Business News Can Bremont’s Stunning New Manufacture Revive British Watchmaking?

I should explain.

Getting on 15 years ago, I went to the launch of one of Bremont’s first-ever watches at a long-since defunct jewellers in Mayfair. It was a small affair attended by the few UK writers who were covering the watch industry in those days, and no doubt a fair number of the founders’ friends and family. The plucky British brothers behind the brand, Nick and Giles English, have always known how to draw a crowd, most of whom have remained loyal, no matter the hiccups along the way. The bright-eyed agency PR exec working the door that day is now the company’s head of comms.

Even back then, the Englishes were clear in their mission. The former financiers and passionate aviators took five years to mold Bremont from a vague notion into a tangible product, and to do so they’d had to rely on an international network of suppliers – precious few of them British. One day, they said, they wanted to bring watch manufacturing back to Britain and kickstart the revival of a domestic industry that died in the 1970s, and a watchmaking culture that in the 18th century was rival to none, not even that of the Swiss.

It’s a mantra they’ve repeated ever since. Ad nauseam, some might say. If they’d not been the men they are – ambitious, spirited, well-connected – we might have laughed. Who in their right mind would consider attempting to build a Swiss-style precision micro-engineering business in the UK, a country with next to no living experience in the sector, and even less infrastructure?

But with each passing year and as Bremont began racking up military partnerships, endorsements from celebrities whose voices seemed to count, and material associations with sources as unlikely as the owners of The Wright Flyer and the Enigma machine, the vision became less and less implausible.

They opened a facility in Henley where they began assembling, testing, and repairing watches, training up watchmaking apprentices along the way. Almost as soon as they’d got it up and running, they outgrew it. On more than one occasion I visited it to find non-technical departments relegated to temporary on-site cabins. They took a small industrial unit at Silverstone in Formula 1 territory, 50 miles north of Henley, and installed a few CNC milling machines so they could begin manufacturing parts – mainly a small number of cases and baseplates. Later, that facility would move nearer to Henley and to the village of Ruscombe, where it remains. Stopgaps all, and there was little fanfare around them. But they heralded what was to come.

And so came the plot to build a full-scale manufacturing facility, and the plot to build it on. Funds were raised, two years of planning passed, and ground was broken in June 2019. On March 16, 2020, I paid my first visit, a hard-hat tour around the 35,000 square foot shell that at the time was still waiting for half its windows. It would open that summer, said the foreman, as COVID-19 clouds gathered.

It didn’t. With its lockdowns, its delays and its persistent uncertainties, the pandemic took hold. As with a return to the freedoms of the old world, so too the opening date was pushed back more than once. But in March of this year, the Bremont Manufacturing and Technology Centre opened. Nick and Giles stood on the roof waving the Union Jack for the cameras. Mission accomplished?

We’ll come to that.

Back to that driveway. It would be wrong to say I’ve walked that journey with Nick, Giles, and their team. But like many of my British colleagues, I’ve watched on at relatively close quarters as they’ve battled their way to this point, our proximity and shared mother tongue meaning that yes, inevitably, there’s a closer bond between the UK press and Bremont than there might normally be between watch media and watch brand.

Which is why passing through those gates for the first time, windscreen framing the centre’s gently arched silhouette and floor-to-roofline windows, I felt a stirring of the soul that, if I’m honest, fell outside the usual boundaries of professional objectivity. I felt pleased, no, delighted for the human beings inside it. As I asked myself then: What of it?

Inside, it’s spotlessly clean, of course, with acres of glass introduced to allow light to pass freely through the building. Looking out, the views are of fields with low-running hills beyond. I wouldn’t say it’s exactly like being in La Vallée de Joux, because there’s a polo club next door and in my head I know that only a mile away there’s Henley, with its singularly British high street. But if I’d been brought blindfolded, I might have struggled to drop a pin.

