Inside Britain's Best New Watch Shop, Time+Tide
This story is taken from Esquire's About Time newsletter, style director Johnny Davis’s straight-talking take on the wonderful world of watches. Sign up here
A few weeks ago, a tourist arrived at London’s Oxford Circus with the intention of buying her husband a new watch.
Opening up Google Maps, she typed in “watch shop”.
Despite being surrounded by all sorts of luxury Swiss boutiques – Omega, Breitling, Cartier, Tag Heuer, etc. all have shops nearby, as do the multiband retailers Watches of Switzerland and Mappin & Webb – her phone’s first suggestion was somewhere new.
The Time+Tide London Discovery Studio is a flamboyantly named 170 sq metre space on the middle floor of a building just off Oxford Street, behind the Nike flagship.
With its polished wooden floors, white banquettes and recessed video screens, it has something of the take-the-weight-off appeal of a first-class airport lounge, rather than a stand-on-ceremony carpeted luxury watch retailer, with walls typically adorned by watch posters and larger-than-lifesize images of Hollywood brand ambassadors.
But the Time+Tide London Discovery Studio does indeed sell watches.
They include a couple of brands that are well-known and are widely available elsewhere, eg: Hamilton and Zenith.
But mostly its business is in the independent names that typically have no other retail outlet – Studio Underd0g, Furlan Marri and Farer among them.
The tourist in question left with a Nivada Grenchen F77 dress watch.
Apparently, her husband was very happy.
The space is overseen by Time+Tide, the watch media platform which began as a “side hustle” website in Melbourne by the style journalist and entrepreneur Andrew McUtchen just over ten years ago, and has since grown to include offices in New York, London and Amsterdam.
Time+Tide is not alone in the field of watch media, nor is it the biggest player within it.
But it may well be the smartest.
McUtchen has explained that back in 2014 he was no “forum-trawling watch fanatic”– he simply spotted a gap in the market.
“I started Time+Tide as a business because there was an opportunity in Australia to be a preeminent watch website,” he said.
That gap, he reasoned, could just as well have been something else.
“It might have been coffee machines,” he explained – though I suspect not entirely seriously.
In the intervening decade Time+Tide has leaned in hard to the places watch fans like to get their content – its YouTube channel is updated with reviews and opinions multiple times a week, while its Instagram is often the next-best place to hear about new watch launches (after Esquire, naturally).
Time+Tide is, to use a term, digitally literate.
McUtchen is a familiar sight at watch events, where he’s typically found enthusiastically presenting some piece or other to camera.
(The watch-shopping tourist was served up the address of the Discovery Studio above the other watch outlets because Time+Tide’s head of ecommerce knows what they’re doing.)
McUtchen’s Force 10 personality and profile were given a significant boost when he teamed up with friends George Bamford of Bamford Watch Department and Adrian Barker of the watch strap retailer Bark & Jack to launch About Effing Time, the successful podcast/YouTube series that offered an “unfiltered” view of horology, and has been described, not especially accurately, as “Top Gear for watches”, and ran for a year from 2022. (There was a one-off reunion last month.)
When Russell Sheldrake, Time+Tide’s UK managing editor, showed me around the Discovery Studio just before Christmas, he pointed out that these days it would be wrong to consider the company a one-man show, what with all that global expansion.
Should anything unforeseen befall the boss, he noted, the business was built to carry on, full-steam ahead.
It was a point only slightly undermined when he later mentioned a recent internal planning meeting being interrupted by a passing customer – they wanted a selfie with the boss.
Time+Tide had already opened a Discovery Studio in Melbourne in 2022. Among other things, it was notable as the first place you could buy Hamilton watches in the southern hemisphere. (Hamilton has since opened its own shop in Melbourne).
Independent brands have always been part of Time+Tide’s coverage, but the London Studio has doubled-down on the idea – and it is absolutely a case of the right space at the right time.
