Hello,
For years, all anyone saw of Andrew Morgan were his hands.
Familiar to millions as ‘The Talking Hands’ – Morgan oversaw the YouTube channel ran by Watchfinder & Co, the UK's largest retailer of second-hand watches. Products were reviewed top-down, narrated by Morgan with just his hands and the watches in shot.
He joined Watchfinder in 2011 – the dark ages for any watch fans wanting to gen up on their hobby, a time before #watchesofinstagram, when Hodinkee was still finding its feet and before erudite 8am Sunday newsletters had been brainstormed by glossy magazine companies.
Morgan realised that buying and selling watches was all well and good, but if Watchfinder wanted reach its potential it would need decent content to keep people coming back.
Decent video content, in this case. Today Watchfinder videos like 'Can You Spot A Fake Rolex?' and '5 Watches You Should Avoid' have been watched many millions of times.
'The Talking Hands' finally revealed his face last year. By then Morgan's warm, çand dryly entertaining videos had carved out a niche – watch reviews and round-ups in a POV format that allowed the viewer to get as close to interacting with nice watches as their devices’ screens allowed. Here was a new way to consume watch content. Knowledge worn lightly, a sometimes stuffy subject made accessible and fun to anyone with even a passing interest. Which, increasingly, was lots of people.
Then, in April this year, Morgan announced that he was leaving Watchfinder. Naturally, he did so on YouTube. ‘I Quit’
After 1,000 videos, a million subscribers and four billion views, Morgan was leaving the channel he'd created to concentrate on another – Andrew Morgan Watches, or AMW.
Morgan also established a parallel consultancy company, one where he could take all that watch retail knowledge and use it to help watch companies he liked, big and small, to become even more liked.
The field of YouTube watch content has grown exponentially since Morgan got in on the ground floor, and helped build Watchfinder into a company with an annual turnover of £13m. In 2018 it was acquired by Richemont, the luxury goods conglomerate.
AMW takes Morgan's Watchfinder persona and doubles down on the dry humour. Like all the best critical writing, it is possible to watch an episode of AMW and know nothing or everything about the subject, and still get plenty out of it.
As commenter @alphacaus2 wrote the other week 'Andrew Morgan is the Dave Chapelle of YouTube watch personalities. You come for the watch recommendations, but you stay for the interesting puns and digressions'.
Whether you find zingers like 'In 1927, Charles Lindberg invented deep vein thrombosis when he became the first person to singlehandedly navigate a plane across the Atlantic', with reference to Longines' original pilot watches or 'Oh sorry, I've just heard the box is recycled – I'll have two please,' about an expensive brand's feeble attempt at greenwashing, or the deep-cut references to Jeff Buckley, video games and Pokémon, amusing or grating will be down to your personal preference. Either way, it's not the sort of thing you get over on Hodinkee.
Anyway, since Morgan quit the band and went solo, it's all been going rather well.
Tomorrow (Monday) he’ll announce his first watch collab, a project with one of the most successful brands of the last 20 years. In true YouTuber fashion, I’ve saved that bit of news for the very end. Before that, Morgan discusses his career, what works on YouTube and what doesn’t, what we can all learn from Mr. Beast and why Rolex was, and always will be, the king.
And remember, if you’re enjoying About Time, don’t forget to hit the like and subscribe button. See you next week. |
A conversation with Andrew Morgan |
About Time: People might know you from watches on YouTube. But you’re also a science fiction author.
Andrew Morgan: I suppose I am. I’m one of those people who has a million hobbies and no time to do any of them. I hit a sweet spot in Amazon’s self-publishing programme [it launched in 2007] where an individual could achieve success. And whilst I didn't reach the heady heights of Andy Weir, who has a Nasa program named after him, I think my best-selling book New York Deep sold 50,000 copies, which I was very pleased with.
But you trained as a civil engineer?
That involved structural engineering, M&E [mechanical and electrical services], planning and CAD [computer-aided design]. I think at the time there was a bid going in for a monorail in Abu Dhabi. So, using the 3D stuff in CAD I put together the visuals for it. ‘This is what the future will look like… shiny!’ And I thought, ‘You know, I really enjoy the creativity around this’. And that’s where I got the bug for making content from.
When did watches come into it?
Around that time I discovered Rolex. Back then Rolex was still an incredibly well-known brand. But actually, a lot of the Rolex collection was considered properly nerdy-niche. Most people in collecting community hated the Sea-Dweller. It was too thick. If you were successful, you bought a Datejust. If you were really successful, you bought a Day-Date. If you bought a Submariner, you were a bit weird. The idea of paying thousands for a steel watch seemed… uncharacteristic. But when I graduated as a civil engineer, I purchased a Submariner. Rattly bracelet. I absolutely loved that thing. So, I took pictures of that. I was trying to get lume shots. I was trying to learn how to light it. It had reflective glass that you were trying to take pictures through... With the bracelet you were talking a spherical shape. How do I start to control this? There was nothing online that I could find so I was just sort of finding my own way.
