With a billionaire financial backer plus the arrival of Davide Cerrato, a highly respected and industry savvy CEO, Bremont is extending its British roots and taking the company global.
With a new tagline, ‘Simplify to Amplify’, Davide Cerrato, appointed CEO of Bremont in June last year, is setting out the future of the British company. “Every brand should have a single story that sums it up,” he says.
“For Bremont, that is a story of adventure and exploration. We launched a new campaign called ‘Take it Further’, which is a call to everyone to fight for their dreams, because you can achieve anything if you have the right mindset, which is never give up, believe in yourself, face your fears and cope with risk.”
The old brand motto of ‘Tested Beyond Endurance’ is something that Cerrato believes is so ingrained that it goes without saying.
“Plus, the testing culture is essential to adventure, and exploration is the perfect synthesis of everything Bremont – it is so associated with Britain that it also allows us to talk about our Britishness in a new way, which I think is more relevant to the rest of the world.”
And as for the brand’s strong ties with the military, Cerrato says that these will continue. But, for him, ‘in the field’ testing needs to run deeper than merely surviving the toughest conditions, which is where ambassadors like environmentalist Ocean Ramsey and surfer Laird Hamilton come in.
As well as freediving with sharks, Ramsey is dedicated to the protection of the seas, while big-wave surfer Hamilton is seriously focused on healthy living.
Both are currently wearing the new execution of the Supermarine – launched in November 2023, giving the world its first hint at the direction Cerrato, with the backing of billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman who took a minority stake in the watch brand last year, hope to take Bremont.
Although, he says, there will be a second wave of Supermarine at the end of February that will show much more of his personality. As for Watches and Wonders, while Supermarine will headline water adventure, a brand-new collection will be at the centre of land adventure.
At the time of our interview, Cerrato had just seen the first prototypes for the under-wraps field watch, which he describes as “mind-blowing”.
The field watch range will introduce a distinct personality and bring some new complications to the brand. Then, for late 2024 and into 2025, the focus will be on aviation with a new collection called Altitude, which will include a refreshed Martin Baker line-up.
According to Cerrato, “We want to define a strong design identity by product family. We are starting with the details, for example the arrow at 12, the shape of the hands, use of colour, the logo and signature… It’s starting to create a family feel for the Supermarine. The same approach will be applied to the new field watch to have a clear transversal line but with a variation of colour, size and function.”
Bremont’s founders Nick and Giles English, Cerrato says that they will always be the originators and, although no longer operational, are key advisors who are 100 per cent on board with all of the changes.
For Cerrato, all of the basics were already there for Bremont but he feels that it needed a sharper language to show that it had mastered watchmaking on a scale to rival the biggest international brands.
“The use of colours on indications sometimes seemed a bit random, the fonts leaned towards vintage and didn’t feel technical enough, the rubber strap was bulky and not tapered, and the London signature didn’t really work.”
With these tiny tweaks, Cerrato and his team have indeed evolved the brand in a way that he compares to a snake shedding its skin. “And at Watches and Wonders,” he says, “the world is going to discover the new Bremont.”
As for Bremont’s founders Nick and Giles English, Cerrato says that they will always be the originators and, although no longer operational, are key advisors who are 100 per cent on board with all of the changes.
And, while the British identity that they established is key to the brand, the story will be told in a different way. “We want to build a brand that is future-proof. So, we will talk about adventure – which still has a very British basis – but we will make it less personal and more universal than the way in which it was told before. We will be looking at our ambassadors and partnerships, too. We are a small brand and we really need to focus if we want to grow.”
So far, 40% of the collection has been cut, with Cerrato insisting that there will be more changes in the coming months.
This means that Bremont’s women’s collections are also set for change, with Cerrato saying: “I think the idea of ‘women’s watches’ is a very obsolete concept. It is a label attached by brands to their products and it means a smaller, gem-set version of a man’s watch in baby blue or pink. I think you can still have cocktail watches but now women are wearing the same sports watches as men – it is no longer gender driven. The thing is size. This is something that Tudor does very well with the Black Bay in 42, 39, 37, 36, 30 – it gives scope and access to everyone. I think that’s the new way of opening up to every gender.”
While the brand is strong in the UK – with 80% of its sales here – the aim is to go big in the US, as well as the Middle East, where it has just launched a new partnership with Ahmed Seddiqi & Sons.
Although this was in discussion before Cerrato’s appointment, his relationship with the Seddiqi family during his days at Tudor, Montblanc and HYT helped solidify the deal.
“I love what they do,” he says. “Just look at Dubai Watch Week – it’s incredible. We are really focusing on a long-term partnership. On my fifth day at Bremont, we had a meeting with the Seddiqi team and they told me, ‘There’s a lot of work to be done’. I said ‘I totally agree. And I’m going to do it’. We need to define the overall models so that we can scale up. The level of complexity was so big that it was impossible before.”
With the US in mind, Laird Hamilton is fronting a new global campaign with billboards and digital billboards taking over advertising hotspots in London and LA. The next step is to work on growing the network of retailers. Eager for multi-brand boutique partners, Cerrato thinks it is too early for any monobrand stores outside of the domestic market, again emphasising that long-term partnerships are the way forward.
Major points of sale in the US are New York, LA, Miami and Dallas and an important element of expansion is, Cerrato believes, pricing. “One of the hurdles for expansion of the company before was pricing,” he says.
“Prices for the Supermarine started at £3,500, so one of the big things I am doing is bring the entry price down. The new pieces start at £3,250. These should be entry level into the serious mechanical watch segment, a sector that is super competitive and has to represent total value for money.
“Everyone is going crazy – it looks like 2010 when everyone followed Rolex and put their prices up. We didn’t do that at Tudor and we hit the market – and that’s what I want to do at Bremont. The big part of the market is between £2,000 and £3,000. Our new GMT, out in February, will start at £2,750 and the new field watch will start at £2,500.”
But Cerrato also recognises that not all prices can be dropped as an average price point has to be maintained. So, by dropping entry prices and, at the same time, introducing new complications at a higher price point, the average is maintained while opening up the segment to newcomers.
“You need to have everything,” he says talking about Bremont’s planned path to success. “The design must be perfect. The quality has to be excellent. These are watches to wear every day not to be kept in a safe for a special occasion.”