The recent boom in independent watch companies, sometimes called microbrands, has been well-documented.
As the bigger watch brands hike their prices higher and higher, it’s the nimbler small-time players that have rushed to fill a gap in the market. The amount of people any of us are likely to know who can comfortably drop £9,000 on the newest (very nice!) Omega is small. The number who can justify £500 for a new Baltic, is likely less so. (The number for whom both options are currently off the table is presumably higher still. But we can all enjoy looking at the pictures, eh?)
Of course, it’s not really a fair comparison.
The indies come minus the brand equity of the big boys, or the build quality, or the likelihood whatever you’ve bought is an investment, or the idea you might one day want to hand that watch down to your family. (Will the grandkids of 2045 want a watch with a pizza dial? Maybe they will.)
But it has to be said that the independent “space” is where a lot of the buzz and excitement is in watches just now.
Since we started this newsletter nine months ago, many of the brands we’ve covered – Christopher Ward, Studio Underd0g, Baltic, Bamford Watch Department, Fears, Mr Jones Watches – are the same ones the Time+Tide’s London Discovery Studio is selling.
Many of those brands were built on a direct-to-consumer model. That’s a big part of why they can pass on savings to their customers.
The downside to that set-up is that people are likely to be buying something off a picture on their laptop screen – there’s very few places you can get to see or try on a Christopher Ward or a Fears.
So Time+Tide has gathered a load of them under one roof.
As Sheldrake explained, the brands pay to have their watches on display, some on a largely permanent basis, others sign a three-month contract to have their models shown in cabinets with a rotating inventory. The idea is there’ll be new stuff to “discover” the next time you’re passing the Studio.
To complete the cosy atmosphere, a “London pub” corner with a watch-themed darts board is apparently also in the works.
It’s my ignorance, but I’d never heard of two of the brands on display the other week: Dennison, a Birmingham company who make watches with attractive stone dials in retro, cushion-shaped cases that sell for less than £600, and Serica, from Paris, who make eye-catching chronometers in unusually compact sizes, for less than £1,000. Both of them looked great.
Another revenue strand to the Studio is events.
Since opening its already held an evening with Tag Heuer, as well as hosting the British Watchmakers’ Weekender, a celebration of homegrown horlology and the smaller sibling of British Watchmakers’ Day. (Time+Time has collaborated on watches with Tag Heuer and with Studio Underd0g, whom it stocks.)
Plenty more events are planned for 2025.
As we talked, a steady stream of customers made their way around the Studio, chatting to the young, branded-hoodie wearing staff, and getting watches out of cabinets and trying them on.
Later, I spoke to McUtchen, who was on his Christmas break with his family in Melbourne. It was 9am in Australia. Birds twittered away in the background. It all sounded pretty idyllic.
About Time: What look were you going for with the Studio?
Andrew McUtchen: Well, we were definitely warned against breaking the rules of retail. You know, creating soft furnishings for people to sit on. Having too much [unused] space, where the cost of the space per square inch is so extortionate that the temptation is to fill everywhere with cabinets and displays and visual merchandise. Because it’s hard not to turn a watch environment into a “man cave”. The [watch] brands would send us their visual merchandise to put in the cabinets, and we’d stick it all in a “man cave box” that we kept in the back room. All the things that would fit in a typical male watch lovers’ domain [eg: branded wall clocks, posters, model cars, etc], we didn’t put any of it out. We really stuck to our guns with the idea that there’s a drive to connect in a different way, in the new wave of watch culture. And that’s been reflected in the people we’ve seen coming through the door.
How much did the Melbourne shop act as a template for the London one?
Probably 80 per cent. One of the brands we had in mind was Aesop [the Aussie fragrance and skincare brand]. There’s a consistency to the feel of [their stores] but they’re all uniquely shaped, and sensitive to their environments and cities and contexts. There was a thought early that we’d use some of the codes of Melbourne and adapt it to London. We flew over the same shop fitter. He’s wildly details focused. About the particular shade of the wood panelling. The rose gold in the cabinets.
