A matter of time

When two brothers decided to go into manufacturing, putting British watchmaking back on the map was a happy consequence.

Bremont Supermarine diving watches.

Bremont co-founder Nick English has a relatively modest aspiration for the measure of the long-term success of his British watch brand. He’d like a street sign. Or more specifically, a street sign pointing to the company’s new purpose-built headquarters currently under construction at Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire.

“We’re really proud of our new facility [due to open in about 18 months’ time], which will bring everyone together under one roof. I would love that to be a proper destination one day for anyone coming to the UK – that if you’re into watches you must go and see Bremont. You know those brown signs that if you’re big enough the authorities will let you put up? That would be great if we could have one of those that said “Bremont Watch Factory”.

Nick English.

Bremont was founded by English and his brother Giles in 2002. The two brothers were both working in corporate finance in London and decided to quit their jobs and start their own manufacturing business – the fact that it would be in watchmaking was almost incidental.

The Bremont brothers’ father, Euan, was an engineer by trade and spent much of his spare time restoring old planes, cars, boats and clocks, and even making musical instruments. He was killed in a plane accident in 1995, at the age of 49, while flying a 1942 World War II Harvard aircraft. Nick, who was on board, was badly injured, breaking more than 30 bones.

“We grew up loving machines, and we felt we knew about the history of British watchmaking because our dad talked about it all the time,” Nick says. “And with those other things, like cars and planes, there’s a huge barrier to entry. We just thought we should give it a go, and we wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t for losing our father. There just had to be a catalyst for making us lose all sense of reality and our fear [of establishing our own business] just disappeared.”

Bremont’s showroom.

One of the biggest challenges the pair faced was that the British watchmaking industry – which in the 19th century was a world leader – had become all but non-existent. But, says Nick, it would have been just as difficult to start a new watch brand if they decided to do it in Switzerland.

“The difficulty lies in setting up any brand in a congested market,” he says. “It’s literally passion, grit and determination that allows you to succeed – and hopefully a chunk of authenticity, so that people can see that what we say we are doing we are actually doing.”

Today, Bremont designs and assembles all of its watches in Britain and many of the components are also manufactured locally. Movements are made in Switzerland, but the company is working on developing its own movement to be made in Britain. Nick says they hope to have a working prototype of it in about a year’s time and that it would go into production about a year after that.

Last year Bremont produced 10,000 timepieces. When the in-house movement is ready the number of units that will carry it will be in the hundreds, according to Nick, given the cost of development and production.

And the origin of the brand’s name? In the late 1990s Nick and Giles English were flying their 1930s biplane across France when they were suddenly forced to make an emergency landing and came down on a farm owned by one Antoine Bremont. It turned out that the French farmer was, like their father, a gifted engineer and was also a restorer of clocks. “We told him his kind hospitality would never be forgotten,” says Nick.