How did the Watchfinder job come up?
I was getting a little bit weary of the civil engineering, the bureaucracy of that. And a job appeared in the local newspaper – remember when you used to find jobs in newspapers? – for a copywriter for a pre-owned watch business based in Maidstone called Watchfinder. They were not offering enough for me to really consider the job. It was literally ‘write copy for watches to sell them’. But I had an idea. I absolutely love cars and in the car industry social media and online community was really starting to boom. This was probably the heyday of [online motoring community/car marketplace The Times once called ‘Mumsnet for men’] PistonHeads. That didn’t really exist for watches outside of Hodinkee. And Hodinkee was incredibly ‘niche collector’. It was Reference Number Central. I found a lot of that quite dry. I thought maybe we can do something to build a community. I sent [Watchfinder] some articles I’d written, took pictures of my Rolex and put together this idea for a plan. And they offered me a job. Prior to this Watchfinder was a shop in Maidstone that bought and sold pre-owned watches. In order to grow, they needed to build trust. And to build trust you need to have a brand. So together with another guy who was a freelance designer, we did that.
This was the same year Mr Porter launched, with the idea that good content could drive e-commerce.
Mr. Porter was the business model that sold this in. They had seen that Mr. Porter had been purchased by Richemont. So, Watchfinder were, like, ‘This is our business model’. Watches seem to be 10 years behind cars and fashion. If you want to see what’s going to happen in watches in 10 years time, look at what the car and fashion industries are doing now. At first we just did a fairly straightforward blog. You could see traffic on there, but it was difficult to grow it organically. There wasn’t the money to push it out to new people, for them to see it. It was just being shown to whoever was already on the email database or browsing the website.
People responded to the tone of voice. Friendly, funny, not talking down to anyone. Like you say, not Reference Number Central.
It was just a case of, ‘How can I talk about watches in a way that people haven’t before?’ It always bugged me that an auction would say, ‘Rare and Important Watches’. Or an article would say ‘the ‘Single Red’ is important’. It’s not enough to say that it is! You need to show me why it’s important. [Rolex’s ‘Single Red’ was a prototype of its 1967 Sea-Dweller, given to divers to test. Just 12 are said to exist.] Those were the stories that I found really interesting. And Rolex in particular has proven to be a great source of fascination. Because I thought Rolex was the king. And then I dug into [its brand history] and I found out that, actually, so much of it was based on marketing and I kind of soured on it. And then the more I dug into it, the more I realised, actually, no: what they did was set the standard for how watch brands should operate. And I got this newfound respect for what they’d done. I feel as though as I’ve gone on that journey and I’ve taken people along it with me,
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Jubilee Vade Mecum, the 1946 branding bible by Rolex founder Hans Wilsdorf |
You’re a fan of the brand biography written by Rolex’s founder, Hans Wilsdorf.
Jubilee Vade Mecum [four-volumes published in 1946]. If you gather up all the teachings of Hans Wilsdorf when it comes to branding, you’ll see that all the successful brands today do exactly the same stuff. From how you name your brand to how you engage with people, the simplicity of the product lines, the look and feel, the consistency, the visual identity... A brand like [red-hot independent watchmaker] F.P. Journe abides by a lot of that. It’s fascinating to see how visionary Hans Wilsdorf was on that stuff.
How did the videos start at Watchfinder?
This was the time when a free piece of software called Magic Lantern came out. You could use it to turn a still camera into a video camera. The budding director-slash-cinematographer in me was, like, ‘I can do something with this!’ Then my research into cinematography introduced me to a new type of lighting… this gets super-nerdy [goes on about cones, pyramids and sheets of diffusion material for quite a while]. In reading this stuff, it gave me the Billy Big Balls confidence to say to Watchfinder, ‘Look, we can do video now. I’ve read a book!' Watchfinder at the time was establishing its service centre – its ‘Manufacturer Certified Service Centre’. To [get that certification] you have to have the equipment that each different watch manufacturer tells you to have. And sometimes they’ll say ‘Okay, great you’ve got all the [respected toolmaker] Bergeon tools – that’s great’. But others will say ‘No, no, no. You need our tools’. And you have to go and invest in all of these duplicates of the same tools to meet that certification. Watchfinder had done this, and they wanted to make a song and dance about the fact that it gone to this enormous investment. And I filmed [the work going on at centre] like it was through the watchmaker’s lens – the level of detail of the movement coming apart and being reassembled. We shot that, uploaded it to YouTube, and forgot about it.
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With a Grand Seiko SBGV245 |
Before long it had a million views. Today it’s on 7m.