Time+Tide had a retail space even before the Melbourne Studio though, right?
We did it very badly. We went “peak hipster”. Before we moved to [Melbourne street known for its designer boutiques and heritage buildings] Collins Street. The business had a very different idea about itself. We bunkered into this motorcycle garage in [Melbourne suburb] Cremorne, and decided we’d convert it. We put the picture of Steve McQueen up, the one where he’s drinking a coffee, the mug is covering half his face, and he’s wearing his Submariner – the ref. 5513. He just looks so fucking hungover. We put a huge mural of him on these massive double doors, seven or eight meters high. It became known as “McQueen Street”, cos of this huge grumpy picture. We decided that in addition to doing videos and media [for Time+Tide] in that space, we’d also put in some cabinets and sell some Doxa [watches], and we took a dip on Hamilton. So, we started distributing brands through this motorcycle warehouse. Now it gives me enormous cringe. You can’t knock the hustle. But the execution left a lot to be desired. It was not sustainable for us to be selling Swiss luxury products from a garage.
Retail is expensive. How are the Studios financed?
When we decided that we’d move into Collins Street, we knew we’d need to elevate and professionalise the retail side of the business. In our first year with Hamilton [at the Cremorne location] we’d sold, I think, 850 watches. So, it was starting to move. The scale element was there for us to think, “It’s worth diversifying the [current] media business with a touch of retail, into something that might resemble more of a half-half structure”. We had a general manager of one of the big [watch] brands in Australia visit us and say, “Look, I’m looking for a change. I have a vision for what this could be, but it’s going to cost a ton. We’re going to have to rustle up some money for a fit out”. He pitched us on going bigger and thinking bigger. So, we scratched and saved and pulled money from our own finances, to fund that. We managed to do the first build under our own steam. With the benefit of hindsight, you could say, “Oh, that was our flagship in order to scale into a bigger market”. But at that point, it wasn’t. But that certainly helped us seek an investor for the London expansion. It’s one thing to pitch an idea off renders. It’s another to have an investor walk through a space and just say “This is exactly what London needs”. So that was the pathway from one to the next.
This sort of shop wouldn't have worked five years ago.
I think five years is exactly right. There’s been a perfect storm of elements that have made this more and more viable. The sheer, sometimes outrageous, profitability of the more successful indie brands. The Studio Underd0gs, Christopher Wards and Furlan Marris of this world – they’re doing numbers that are really significant. So, instead of working with a ragtag group of wannabes, what’s emerged in the last five years is people with absolute watch industry blue blood pedigree. [Studio Underd0g founder] Richard Benc was head designer at Braun. [Furlan Marri co-founder] Andrea Furlan has a storied career already in watches [he spent time at Hublot and Chopard and worked for revered watchmaker Dominique Renaud]. [Baltic founder] Etienne Malec – he and his team are absolutely shrewd in their business operations, as well as their design. The microbrand space can attract prospectors and “get rich quick” people – people that don’t have a sustainable long-term plan. Instead, you’ve got elite groups of entrepreneurs coming up that know their minds, know their business plan. Baltic, Furlan, Underd0g – these brands will be here in generations. And in a way I feel that we’ve all hit adolescence together. We’ve gone from a puny idea in the face of “Schwarzenegger Rolex” into something that’s got some physique going on. Apologies for my fitness metaphors.
How do you arrive at the mix of brands? Hamilton is a much bigger name than many of the others, for example.
