Poole-based British watch brand, Elliot Brown, has been making a name for itself since exploding on the scene almost a decade ago. With the launch of its patented Beachmaster at the 2022 WatchPro Salon, the brand has taken the step up to a price level where the competition is fierce.
Elliot Brown’s co-founder, Ian Elliot, spent some time with Daniel Malins to discuss the ongoing success story.
WATCHPRO: How have things been since we last spoke?
IAN ELLIOT: Business-wise, it’s been amazing. We are doubling our online sales target currently, month on month. I think retail will hit target, which is great. Projects are always buoyant for us. We’re probably into 200-250 projects now.
The time we had off in lock down was great because it gave us the headspace to think about who we are and what we do. We were just talking about charity t-shirts and the British Legion; we love doing not-for-profit projects like that because it’s just life affirming. And of course we always keep coming up with new ideas for watches. Here at WatchPro Salon, we’ve got our patented mission timing watch called Beachmaster. This came about after a conversation at a Royal Marines event where they were embarking on an entire circumnavigation of the Norwegian coastline by canoe and bike. And a guy came up to us and said “Have you ever thought about doing a mission time watch?” I said “No, but I’m sure we could.” I came home, Alex (Brown, co-founder) and I chatted about it, and in about half an hour we’d essentially designed it.
In the last couple of years, we started developing it further, and we couldn’t be happier with the finished product. We started thinking there must be other people in the market that have made a mission timer with a split in the inner bezel or outer bezel.. And we couldn’t find one. So we phoned our patent attorney and, although the process seemed to take forever, eventually we were granted the patent. So now we’ve got this invention that’s ours. It can’t be copied and no-one’s ever done it before. We think the last time a British watch designer was granted a patent on a watch, rather than a component within a watch, was many years ago.
WP: How long does your patent last for?
IE: I think it’s 10 years.
WP: When you design something unique like the Beachmaster, are you thinking it will make you good money in year one, or is it mainly a statement piece just to say, “Look what we can do!”?
IE: For us, it’s an expensive timepiece. When we design a watch, we think about how it’s going to be used. Is it practical? So, first and foremost, we’ve spoken with many people that have seen the samples in the office and gone “That’s a brilliant idea.” You countdown to mission start and then you can meet someone at an agreed point later, because that’s generally what happens on a mission.
We’re a very small, quite niche brand, so we have to make sure that we’re offering good value. It definitely ticks that box. And then can it spurn a range or a collection? It’s a bit like creating Holton as a military issue watch and then that can develop into a range of very cohesive Holton models that all fit within that genre. We can do exactly the same with Beachmaster. We’re launching two here (at WatchPro Salon), there’ll be a third founders edition that will come, and then we’ve got some plans for some other models but I can’t talk about them right now.
WP: You said to me earlier that in the world of watches the Beachmaster is not very expensive. Have you ever felt the pressure to increase your prices across the board?
IE: It feels very much like that’s happening. We’ve had so many people come up to us and say “It’s about time guys!” The price element isn’t a barrier to entry at all. Something with that story, with that level of engineering, it’s not going to be an issue, we’re very confident about that.
We’re up against businesses that can create an in-house movement, drop it into many, many collections within their portfolio and really compete aggressively in the marketplace. And we’re always conscious of that and always want to represent good value, as well as being good quality and having lots of lovely stories and ethos attached. I would say we’ve always been in a very competitive and quite awkward price range. And the Beachmaster definitely isn’t awkward middle ground, is it? It’s commanding the right price for the right story and quality of watch. And I also think it’s us kind of flexing our muscles a little bit. We’ve always had this in us to do this kind of thing, we’ve just never felt the time was right, or the idea was right, or the story was right. And now it is.
WP: I just wonder whether this is a one-off project and then you’ll go back to business as usual, or is this a blueprint for a new direction of travel?
IE: We are very pleased to announce we’re going back in with Goldsmiths, in their virtual store online. And if you think about the sort of metrics of a range they’re looking for, they want a good spread and they want good variety. What creating Beachmaster does is it gives us space to operate. We’ve now got a product range from over £2,500 down to £400, so we’ve got a lot of gaps in the middle that we can start to drop things into if we choose to. And, if the Beachmaster price level is easily acceptable, then who’s to say what we can do? We’ve got the engineering prowess to make anything. We’ve always said our watches are too good for what they are at their price point, in terms of the actual level of detailed engineering. And now it’s just us flexing our muscles and maybe getting out of that awkward pricing area. We feel like we are starting again.
WP: When you said you’re constantly wanting to create new watches, can this be a curse as well as a blessing? On paper it seems like a great thing to constantly create new and better products but is there something to be said for just having two or three core products that everyone knows you for?
IE: If you look at how our collections have grown in the last three or four years, you’ll find that the number of individual models we hold hasn’t increased very much And we’re focusing on pillars within our existing collection. So we’ve got Canford, for example, we’ve got Bloxworth, we’ve got Beachmaster. And those pillars are very much their own kind of story. They’ve all got the same USPs, they’re all as tough as any watch in existence. So although we keep coming up with new ideas, they’ve all got to justify their place within those pillars, and give us room to grow in terms of the different pricing areas that we can look at.
WP: You often speak as an engineer and a designer, but do you ever find there’s an internal conflict in your mind between the innovation side of your business versus the boring stuff, like heating the office, paying the staff, etc?
IE: That’s a business, isn’t it? You’ve got to have a solid business model sitting behind all those ideas. Because Alex and I are both engineers at heart, I think by the time an idea comes into our head, it’s already viable for the business. Because we’re problem solvers, when we come up with new ideas, they’re all based on something that’s needed and practical. We’ve had ideas that are bonkers but those ideas live very short lives!
