Founded in 1869 by Thomas Weir, Weir & Sons has witnessed the history of Dublin unfolding over 150 years. It remains in the hands of Mr Weir’s direct descendants.
David Andrews, great grandson to Thomas Weir, is still working as patriarch of the business with his children Chris, Lucinda and Natasha in day-to-day charge.
At the age of 76, David has been honoured with WatchPro’s Lifetime Achievement Award, an accolade presented only twice before: first to the late Mark Hearn, who transformed Patek Philippe UK into the force it is today, the second was to Jean-Claude Biver in the year he announced his retirement from running LVMH Watches & Jewellery.
David Andrews was born in 1947 to Arthur and Maiegread Andrews — Maiegread being the granddaughter of Thomas Weir — and joined the family firm in 1967. That may sound like a seamless transition from one generation of a hugely successful business to the next, but it was anything but.
“The founder died in 1901, and his sons, Jack, James, Willie and George, ran different parts of the business all over the British Isles. By the 1930s, they added up to the biggest jewellery group in the country with shops under different trading names in Belfast, London, Manchester, Swansea, Cardiff, Tynemouth; all over the place. Weir & Sons was registered in Ireland in 1927,” David describes.
“As the Second World War approached, they sold all the stores on the mainland and retrenched to just the store in Dublin. But they were given shares in the mainland business, which performed brilliantly and were divided up into trusts owned by the siblings. I joined the business in 1967 and the Weirs store on Grafton Street was being run more like a hobby than a business because they were more interested in their bank balances than going into the family firm, which had no brands,” he continues.
There was no automatic expectation that David would join the business. His mother, Maiegread Andrews (born Maiegread Weir), was not working for the firm. His father, Arthur was head of the Royal Bank of Ireland.
A career in the financial industry looked more likely, and David worked at Price Waterhouse for two years instead of going to university, and he was then expected to take a role with the civil service in Northern Ireland.
But Weirs was calling more loudly to him, and he joined the company at the age of 20. “When I joined it was because I wanted to buy and sell goods. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was a retailer,” he laughs.
Weirs was already in the jewellery, watches and gifts business, but was hardly the dominant force in Dublin it has become.
“The year I joined we sold 200 Omega watches and 30 Rolexes. Prices for Rolexes started at £40. Omegas started at £21 for steel. We were also working with Patek Philippe, Cartier, Tudor and Tissot; so we had a few good brands, but watches were not that big a part of the business in those days. The whole place was full of Waterford glass. That was the biggest department because we could sell it 60% cheaper than in America, and they would come here to buy it,” David explains.
That over-reliance on American tourists was exposed in the few years after David joined Weirs as sectarian violence flared across the island of Ireland and news of Bloody Sunday in 1972 broke across the world. “When the troubles blew up in 1969 ahead of Bloody Sunday, it stopped the Americans coming to Ireland for years. They saw it as too risky,” he remembers.
Politics intervened again in 1973 when the Republic of Ireland joined the European Union and increased its sales tax from 2.5% — far lower than the 20% VAT being charged in mainland Britain — to 35%. “That was bloody hard to take; those were really tough years,” David reflects.
He was taking greater and greater control through the 1970s and recognised the rising power of brands, particularly Swiss watchmakers.
His first trip to Basel was in 1976, where he acted as a one-man ambassador for Ireland as a way of persuading brands to work with Weirs. “I started taking on brands. Boy did I take on brands,” he smiles. “My overdraft was bigger than by turnover because I was taking on so much stock from so many brands. I am not sure I could have managed that if it were not for my father’s history running the Bank of Ireland, which meant I had very good relations with my bank manager.”
Still in his twenties, David was a hustler at a time when Swiss watchmaking maisons cared little for sophisticated channel management. They had much bigger battles on the home front with the quartz crisis raging. “I also used to go and buy directly from factories in Switzerland, which gave me the opportunity to get much better prices. A Tissot Seastar was selling at the time in Ireland for £89. I could buy discontinued stock for £10 and would sell them for £29.95,” he reveals.
David’s father and mother died within two years of each other in 1978 and 1980, and he used the ensuing decade to put Weirs on a firmer footing. By the 1990s the company had paid off its overdraft and when, in 1993, the freehold to its Grafton Street building became available, he snapped it up.