I had to refresh the browser. ‘How has this happened?’ Someone had shared it on Reddit. A content aggregation site had found it on Reddit and hosted it. Then a bigger one had found it. And then it had been on Yahoo. I think might have even been on Esquire as well. By the definition of ‘viral’… it had gone viral.
What was it that people liked about it?
There is a vicarious satisfaction to seeing someone else demonstrate a difficult skill. It’s what luxury lifestyle influencers have benefitted from. When you achieve success as an individual, you are rewarded by a dopamine hit. That’s an evolutionary trait that encourages you to continue pushing and trying harder, and not just give up. But there are studies that say, when you watch someone else be successful at something, you experience a significant proportion of that same feeling of success. And that was simply the case with this. People enjoyed the experience and felt rewarded by it. We produced a few more videos along the same lines but the success of each one waned. The biggest problem was: Watchfinder wasn’t a servicing company. It was a company that bought and sold watches.
So, you came up with idea of POV, top-down reviews?
If you lift up a camera and point it forward, at a person – you have to light the person and you have the light the background, so it becomes more expensive. But if you take the camera and you put it ‘in my eyes’ and look down, you then have a much smaller space that you need to contain in terms of the setup. As well as giving this vicarious experience of the watch, like you’re seeing it and holding it yourself. It looked liked you were looking at a desk. It was actually some scaffold boards glued together.
Did it work immediately?
The first videos were scripted and we used a voiceover artist. They were like advertorials, very polished. The visuals are cool, but no one was interested. Then I saw ‘a guide to creators’ that YouTube had put out. And it said something that has stuck with me – ‘Don’t tell the audience what you want to tell them. Tell them what they want to hear’. And I had a think about this. YouTube is a place people go at the end of the day to be entertained. They want to be educated as well. But primarily entertained. And an advertorial is not entertaining. What is entertaining? Narrative storytelling. And I was, like, ‘I can do that’. And I think the first story I told was about a Speedmaster. That was good too because voiceovers were quite expensive.
People still describe watches as ‘niche’ today. But there's such a breadth of stories.
There’s a huge amount. We’re talking about centuries of history. How could you not find a story? And the first video we did in that format got 25,000 views in a week. And I was engaging pretty heavily with Reddit then as well. ‘What do you like?’ ‘What don’t you like?’ ‘What’s working?’ And from there 'The Talking Hands’ format got refined. You became identifiable by your hands. I find the name ‘The Talking Hands’ a bit unusual. Talking about my own hands in the third person is the strangest sort of esoteric. Watchfinder is in the business of selling watches. How did that influence what you talked about?
My job title was Content Director. So that included any product photography, any copy, anything for the entire business. Of course, I wasn’t going to go off on a massive tangent and do anything that was detrimental to the brand. But featuring stuff that wasn’t necessarily our bestsellers, or stuff that we maybe didn’t even sell, still went to demonstrate that Watchfinder was the expert. Watchfinder never received a penny from a single watch brand to feature a watch. And it left me able to approach brands that I thought were interesting.
Go on.
It’s where my love of independents started to come in. And when I say independents, I mean guys who have been through watchmaking school and started to make their own watches. Guys who are bringing something new to the table that people should pay attention to. I thought ‘Aw, man, this is a goldmine’. In my mind it was a renaissance of the industry. Because at the time, the big worry was the average age of the watch buyer. How can young people be engaged and inspired by this stuff? And some of these brands were starting to do that. If the quartz crisis [when mechanical Swiss watchmaking faced an extinction-level event from cheap digital watches from Japan] was World War Two, this was almost like a Cold War. It was about the things that weren’t happening more than the things that were. That was a profound moment for me where I realised that watchmaking expanded well beyond the brands that I was aware of and was growing at a rate that I couldn’t even conceive. Granted, they weren’t selling tens of thousands of watches. But these individual watchmakers were selling runs of 50 watches in a year for a really good price. Entirely through Instagram, through the network of collectors on WhatsApp, without hitting any kind of mainstream marketing at all. So, I thought it’d be really cool to give some of those guys a platform via the Watchfinder channel, so people could discover them.
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Morgan's custom one-of-one Christopher Ward Bel Canto |
What brands are you talking about?
People like [28-year-old German watchmaker] Felipe Pikullik and [Czech artist/ watchmaker] Ondře Berkus. And even Christopher Ward. Genuinely, the Bel Canto [the brand’s chiming titanium model, a complication usually the preserve of Swiss haute horology that wowed the industry with its sub-£3,000 price] was this light-switch moment. I was aware of Christopher Ward. The watches were fine. They were high-quality alternatives to more expensive watches. But the Bel Canto – which I’m wearing right now – just made me think, ‘Okay, I thought I knew what you could get for a certain price point and a certain quality, but there’s this guy [Mike France, MD of Christopher Ward] who’s made it his mission to make this crazy cool stuff available to people who can't spend as much’. From that to Ondře Berkus, who was just in a shed in the countryside, making one-of-one crazy watches from his own imagination, I thought, ‘There is so much to play with here’.
The field of ‘watch reviews on YouTube’ was a fairly narrow one when you started. Then loads of people got in on the act. How did that affect things?
It affected it a lot. In good ways and bad ways. Pre-Covid, the Christmas of 2019, was the period where I was thinking ‘Okay, YouTube has chosen the Watchfinder channel’. Because every video was getting around 300,000 views. And then when Covid hit, YouTube changed overnight. The people who were watching the Watchfinder channel [tended to be people] covering off people who were furloughed, and working late into the evening and their lives were turned upside down. They had no time for YouTube. Meanwhile, all of the kids who were at school literally had nothing to do and were watching YouTube like crazy. And YouTube is predominantly a platform for children. If we think of Carwow, for example. That’s probably one of the biggest car channels on the internet. They’re coming up to 10 million subscribers. Their audience is going to be a mix of adults down to teenagers. People who like ‘Fast-Car-Go-Loud-In-Straight-Line’, all the way through people who can actually afford to buy them. A good spread of demographics. If you then you head to [YouTube sensation known for his eye-popping stunts and altruism] Mr. Beast – his audience then skews younger. He’s got 250 million subscribers. And his videos get maybe 150 million, sometimes 200 million views. That's pretty impressive. If we then jump to a channel called Cocomelon – which I’m sure you you've never heard of – their most popular videos have got 6.6 billion views.
What’s Cocomelon, then? It’s nursery rhymes for kids. The biggest audience on YouTube by an enormous margin. And that especially changed during Coronavirus. I thought the received wisdom that watch content exploded during Covid? Men with nothing to do?
The drop in views happened literally on the day of Coronavirus for the Watchfinder channel. So previously, YouTube wanted to connect niche topics with niche audiences. During lockdown, it was going ‘What is the most popular stuff right now? Let’s just pump that. That's what people want to see’. It became about connecting the most people with the most views. So niche channels really suffered. Also, because YouTube was losing views to TikTok, it created Shorts. To incentivise it, it said, ‘If you create Shorts, we’ll give you loads of views. And we'll share more of your longform videos too’.
The algorithm is doing this?
Exactly. When you hear the word ‘algorithm’, you can just transpose that word ‘audience’. And at the time the audience wanted shortform videos that they could just like flick through without much investment. And [sweary and shouty Irish YouTuber] Nico [Leonard] is one of the people who really exploded in that time. He cleverly hit upon what I like to call ‘audience opportunity’. If you search for ‘Kanye West’ or ‘Drake’, the audience opportunity is much higher than it is for 'Panerai'. What Nico took advantage of was connecting people who are interested in those things with watches by plugging watches into a more popular topic.
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With Studio Underd0g's Richard Benc, wearing an H.Moser Streamliner Chronograph Undefeated |
I’ve seen Nico do reaction videos mocking people on TikTok who were showing off their watches...
All those people on TikTok will be popular names. It’s very, very clever what he does, and it utilises exactly the way that YouTube works – or worked at the time. Nico took advantage of that. He also jumped on Shorts immediately. And that blew his channel up. Watchfinder’s channel at the time was getting around two million views per month. So was Nico’s channel. Where he did Shorts it went 40 million views a month. What did you do?
The boost in video views from Shorts lasted about a year. After which my team started to come back [from furlough] but it was too late by that point. A lot of the stickiness from that exposure stayed with Nico and kept his channel strong. |
At Watches And Wonders 2024, with fellow YouTuber Teddy Baldassarre |
Not everyone wants shouting and swearing with their watch content – or any content – though.
If I were to very loosely set the scene for what I think watch YouTube looks like, on the one side you’ve got the most informative [popular US-based watch influencer] Teddy Baldassarre - he says ‘These are the watches, these are the specs, these are why you might like them’. Very, very informative. A great way for people who are already deep into watches to discover new things and to make decisions. It’s pure consumer advice. And then at the other end, you’ve got Nico, who is mostly entertainment. It’s kind of like fart jokes and innuendo, being silly and getting into beefs with Rick Ross, and all those kinds of things. And what I’ve tried to do is place myself in the middle, where I provide some consumer advice and some entertainment, without deviating too far into either. I hope I’m a happy medium.
You left Watchfinder having done 1,000 videos and racked up 4bn views. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to go and do my own thing. And you know, take a risk. Your own AMW channel has also allowed you to be sillier.