WP: You say you and Alex are problem solvers, which is how the Beachmaster came about. Is that normally how it works? Or do you sometimes set a business target, for example a certain percentage growth in sales or profit, and then work out backwards how to get there?
IE: It’s always one way. If we’re producing desirable timepieces that fit within our brand genre, then by their very nature they appeal to our existing retailer network, they appeal to our special project audiences and they appeal to our direct to consumer audience. So there’s not really much risk there. You know, Holton didn’t exist before we had a conversation with the military about what they needed. It was a blank sheet of paper, a brand new watch, which did everything they needed and absolutely nothing they didn’t. And its purity of design is what’s carried it because it’s so simple. We very much hope Beachmaster’s the same. You couldn’t get a more simple mission timer. It’s elegant, it’s simple.
WP: To focus for a minute on your partnerships and charity relationships, are they just a nice thing to do or do you see them as being beneficial to your business too?
IE: Every single corporate or charitable body that we associate the brand with has to fit. So when we picked up the phone to Land Rover and said, “Hey, we make ‘go anywhere, do anything’ watches, you make ‘do anything’ vehicles, it was a serious conversation. Because they were selling ‘merchandise’ watches and that is very different to what we do.
When we first set the business up, we said we wanted to work with the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution). They rely on the absolute best equipment and it was a charity close to my heart. I was rescued once when I was at university and I’ve always wanted to repay that debt. It was a very proud moment creating the RNLI relationship. And you’re working with people that demand the best, so if your product is associated with those people there’s an assumption that you must be pretty good as well. So there’s definitely an eye towards its commercial opinion, if you like, and the association. If you’re putting someone else’s brand on your product, it has to fit, it has to be authentic. There’s lots of inauthentic stuff in the world. So we’re very conscious and careful with our collaborations. When we’re making a project watch, for example, the first thing people want is to see their logo on a dial. And I always start the conversation by saying, “Okay, we’re going to work with you if the last thing we consider is your logo on the dial of our watch.” Because, first and foremost, the watch has to be authentic and you don’t make an authentic watch by sticking a logo on it. You make an authentic watch by telling a story. We’re very keen to make products that have their own story rather than always jumping onto someone else’s brand story and collaborating.
WP: Just focusing on the charitable element, does it frustrate you or please you to see how inauthentic some of those other brands’ partnerships are? It could please you in the sense that you feel elevated above those companies, but it could frustrate you because you’ve gone to a lot of effort to be authentic, while there are other companies just hoping to gain some commercial value by latching onto a movement or charity.
IE: I think it’s how much of your heart’s in it. If you’re distributing something that someone else has created, it’s very rare to have as much heart in the business as it is in the headquarters where all the creation and invention is going on. And I think a lot of the watch industry people who you speak to aren’t creators, they’re distributors. So it is more about the business of sales and marketing. And if you have a significant target to achieve and you have a bonus, then you can become very blinkered on achieving that and not having a wider view of the environment and the people, and the charity elements, and those sort of things.
We’re lucky that we are the creators and we can choose how we do things and that ethos can disseminate through everybody in the business. Is making watches environmentally friendly? No, inherently not. We’re using raw earth materials, effectively, and refining them. Can we be conscious about how they’re made, vetting the environments that they’re made in, vetting the waste, vetting the energy, using recycled materials and packaging, making stuff that lasts a long time and can be serviced forever? Yeah, absolutely. We’re very, very conscious. We don’t think of it as being any more than responsible and we don’t make any claims about what we do.
WP: This sounds like actions, not words, which I would argue is the opposite of some companies.
IE: Maybe some feel the need to create a story that is an environmental one. I think the majority of people can see when it’s greenwashing. You just need to look at the fashion area of our industry, which has been guilty of putting things into the market that are shiny and branded but that’s as far as the story goes, there’s not much behind it. It’s a lot of money for something that’s not of the highest quality or integrity and the consumer sees through it. We just feel we’ve always been really honest about what we do, how we test stuff and how we build stuff.
WP: We met in 2013 and discussed your vision for Elliot Brown. Where are you at as a business now, compared to where you thought you’d be back then?
IE: It has been different. I think our launch products were very niche and we had expectations that they would be accepted into the retail landscape much faster than they have been. Because they haven’t, and also because of things that have happened naturally, like our proximity to a military base and charities that we’ve got involved with, we’ve gone in all sorts of different directions. And we’ve ended up with multiple income streams, which have turned out to be the absolute best thing for us. So it’s very different from what we expected. We expected a primarily trade business selling to retailers, and what we’ve got is a very diverse landscape of projects – direct to consumer, trade, and collaborations. And that I think is stronger than anything we could have imagined. I remember coming out of a meeting with Land Rover, calling Alex on the way down the motorway, and I had tears. Because it was like, “I just had a meeting with Land Rover and they absolutely loved our story and they want to be part of it!” And you have those proud moments and you can’t swap that for anything.
I think we thought we might be a little bit bigger than we are, turnover-wise. But then the conditions have changed dramatically. And it’s really energising to know that a business like Goldsmiths is now keen on Elliot Brown. We had that trial back in 2015 with them in a few stores and we got on famously but our collection wasn’t big or broad enough. But now, It feels like we’re going again. And that’s really exciting because we’ve got this fantastic bedrock under us now and all that experience and knowledge and credibility that we didn’t have the first time around. Everything feels like we’ve been leading up to this point.
WP: And finally, what is the best and worst thing about working with Alex?
IE: The best thing is that we share a desire to create beautifully thoughtful products. What’s the worst thing about Alex? Genuinely I don’t have one. I love the guy.