It’s a real hot button topic at Time+Tide at the moment. Since the awareness of the Studio has been growing –The New York Times featured Time+Tide and the Studio again yesterday [23 December]. I suppose there’s a little bit of carte blanche going on in terms of the brands we could choose from. But as much as we can, I’m going to allow as many brands as possible a chance to duke it out with our buyers. We have the cavities in the space – they’re for the brands that have been around long enough to practically be a household name [for watch fans]. The Farers, the Baltics, the Nivada Grenchens. These brands have earned their right to a permanent spot. But you also have this wave after wave of new brands. So, we have two tiers. One tier is what we’ve calling “hot drops”, which is glass cabinets that will allow brands three months to try their hand. Every brand comes in and says [the same thing]: “You’ll be blown away”; “We’ve got a huge audience”. “We’ve got sales inquiries all the time”. We can give them a try. But then there’s a brand like [Cambridge-based independent] Beaucroft, which hasn’t even reached that level. But they were in the Weekender and they sold, I think, 19 watches over two days. And then we had them in again and they sold another 10 on the first day. So, there’s the proof that they have appeal. Dennison is another brand. They’ve democratised stone dials and worked on creating a really attractive case shape. We put them in on a wing and a prayer. And we cannot keep them in stock.
It's still a business, though. You still need to select brands that will sell.
There’s this reductive binary idea of commercial product and non-commercial product. We just don’t see watches that way at Time+Tide. We see things that will spark people’s imagination and that will hit a certain kind of cultural accord for the moment, and that is a platform that you can build on. If we [just] chose commercial products, it would be the most fucking boring store. And it would do everyone in our store a disservice. And our customers. It would be a dearth of imagination.
Who else has surprised you?
Micromilspec. I would consider them to be a brand that are at the level where they’re throwing everything at [the business] and haven’t quite found their spot. They’ve paved their way to this point through 40mm-plus military-issue commissions. [The Norwegian brand established itself via custom watches for military units and first responders]. They have an interesting story, from an interesting part of the world. But in my view, they only really had one hero model that had any sort of uniqueness – the [rugged chronograph/ GMT watch] Milgraph. But we’ve given them a shot. And I’ve been proved wrong because the watches that sell are generally not the Milgraph.
How many brands approach you?
For every brand that makes it, there’d be 10-plus that simply don’t and the conversation usually goes something like, “Look, you know, try again – come back.” But back to that original comment about the space. We don’t want to jam it full of product and have people sidling past each other in narrow aisles. We want to maintain its atmosphere as a kind of a town square for watch culture, and watch lovers.
What does a brand need to have to get selected, then?
We’ll look at their social media following. We’ll look at their press coverage. But as a journalist I think your instincts are pretty sharp. After 14 or 15 years of looking at watches all day, every day, you develop okay instincts. That’s the main factor. Usually, the instincts you'll have are “this is just derivative”. “This is an idea-free product”. “This watch contains no traces of originality!” But I also really enjoy working with brands, even if it’s not the result they were hoping for [ie: we don’t end up stocking them]. You know Duckworth Prestex?
Yes.
It’s another interesting brand, a bit like Fears, that has some provenance in the UK [its roots can be traced back to Bolton in 1869]. It has fantastic, legitimate vintage pieces and a long history. One of their watches just jumped out to me. This fantastic Tank-shaped model [the Centenary]. It’s quartz, but there’s no second hand which means you're not aware that it’s a quartz, which is good [the telltale “jump” to the second hand on quartz watches, as opposed to the clean sweep typical of mechanical models, is a point of watch snob contention]. And then there’s these wonderful, wacky, Dr Seuss-style numerals. They’re applied [ie: physically attached to the dial, rather than painted on or printed], as well, so they look absolutely brilliant. I said to Neil [Duckworth, founder], “What are these numerals? They’re absolutely wild”. And he said “My grandfather drew those. We found the blueprints so we thought we’d bring them back, because they don't really look like anything else”. And I’m, like, “That is enough for us to build a story around”. They have a unique element. They have nice build quality. They have affordable quartz. In Neil's case, I really hope that we end up with a Duckworth Prestex element to the store.
The staff genuinely seem very “un-selly”. Where do you recruit them from?
We’ve hired someone who had worked at [high-end London vintage shop] