I am occassionally asked by budding entrepreneurs how to launch a watch brand.
That’s actually the wrong question.
Launching a watch brand is easy. It is building a watch brand that’s hard.
Two articles I’ve written in recent days about Grand Seiko and William Wood show that it is not impossible to build successful businesses in the extremely competitive watch industry that is crowded in every category from smart watches to grand complications and from Sekonda to Richard Mille.
There are no gaps in the market, and wristwatches are entirely unnecessary in an era of mobile phones.
And there is nothing left to invent, just variations on a theme, all in products measuring about one inch across that have to tell the time.
Grand Seiko and William Wood, beyond both making products one inch across that tell the time, appear to have little in common.
One has the backing of billionaire Seiko Watch Corporation, which started making luxury versions of its watches in 1960 for the Japanese market before deciding to break out into the West in around 2010.
Grand Seiko started outside Japan with America under the leadership of Aiko Naito.
He was so successful (a top 5 watch brand in the $5-10,000 price sector) he was promoted to the global president for the entirity of Seiko Watch Corporation.
William Wood was founded in 2017 by Johnny Garrett, a former finance executive with a watch habit.
Six years later, the micro brand is now stocked in the UK and USA by Watches of Switzerland.
This is how they did it.
First, they focused on building relationships with influential people. Grand Seiko already had a small following of watch geeks in America so Mr Naito went to the apex geek, Ben Clymer at Hodinkee and his acolytes.
They hit it off and other collectors were soon reading stories about the engineering, heritage and artistry of the Japanese watchmaker.
Collectors with common interests tend to find each other, in this case they formed a club named GS9, which Mr Naito cultivated.
Retailers, at this point, were unwilling to take a punt on a brand that was not only not Swiss, it was associated with mass market Seiko watches.
So Mr Naito started encouraging collectors” meetings within retail stores, with Hodinkee and other media spreading the word.
Once retailers saw how buzzy these gatherings were, and how comparatively young the Grand Seiko crowd was, they wanted more of the action and distribution for the brand took off.
William Wood’s strategy was similar.
Mr Garrett engaged with titles like WatchPro, Oracle Time and Worn & Wound, as well as getting in front of as many YouTubers and podcasters as he could.
He had a story with cut through to tell about his firefighting grandfather whose profession feeds into William Wood’s watch designs.
Sheer persistence helped word to spread, and appearances at shows like Wind-Up Watch Fair in America and WatchPro Salon in the UK paid for themselves through direct sales.
Watches of Switzerland’s buying team saw William Wood at WatchPro Salon and must have liked what they saw and conversations developed into the agreement announced this week.
Success is a journey not a destination, and neither Grand Seiko nor William Wood will be settling for what they have achieved so far.
There stories and journies are far from identical, but their similarities might be an inspiration to others.