It was a transformational moment that gave David the control he craved. “Weirs had an agreement to pay a fixed rent of £956 per year from 1956 for one hundred years. We bought the freehold for £33,000 and it is a 33,000 square foot building. If you don’t pay rent, and you keep your staff costs under control, you can’t go too wrong,” he says.
The Irish government was not so prudent. The country was using the collective bargaining power that membership of the European Union brought its banks and other businesses to borrow and invest in super-charging the economy. For a time it was working, with thousands of paper millionaires being minted on the back of a real estate boom.
It didn’t last.
The global financial crisis hit the country harder than its larger European partners, leading it to being banded together with the PIGS — Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain — as nations struggling to service their debts and balance their books.
2007 was the toughest. “Turnover dropped by 52% and it would have been worse were it not for us having Patek and Rolex. We didn’t make any redundancies at the time, but a lot of the team were emigrating to places like Australia,” David remembers.
Salvation came from an unexpected direction. “The Chinese started arriving here in 2010,” he says. “There were direct flights to Dublin from China and we signed up with tour guides who helped to bring customers to us again. They were big spenders.”
Business boomed for a decade with Weirs remaining the go-to emporium for everything from souvenirs and silverware to bridal jewellery and watches for every budget.
WatchPro had previously travelled to visit David, Chris and Lucinda in March 2020. It was just weeks before the world went into lock down to tackle the spread of covid, but we all thought at the time it would soon blow over.
So oblivious were we that the conversation then was more about how Weir & Sons still managed to stock scores of brands from every price point under one roof. “It certainly is different, and a lot of the higher end watch companies do not understand it. They cannot wrap their heads around us selling Tommy Hilfiger and Daniel Wellington from the same premises as Rolex and Patek Philippe,” David said at the time.
His philosophy was simple: do not let anybody walk out of the store because they could not find something they wanted and could afford.
Lower priced watches were sold from a basement floor. The main showroom stocked the more prestigious watch brands from largely unbranded Victorian-era oak and glass cabinets and the first floor was a maze of partitions to create spaces for private meetings and staff.
Post-covid and Weir & Sons has been evolving again. The company’s administrative offices have moved out of the Grafton Street building. Rolex, which has been supplying Weirs for over 100 years, and its other long-standing partner Patek Philippe, have finally been given large suites on the first floor with hospitality, private meeting spaces and displays telling the stories of the watchmakers.
This is creating more space for brands on the ground floor, which is also being completely refurbished, but will still have areas for Rolex, Cartier and Patek Philippe.
The entire property is expanding into a previously unused neighbouring space, an elevator is being installed and there will be a dramatic staircase connecting the floors.
There will be fewer brands when the work is finished and, while there is still strong resistance to installing rows of corporate cabinets and furniture for watchmakers, the entire property is working towards a balance that takes advantage of its architecture and history while modernising for customers that want a more immersive experience with brands.
David still walks the floor and studies the books for the business, “like the King receiving his Red Boxes,” he jokes. Chris and Lucinda are in charge day-to-day.
“Chris is the managing director, Lucinda is marketing director and I am the chairman. They are overseeing this huge refit, which means managing the relationships with our key brands and giving them a fair allocation of real estate in our store,” David explains.
The lower ground floor will still stock more affordable watch brands, which the business sees as a gateway for younger customers to a lifelong love of watches. “We want people to wear watches, and start when they are young so that they keep the habit for life. That is why we keep selling watches from the likes of Citizen,” David says.
Now approaching his 60th year in the business, David has seen Weir & Sons transformed from a disorganised shop selling silverware and crystal (with a sideline in jewellery and watches) to the temple of luxury brands it is today. Over that time, watches have rocketed in importance, from around 20% of turnover when he joined the firm to around two-thirds of sales today.
David still has his hand on the tiller, to use an analogy from his favourite pastime, sailing, but is proud to see Chris and Lucinda making the decisions. “I am very lucky to have another generation in the business. It is important in our business to have a family succession plan, and I am fortunate to be handing over to the best,” he says.
The 2024 WatchPro Awards take place on October 31 at Raffles Hotel in the Old War Offices. Tickets and tables can be bought online here.
