In some part, yes. There will be more Bel Cantos. I’ll use that as a collective term.
More chiming watches? No, no! Different! Although that’s not a bad idea. Different complications, etcetera. Built on the Bel Canto module? Not just on that module. Good try, but no. No, we’ve got a number of things in development. Complications we haven’t yet seen from Christopher Ward? Yeah. Later this year? Not this year. These things take time.
There was a video somewhere recently where you said something like ‘Don’t go on holiday in August, we’ve got something amazing coming’.
There’s a great watch coming in August. God, you poor man, you’ve watched my video. Somebody said to me quite recently – I’m not sure it's true, necessarily – but it was definitely interesting… They said, ‘I think you’re taking from Seiko as the entry-level for proper watches’. And my goodness, if that were true, to be even thought about in those terms, I think says quite a lot about the business, and where the brand is and how it's perceived. And it’s very important that we’re always accessible.
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2024's skeletonised Twelve X (Ti) |
People had a bit of a go at another one of your recent watches, the Twelve x (Ti), because it retails at over £4,000. Pricey by CW standards.
It was still using the ‘x3’ model. You’re buying a really well-made watch. The value never changes. Is there a ceiling to that model?
What you don’t want to do is leap too far too soon and frighten the horses. People are shouting for us to do a tourbillon. But I’m not really that interested in tourbillions because everybody’s done a tourbillon. There are more difficult things to make than tourbillons. So, what would be highest you’d charge? £7,000? £8,000? I don’t know. We talk about this internally. For the right watch, for the right reasons, that’s really pushing our boundaries… Are we frightened of a £10,000 or £15,000? Probably not. We haven’t yet reached a ceiling. But I think you have to be careful. Because there’s a danger that people think we're dropping out of the other stuff we’re focused on. And that’s far from the truth. We’re talking about two or three watches. But perception is reality. And we don’t want to alienate those people who are so close to the brand. Would you ever do a shop?
Well, not in the traditional sense. The showroom downstairs here is our only physical space. We’ve just signed a lease on a showroom in Dallas, in the US. People can go and see a Christopher Ward watch there. And if it works, we’d look at having a number of showrooms across the world. What’s the difference between a showroom and a shop? In Dallas we’re stockless. We will have the entire range and you can wear anything you like, but you'll have to order it from here [the UK]. Because, back to what we were saying – stock is evil as far as I’m concerned. Working capital. It’s a very Japanese approach. Don’t be stuck with unsold inventory.
Not like the rest of the watch industry. Who end up buying half of it back. So, if the model works, then we’ll think about rolling that out. We go to a lot of [trade] shows. Mike Pearson [American brand director, formerly of Bremont and Zodiac] and joined us, based in Houston. Mike is ‘spreading the Ward’ in the US. He’s almost permanently on the road, going to shows, Red Bar Groups, you name it. There’s a hunger for people to come and see us. But we’re not going to turn to third-party distribution because that screws the model. And we’re not going to be opening very expensive premises on Bond Street. Because we don’t need to.
What do you think the rest of the watch business makes of Christopher Ward? I don’t think they think too much about us. I don’t think Rolex is sitting there quaking in its boots. |
There's a whole lot of lume going on in watches right now. Panerai, Bell & Ross, IWC and A. Lange & Söhhne have all released models that have made sunglasses-bright luminescence part of their USP receently. Now comes this iridescent conversation-starter from Belgian nonconformists Ressence. Where others settle for lume on the hands or markers, the new Type 5 L Diver lumes the entire dial. The definition of a 'summer-ready dive watch'. Or just a pretty cool party trick.
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