I am by nature, a stupid person. One of my favourite sitcoms specifically is That Mitchell and Webb Look. The humour is clever, but it’s also grounded in silliness. I absolutely love Blackadder. 'We're in the stickiest situation since Sticky the stick insect got stuck on a sticky bun'. And that kind of humour is not appropriate for Watchfinder. So, I’ve incorporated that into the AMW channel because I wanted to provide something new and fresh that people haven’t seen me doing before. And also for the benefit of my own personal satisfaction, which is to make myself chuckle when I write stupid jokes.
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'The title and the thumbnail are the poster for the movie' |
For all your editorial freedom, the subjects you cover are clearly aimed at the broadest audience possible. ‘10 Watches You Should Just Go Out and Buy’; ‘The Watches I Regret Most’… What works well for you?
There’s a Mr. Beast school of thought when it comes to title creation and thumbnails [ie: the picture used to sum up the video]. The YouTube video itself is like the movie. The title and the thumbnail are the poster for the movie. And the first 30 seconds of the video are the trailer. Your performance in the first 30 seconds will determine how much retention you have. If you don’t get those right, it doesn’t matter how good your video is. There’s a trick you use often in your 30-second intros, when the subject is a Top 10. ‘And I’ve saved the best/ cheapest/ most surprising until the end…’
Some people do message to say they absolutely hate me doing that. Unfortunately, the benefits outweigh the negatives. [Morgan has more recently been riffing on this conceit. ‘The last one comes right at the very end’ or ‘The last one is definitely a watch on this list’.]
I’d thought your ‘The Worst…’ videos might outperform ‘The Perfect…’ But looking at the views both seem to perform equally well.
The reason that ‘worst’ and ‘perfect’ both work is that they’re both extremes. If someone feels like the future of their watch-buying decisions could be negatively impacted by missing this video, then they’ll watch it. So, if you say ‘Here are 10 perfect watches’ they might go ‘Well, what if I go and buy a watch and it’s one of the substandard ones?’ Or if you say ‘Here are some watches that I regret’ they go ‘I’d better make sure I know what those are, so I don’t make the same mistakes’. It’s all about consumer advice so they don't make a mistake in the future.
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What’s the science behind pulling faces on the thumbnails?
People also say they hate reaction faces on thumbnails. And I say to them, ‘Go and look at any Pixar movie poster. Any of them. You will see the same faces on there, because they work for a broad demographic’. Okay, the Dune: Part Two poster has them all looking stoic. But they’re still giving an emotion for you to respond to. The evil guy on the poster will be going ‘Grrrr!’ They’re all hyperrealist experiences of what you'll get in the film. You should be able to tell what the video is about without the title, just by looking at the thumbnail.
You’ve done quite a lot of videos on Rolex and Omega.
It’s the same thing with ‘audience opportunity’. If you were to search ‘Panerai’ and filter by high to low, and compare that to Rolex and Omega… More people are interested in those brands. So, some people in the comments might say, ‘Why do you keep featuring Rolex? We’re not interested in it’. Unfortunately, the Royal ‘you’ is interested. That’s what people want to see. My mentality when it comes to a AMW specifically is to take my own wants and needs out of the equation. What do people want to see? Mr. Beast said this specifically about the algorithm/audience thing. Whenever someone says, ‘Oh, the algorithm’s not working for me’. The audience isn’t working for you. The audience isn’t happy with what you’re making. Make the things that the audience wants you to make. He also said: ‘It’s easier to make one video that gets 50 million views than it is to make 1,000 videos that gets 50,000 views’. Because if you make that many videos with 50,000 views, that’s so much work. But if you have unlimited budget, you can go ‘I’m going to drive a train into a hole’. People are going to be interested to see what that is.
Do the videos take a lot of work? It looks like it.
I suppose so. But I enjoy it so much that it can’t feel like that. As much as I enjoyed the job of Watchfinder, it was still a job. I still had other things to do. I still had to attend meetings that I couldn't be bothered to go to, and so on. Whereas with this, I wake up in the morning, and I think, ‘It’d be really funny if I said this’. Or 'I’ve discovered a watch on Instagram. I want to tell everyone else about it, too'. |
And presumably it’s working out financially?
So, the AMW business has actually split into two things. The AMW channel is my public CV, my ability to demonstrate that I know how to communicate to people who buy watches and that I have influence and a following. I will never have a brand say, ‘Here’s some money to feature a watch’. Because then I’ll end up featuring watches I don’t like, the content won’t be as good and people won’t want to watch it. The whole point of the channel will spiral. And the audience that I have is magnitudes more valuable than a typical YouTube audience because of the demographic. Which means advertisers will pay more for it, which is good.
Because potential watch buyers tend to have more disposable income?
