Story: The lightbulb moment - It all began on a gentle boat trip down the Thames in May 2004. Peter and I had recently sold Early Learning Centre – an ethical toy company – while Chris was bored with importing T-shirts. I suggested we start a business together. It needed to be something we were all interested in. As football and music seemed beyond us, and because we were all fascinated by horology, we settled on watches. And through a friend who was well connected in the luxury watch industry, we learned some surprising information. Most of the Swiss brands were using the same or similar components, from the same manufacturers, to make their timepieces. The markups from manufacturing costs to RRP (Recommended Retail Price) were staggering: one famous Swiss brand was marking up by 34 times! Once our indignation at these high mark-ups subsided, we saw the opportunity to create a different type of premium watch business. A company that would avoid the huge marketing overheads and third-party retailer margins of the Swiss brands. A company that would provide “the cheapest most expensive watches in the world”. We called it Christopher Ward. It seemed the most quintessentially English name of the three of us. We had a simple three-part plan:
– Sell directly to customers only through our own website
– Apply a maximum three times mark-up on the manufacturing price
– Avoid the costly celebrity endorsements to which the Swiss brands seem addicted
And so, on June 2nd 2005 – from a converted chicken shed on a farm in Berkshire – we launched the world’s first online-only watch brand. We started with two models, the C5 Malvern Automatic and the C3 Malvern Chronograph. Now we had to let people know what we were doing.
