When people think about starting a watch brand, they usually imagine designing dials, choosing colours or deciding on a logo. A lot of that does happen, and for those who throw enough money in, watches can be produced to a high standard in large quantities pretty quickly. That comes with drawbacks and colossal financial risks.
The reality is that a lot of your time is spent thinking about something far less glamorous: the supply chain.
Every watch is made up of dozens of individual components. Cases, crystals, dials, hands, movements, gaskets, crowns, straps and packaging can all come from different manufacturers. Getting those parts to arrive on time, to the right specification and at the quality you expect is often the biggest challenge of all.
As a young microbrand looking to bootstrap in our infancy, we’re learning that every decision has consequences.
Choosing an off-the-shelf component might get a watch to market more quickly, but it can also limit what makes your watch unique. Investing in custom parts gives you more control over the final product, but it also increases cost, lead times and, in many cases, minimum order quantities that can be difficult for a small independent brand to justify.
There’s also the question of control.
The more you rely on an OEM supplier to make decisions for you, the more your watch risks becoming just another catalogue model with a different logo on the dial. That’s not the direction we want to take.
Our aim is to make more decisions ourselves with every generation of watches. That doesn’t happen overnight, and it certainly doesn’t happen without investment, but it’s a journey we’re committed to.
Building a resilient supply chain isn’t just about finding good suppliers. It’s about finding partners who understand your standards, communicate well and consistently deliver quality. That takes time, and like everything else in this business, trust has to be earned.
We’ve already learned that the cheapest option is rarely the best option. Saving a little money on a component isn’t much of a saving if it compromises the finished watch or your confidence in selling it.
Every sale we make goes back into improving what we do. Sometimes that means better finishing, sometimes it means custom tooling, and sometimes it simply means working with suppliers who can consistently produce the quality we expect.
Most customers will never think about the supply chain behind the watch on their wrist—and that’s exactly how it should be. If we’ve done our job properly, all they’ll notice is a watch that feels well made, looks great and does exactly what it’s supposed to do.
Behind the scenes, though, there’s a huge amount of work that goes into making that happen.
We’re still at the beginning of our journey, but one thing is already clear: building a watch is only half the challenge. Building the right supply chain to support it is every bit as important.
As mentioned in my first blog post, I’m a civil engineer. I do have a decent understanding of how things are put together and how they fall to bits, but no prior experience in this industry whatsoever aside from being a consumer.
Adam