Exactly. My average demographic is men aged 25 to 65. I think the mean age is, like, 40. And they live in the US and the UK. So, when it comes to companies that want people to buy stuff, BMW is going to sell more cars to those guys than they are to Mr. Beast’s audience. And then in terms of sponsorship, I can still work with watch-adjacent businesses. Say, a watch strap manufacturer. So Delugs – who make awesome straps, plug for Delugs – they are one of first partners to support me, which I’m incredibly grateful for.
The other side is the consultation side.
That’s the part that people won’t see as much. I realised in my time working on Watchfinder that more and more brands would ask me for advice. Because really what I had been doing the whole time was looking at an arena of watches and thinking ‘Which are the ones that I think that people are going to care about the most? That have a 'headline'? And which ones don’t?’ And I was able to reverse-engineer my process of selection into helping people make a product that fulfils those requirements. I never anticipated this being part of the business at all.
I can see how that would be an asset. The imposter syndrome in me immediately jumped into action. ‘What are you talking about? You can’t charge people money for the nonsense you’re going to tell them?’
What sort of things do you tell them? ‘40mm is going to sell better than 42mm’. ‘Men don’t buy green dials’. That kind of thing?
Yeah, absolutely. I think my skill set is empathy. The ability to understand what people want to hear, not what we want to tell them, right? So, ‘What is the zeitgeist?’ ‘What is timelessness?’ ‘What are the trends?’ ‘How do we turn that into something that’s going to make what do you do popular?’ But also experience in brand and marketing. I helped build up Watchfinder from this pokey shop in Maidstone to being part of the Richemont group – and internationally renowned as a premier retailer of watches. So, I will come across watchmakers who are technically incredibly gifted in terms of design. But they’ve no idea what they’re doing in terms of branding and communication. There are some brands that I would avoid, because there’s no story to tell. I don’t think they look good enough, or I don’t think the value is there. Now, those brands can still be successful by a brute force approach. Spending a huge amount of money on marketing. If you can get that watch on every celebrity’s wrist and on every billboard then you can sell some. But I personally consider a much more effective approach is just to create a good watch in the first place. My advice is ‘Let’s make the product incredible first’. ‘Does it look good?’ ‘Is it great quality? ‘Is it good value?’ ‘You’ve got two out of the three but the third one needs fixing’ and if you do that, the rest of it is going to be so much easier. And I’m doing this with brands on Kickstarter all way through with conversations with legacy brands.
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AMW sponsoring British Watchmakers' Day, back in March |
Give us an example of a common brand fail.
I can give you two. One is ‘internal’, one is ‘external’. A common pitfall is that ‘People will buy our watches because of our name', right? Name is incredibly fragile. Rolex knows this. Over the pandemic period it took control of its pre-owned retailer network and its been building more and more factories to up its production. Because they know that yes, they’re really hot now, but in 10 years, it could all change. It can change so fast. One of my favourite brand marketing stories ever is the De Beers engagement ring story. Do you know this? Pre-First World War the idea of an engagement ring wasn’t a thing. Popular gemstones throughout history have been rubies, sapphires and emeralds. Because they have colour. Diamonds had never been as valuable and interesting. The diamond-sourcing company formed a consortium, called De Beers. And they decided they needed to control the flow of these diamonds into the market, so as not to bring the value down. But also generate a new demand for diamonds. So, they used celebrities, in the East and the West, predominantly Japan and America, to create this idea of the diamond engagement ring. The pharses, ‘A diamond is a girl's best friend’. ‘A diamond is forever’. ‘A diamond is three months’ salary’. Those were all created by the De Beers company as part of a marketing campaign. And within a generation those have become, ‘That’s history. That’s how we've always done it’. Rolex understands that you can very easily go in the other direction. You can fall off the pages of history very, very quickly. And so a lot of brands will say, ‘We are x brand name, that is good enough. We don’t need to be mindful of how good we look or the quality and the value in comparison to our competitors’. And it’s that mentality that has meant that people like F.P. Journe have been able to come in underneath. Because collectors now go, ‘Oh look, instead of paying a huge amount of money to this brand whose founder died 100 years ago, or I have to go on a waiting list and be treated badly by a person in a shop… I can now go and meet the guy who is making my watch, make something that might even be unique to me and have a really personalised experience’. In talking to a lot of collectors and particularly high-net-worth collectors, their big desire isn’t just to buy something expensive, it’s to be part of that journey.
Even being involved in the watchmaking process.
Vacheron Constantin has its Les Cabinotiers [‘made to measure’] customization stuff. AP will do customisation as well if you’re really, really high-end. But you can go to someone like [German independent] Kudoke and have your own initials engraved on the back and see the watchmaking process and spend £10,000-£15,000. And those guys are starting to pick up momentum because collectors go ‘I feel like I was part of something. I’m not just a consumer, I’m a creator’. Which is a huge value. Just saying ‘We are this name’ is starting to lose its value.
