Life's little luxuries

Back in the days of decent expenses, I did a Business Post business lunch with Steve Kent, then recently installed as chief exec of what was still ClinPhone.

This was the drug trials services business brought to life by Neil Rotherham and Jonathan Engler (the only entrepreneurs I knew who still acted like a pair of giggling junior doctors).

Kent had come in to prepare the growing ClinPhone for its next step – possible flotation or a merger with something bigger (it turned out to be the latter through the warm embrace of Parexel).
His CV included a stint with the luxury goods firm Alfred Dunhill, and he was the bloke who opened my eyes to the almost gruesome reality of both luxury goods profit margins and the rarefied atmosphere which the market inhabits.
He told me without batting an eyelid about the days when the Sultan of Brunei would visit its West End shop. The routine was that the shop closed, the Sultan came in, walked out with a load of silk ties and the till would ring to the tune of £40,000 or so…
The closest I’ve ever come to this market (besides an agreeable lunch with a high-flyer like Kent) is rubbing my nose against the windows at Berrys or Copes and drooling over the serried ranks of Jaeger le Coultre, Panerai and IWC.
They are, if you don’t know, Swiss watchmakers. Now, if this conjures up images of white-haired craftsmen using generations-old tools to lovingly assemble intricate movements, forget it. All are owned by luxury goods conglomerates (like Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy or Swatch Group) and the only thing slowing down production at their factories is the need to limit supply so prices stay high.
As my wife knows, I am entirely comfortable with the concept of blowing £10k on an IWC Portugese chronograph in rose gold. She’s comfortable with it too, because this fantastical notion remains unsupported by my bank account.
But I love Swiss mechanical watches, so what do I do? Enter Christopher Ward, a Liverpudlian ex-retail executive who, having made his money, decided to indulge his own passion for timepieces by launching an English watch company.
Ward is a savvy individual, and he spotted a gap in the market for people like me – those who like male ‘jewellery’, have admired classy watches from afar but would probably struggle to shell out for a major brand without giving the plastic an almighty caning.
He decided he was going to make watches which had Swiss movements, luxury design cues and a certain cache. And that he was going to do it for a fraction of the spondoolicks you would normally have to hand over.
How? Well, the £3-4k you usually cough for the likes of a Rolex GMT clearly doesn’t bear any relation to the cost of the metal mickey whirring away inside its 42mm-wide case. No, you are, of course, making your own personal contribution to multi-million Rolex sports marketing budget (check out some of the Golf majors), the velvety environment of the jeweller who sold it and, last but definitely not least, Rolex’s handsome luxury goods profit margins.
Ward decided to ditch all those things which added nothing to the fundamental qualities of the watch. So out went the retail middleman, out went the marketing budget, out went European manufacturing.
He designed the watches himself, secured a supply of Swiss movements, found a manufacturer in the Far East, and set up a website.
Result? A beautifully-designed watch with a Swiss movement was yours by Special Delivery for a couple of hundred quid.
Sorted? Well, not quite. The Swiss watch industry has a well-deserved reputation for protecting its collective interest, and didn’t entirely approve of some English upstart buying its movements and apparently selling Swiss on the cheap.
So after a few years Ward had to transfer manufacture to Switzerland to ensure a continued supply of movements. It meant a small tick up on the prices, but the payback for Ward was that instead of putting Swiss Movt on his watch faces he could now put Swiss Made – an altogether higher level of cache among horological afficionados.
These afficionados will also point out that the Eta 2824 and Valjoux 7750 movements found inside some of Ward’s watches are largely identical to those ticking away inside an Omega or a Breitling.
He shifts thousands of them a year to buyers at home and abroad and to this day his main marketing tool is the website. Cleverly, it gives open access to an entirely independent enthusiast forum, where whinges about delivery problems and the occasional technical hitch have simply added to the brand’s trusted appeal.
So what can we learn from an operation like Ward’s? What you notice on that forum is the surprisingly large number of people who have gone on to buy several of his models –the classic Malvern chronograph, the beautiful C5 Aviator with its glass back, the bruising C40 Speedhawk or his own GMT homage, the C6 Trident (which is in the picture).
And here’s the punchline: in the process, they’ll have spent around the same it would have taken to buy your average Omega.
That’s the line I’m taking at home, anyway...