Giles English, beaming like the parent of the valedictorian on graduation day, is the first to admit that getting to this point has been a war of attrition. As he showed me around, past the front-of-house boutique with its Williams F1 car (the brand’s latest high-profile partner) and glass windows through to one of the site’s manned assembly lines, then upstairs to a staff canteen and a louche bar for entertaining, and down again to an airy room full of CNC milling machines, I couldn’t help asking how he wasn’t completely exhausted by it all. He is exhausted, he said, still smiling.

He and Nick wouldn’t say exactly how much The Wing cost, but admit that the final bill topped £20m, a huge sum for a company making fewer than 10,000 watches a year and that in its most recent set of accounts reported a pandemic-affected turnover in mid-2020 of £14.3m (25 percent down on 2019). The company says it’s enjoyed the well-documented post-lockdown bounceback but is yet to report figures. Nick, meanwhile, says The Wing’s production capacity is 50,000 watches a year, which would certainly help amortise the investment.

Getting there’s the trick, though. In hope that the worst of the pandemic is over, Bremont is scaling up its activities again. Earlier this month, it announced three new boutiques in the United Kingdom, all joint ventures with the Signet group of retailers. A further boutique is scheduled for the U.K. this year, and then two more internationally – one in Shanghai and another at the new Los Angeles Bike Shed, a U.K. moto-culture retail concept, set to open in September in L.A.’s reborn Arts District.

Bremont is also still talking about a high-end in-house calibre, a project that has been in the works for years without ever having a release date. Giles hints there might yet be news this autumn. Whenever it comes, the brothers know they’ll have a big job on their hands to win the watch community over. In 2014, they were caught claiming total proprietorship over a movement that proved to have been created by La Joux-Perret, igniting the HODINKEE comments section to the point where it had to be closed.

For now, the brothers aren’t saying much about the movement to come, other than that Bremont’s team will have designed it, under the direction of movement designer Stephen McDonnell. Some of the new movement’s components will be produced in-house, in The Wing and at Ruscombe, but which ones are left to my speculation. Plates, bridges, and some wheels? Perhaps. Assortments, screws, jewels? Surely not.

The Wing also marks a significant moment in the history of British watchmaking. Watchmaking craft never died in Britain – George Daniels and Roger Smith are testament to that – but the green shoots of an industrial revival have been a long time coming, even if now they’re only just poking through. The Englishes aren’t suggesting for a minute they can water them alone.

They may not have to. For now, Bremont might be flying solo in pumping investment into watch manufacturing in the UK, but there are others flying the flag for the British watch industry.

This summer, KPMG published a bellwether report on behalf of the newly formed Alliance of British Watch and Clockmakers, a much-needed centralizing organization led by Smith and Christopher Ward co-founder Mike France. It found there were more than 100 watch companies based in the UK, between them turning over more than £100m annually. Small fry yet, but growing.

Many of those companies, said the report, were founded in the last decade. Where Britain’s big two of Bremont and Christopher Ward have led (the latter was founded in 2004, two years after Bremont), others are following.

It’s not all rosy, though. The brothers struggle to deny they’re irritated by the reluctance of their fellow Brits to support a return to industrialized watchmaking in the U.K. with manufacturing investment of their own, and are a glaring absentee from the alliance’s membership base.

Those British companies creating watches in any volume remain heavily reliant on Switzerland, Germany, and, more than anywhere else, China – by production volume, 98 percent of all components and packaging in British watches are sourced from China, found the report. Still, high-street brands such as Sekonda and Accurist skew the numbers.

For now, “mission accomplished” would be too strong. The Wing is no one-hit solution to the shortcomings in the U.K.’s watch manufacturing infrastructure, and the brothers are making no claims of domestic exclusivity in their watches, nor verticalization as we might understand it. This is a step, and a big one, towards a long-term goal that remains hugely ambitious.

Further down the line, if The Wing proves a sound investment, Britain’s reliance on others might diminish. Someone, some brave someone, had to be first. If The Wing becomes the catalyst, British watchmaking may forever be in its debt. How great the wonder would be then.

Robin Swithinbank is an independent journalist, who has written for HODINKEE about his life in Swatches, among other things. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times International, Financial Times, GQ, and Robb Report. He is also Harrods' Contributing Watch Editor.