What’s your ‘internal’ one?
One I see in a lot of big brands. The person who ends up at the top is either a finance guy or a salesperson, right? And those people have the mindset, ‘This is what the product is. I just need to get it in front of people. I just need to get it sold. I just need to find ways to persuade people to buy it’. Rather than going, ‘Let’s make a product that people actually want to buy’. [Watch industry legend, former boss of Omega, Hublot, Tag Heuer and LVMH's watch division] Jean-Claude Biver had an ability to spot opportunity where other people didn’t. And if you think about the revitalisation of Blancpain, and with it the mechanical watch industry [Blancpain had been rendered obsolete by the quartz crisis. Biver bought it in 1981 and successfully relaunched it, rebooting Swiss watchmaking in the process]. The team that he assembled to help him wasn’t a team of finance or salespeople. It was a team of marketers. It was a team of people whose job it is to empathise with the end user, to understand what it is that’s going to make their hearts flutter and make them go ‘I want one of those’. That’s where the whole James Bond thing came from. There are a bunch of people out there who see that watch and go ‘I want one because I love James Bond’ [Omega struck the Bond tie-in under Biver]. That team of people, those marketeers, I think all but one are now CEOs of brands, including Rolex. The part that so many brands miss is that you’re making these watches for people to love. They’re not just commodities. They’re pointless things that people buy for a reason.
Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about?
Well, I’m living the dream a little bit, because I asked Christopher Ward if they’d like to work with me on an AMW special edition watch, and they – to my surprise – said yes! So that’s happening very soon. From the 17th of June, you’ll see it appearing on the Christopher Ward website, and it’ll be available for one week only from the 27th. If anyone wants to check it out, I’d be truly humbled and blessed. |
Everything's gone 1974. Why? |
Diamond dial 1974 Piaget, from Phil Toledano's IG. This year's hottest shape |
In the 2016 edition of Esquire’s annual watch special The Big Watch Book, we ran a story about the boom in Apple-adjacent hybrid smartwatches, models like Mondaine’s Helvetica 1 Smartwatch and Frédérique Constant’s Horological Smartwatch (great days!).
The Swiss industry was fighting back against a new threat to its existence coming across the Atlantic from Cupertino.
The hope was that the Apple’s Watch – if you could even call it a watch, eh? – which had launched the previous year, would soon be beating a hasty retreat, seen off by these plucky hybrid Swiss editions.
These models promised a win-win: they had both the clever tech inside them, and they actually looked like watches. (With real hands. And round dials!) One imagined the intro graphics for Dad’s Army. A reference for our younger readers, there.
“My feeling is [the Apple Watch] is going to be a failure,” noted one Swiss watch boss in the story, saying that Apple had broken too many cardinal rules. “Any CEO will tell you that square faces do not appeal to men.” Leaving aside the small matter of Apple going on to become the world’s most successful watch company, even at the time our friend seemed to have a slippery grasp of the market. If men didn’t buy watches with square faces, where did that leave Cartier’s Santos, Tag Heuer’s Monaco or Bell & Ross’s entire inventory?
Anyway, who knows what our guy from 2016 would have made of the watch landscape in 2024? Apple and Switzerland now sort-of happily coexist – there are Hérmes watches, and there are Hérmes-edition Apple Watches. More to the point, today Swiss watches that aren’t round are everywhere.
We are in the midst of funky shaped-watch fever, retro designs with a space-age feel that look like they should be wobbling about against a starry backdrop, approaching the Frontier Planet in a cutaway scene on Blake’s 7 (keep up, kids!). This year got off to a retro-futurist start in February with Piaget’s reissue of the Polo 79, a solid-gold number with a gadroon dial originally marketed at jet-set Eighties playboys. That same month Hamilton dropped a whopping 52mm x 46.6mm black PVD polygon shaped-model that was an adaptation of the world’s first electric timepiece, the Ventura, and came from a collaboration with Dune: Part Two.
In March Sotheby’s hosted a record-breaking sale of oddball watches from yesteryear and everyone suddenly remembered how much they really, really loved asymmetrical marquise-shaped dials and white gold Rolls-Royce car-shaped watches after all.
In the last few weeks the flight-deck doors have really swished open on this Tomorrow’s World (anyone?) stuff. |
The future's so bright: Bamford's Neprosolar |
Bamford Watch Department opened pre-orders on its letterbox-shaped Bamford Neprosolar, a solar-powered, rechargeable digital watch based on a forgotten concept watch from the 1970s. Audemars Piguet announced the Brutalist-inspired, linguistically-challenging [Re]Master02. Newcomers Toledano & Chan unveiled their tasty and immediately sold-out B/1 with its sparkly parallelogram stone dial – as featured in a recent About Time – also inspired by Brutalist architecture.
