Bremont's British pilot-style watches take off
Brothers behind Bremont do battle with the giant Swiss companies using traditional designs, 'no diamonds’ and little start-up funding. "You can’t waste money if you haven’t got it," co founder Giles English tells Amy Wilson.
The Daily Telegraph (national edition, London), Monday 3 December 2012
There is certainly something of the boy’s own adventure story about Bremont. Two brothers swap a career in restoring vintage aircraft for watchmaking in the traditional British style, taking on the Swiss giants and their enormous marketing budgets armed with only a love of clocks and an aversion to bling.
But building up a brand from scratch into a business with an expected turnover of £11m next year has been a far more serious, and modern, process than that.
“I had no experience of luxury brands or marketing although I had always been interested,” said Giles English, co-founder.
“Without doubt we’ve made mistakes and been naive along the way, but we’ve managed. Partly because we never had any money, we had to do things differently. You can’t waste money if you haven’t got it.”
Mr English and his brother Nick started the company after the death of their father, a former RAF pilot, in a plane crash. At the time he was flying a Second World War aircraft with Nick, who suffered serious injuries in the accident.
“My father was passionate about everything to do with engineering but one of his main passions was watches and clocks so I had always grown up fascinated by them,” said Mr English. “After his death and my brother surviving, we said, 'let’s do something we love.’”
Bremont designs are based on pilots’ watches, with simple faces and “no diamonds”, said Mr English.
“Arguably the wristwatch was invented for the pilot and the two have always been linked,” he added.
The military were among Bremont’s earliest customers, and the company now makes watches for 50 squadrons around the world including US Navy test pilots.
But it’s not just foreign armed forces that are wearing Bremont watches. Around 75pc of the company’s sales come from exports, mainly to the US and Asia, where they’re sold in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand.
Like many businesses, Bremont is interested in selling to India and China but Mr English is wary of a number of potential difficulties.
“The import duty is very high,” he said. “In India it can be as much as 60 to 70pc.
There are ways of getting around it but we don’t want to go down that route.
“China is also a far more complex market than most. It’s huge, and there are lots of questions around who is the best person to go with to get your brand out there.
“The big guys can afford to try things and make mistakes but, for a growing business, there’s a real dilemma in every [decision] about what’s the best way you could be spending your time and money.”
The market for luxury goods – Bremont watches sell for an average £3,500 but go from £2,500 up to £20,000 – is international, with many customers in Hong Kong coming from mainland China and shoppers from all over the world buying watches in the company’s recently- opened London shop.
Bremont is about to open a new workshop in Henley-on-Thames, which will enable it to increase production and do a greater amount of manufacturing in the UK.
The company’s ultimate goal is to be Britain’s only watch business to make all the watch parts and assemble them in the UK but, because there is no watchmaking of any scale in this country, this is not yet possible. At present, the parts are made in Switzerland, because that is where the expertise is, but assembled in the UK. The design, prototypes and testing all happen here.
“To buy all the machinery and train all the people is a long-term process,” said Mr English.
The Henley site will employ about 35 people when it is complete.
Bremont has taken on people working in repair departments for big watch brands and trained them to build new watches.
“We’ve been able to approach them with an opportunity to actually make watches so we’ve got some very good people,” said Mr English.
The brothers spent five years developing their watches before they started selling them in early 2007. During that time they were practising their marketing and PR skills and managed to generate interest among specialist watch and luxury goods publications by showing them the watches in development and attracting people with the Made in Britain stamp.
They have since kept up interest in the brand with projects such as a watch built using parts from a Spitfire and another with parts from HMS Victory.
“Those kind of projects humanise what we’re doing and interest collectors,” said Mr English.
By the end of the five-year development period, during which they were also running another business, “we were broke,” said Mr English.
The company took on seed investors, some of who had experience of the luxury sector.
However, Bremont has been self-funding since then and Mr English and his brother remain the majority shareholders.
“Watchmaking is very cash-hungry and it’s on a two-year cycle but in any small business it’s a real dilemma,” said Mr English. “You want to have some equity left at the end of the day and not have sold it all.”
“Because it’s a global market we’ve got to think very carefully about where to direct our efforts, because marketing all around the world can be very costly,” said Mr English.
At the moment, the company’s top priority is manufacturing because it takes two years to build a watch and demand is outstripping supply at present.
“We’re being careful not to over-commit ourselves and then not be able to deliver,” said Mr English. “So when we go to a new market we’re going to three retailers not 20.”
Next year, the company will start selling in the Middle East through a distributor and it is also targeting South America.
Wilson, A. (2012) ‘Bremont’s British pilot-style watches take off’, The Daily Telegraph (London), 3 December.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/businessclub/9719656/Bremonts-British-pilot-style-watches-take-off.html
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