Elsewhere, there is return of the ‘1970s-ready, space-age oddity’ the Amida Digitrend, a ‘unique driver’s watch featuring a digital display read horizontally through an optical inverting prism’ from an era when you couldn’t ask Siri for the time while you were bowling down the M5. Perhaps appropriately, Reddit seems to be drawing a parallel between these designs and Elon Musk’s Cybertruck. Mid-July will see the launch of another similarly shiny asymmetrical brand-new-you’re-retro model from a famous Swiss watchmaker, about which we have been sworn to secrecy. Why is this happening? It can’t be that they’re all copying one another, for the simple reason it is About Time’s understanding it takes about two years to develop a watch from concept to manufacture.
So, what was happening in spring 2022?
Kate Bush's 'Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)' was back in the charts after soundtracking Eighties' love letter Stranger Things, so perhaps the watch companies were inspired by that. Will Smith slapped Chris Rock live on telly, so maybe they were all hoping to return to a more innocent Fresh Prince era? It was also when Elon Musk bought Twitter, so perhaps that explains the Cybertruck connection? |
Toledano & Chan's 1970s-Rolex Midas inspired B/1 |
To be fair, Phil Toledano of Toledano & Chan has been going on about cool 1970s watches for the last four of five years on his Instagram – how great Patek was back then, and how much he loved Rolex’s 1975 King Midas, a watch he has made no bones inspired the B/1.
I asked a watch colleague why he made of it all.
“The watch companies can move much quicker than they let on when they want to,” they said. “Also, I suspect the law of averages applies – the chances of five brands from 1,000 creating a similar looking watch at the same time are high. Plus, that 1970s trend has been bubbling away for years.” Then I asked Andrew Morgan.
“This is the great merry-go-round that is the auction circle-of-life, which is that everything is dictated by what gets hoovered up at auction,” he said. “We’ve been through the 1930s and 1940s grand compilations and chronographs from Patek Philipe, AP, Vacheron Constantin. We’ve gone through the 1950s and 1960s sports watches of Rolex. We’ve come into the 1970s with integrated cases and bracelets and now we’re moving into the late 1970s, early 1980s, which was an evolution of the mechanical watch industry into digital and quartz, but also the influx of luxury jewellery brands like Cartier and Piaget and Bulgari introducing jewel tones and yellow gold and sculpted watches, too. All of the good Rolexes at auction have been hoovered up, all of the good integrated early 1970s stuff has gone. So what are they getting next? They’re looking to get these kind of things – these blocky, Brutalist, sculpted shapes – so the trends are influenced by that. It’s a 50-year cycle. We’re 50 years on from what was trendy 50 years ago.”
Which sounds like a more sensible answer than anything to do with Kate Bush. |
A new clock from Aesop invites you to smell the time |
The Aromatorium, at this week's 3daysofdesign |
How good are you at smelling the time? It’s a question that has occurred to Aesop, the fancy unguent brand. In response it has built the Aromatorium – an ‘aromatic collaboration’ with 3daysofdesign, the annual Copenhagen design festival that took place last week.
The above machine was created by Aesop's in-house design team. Every hour its suspended jar dispenses a fragrance, drop by drop, onto a ceramic plate. 'Here time is not displayed by hands or cuckoo birds, but the notes of our unconventional Eau de Parfum,' explained the exhibit notes. 'From dawn 'til duck, you are armly invoted to apply an aroma that chimes with the hour of the day'. Aesop suggests fresh aromas – 'from green to marine' perhaps Tacit Eau de Parfum, or Ermia Eau de Parfum for the morning; evocative floras like Gloam Eau de Parfum, or Eidesis Eau de Parfum to enliven the day, and something rich and hypnotic for the evening – Marrakech Intense Eau de Parfum, perhaps. And you thought there were no new ideas left under the sun. |
Noah x Timex Sun and Moon Watch |
This arrived on Wednesday. It wasn't the first time the US 'sustainable streetwear' brand Noah had collaborated with Timex. That would be 2020's Ghost Nets Suck! collab, to raise awareness of wildlife-harming fishing nets, and featuring a dial with a turtle holding a knife, and flipping the bird. Cool. The new joint-venture was a pleasingly retro gold-plated number with a sun and moon dial feature, and a bargain basement price of £210. As per other recent colabs elsewhere, the thing sold out within seconds, creating the usual chain reaction – furious comments about bots under Noah's IG, stupidly inflated resale prices on eBay and a fuming Reddit thread. These collabs aren't going away – 'watches are the new sneakers', as one commentator noted. But surely there needs to be a better delivery system? At the time of writing, Noah's Instagram post for this launch has 573 negative comments, most of which are unprintable in a family newsletter. Perhaps not the kind of hype anyone involved was hoping for. 😔
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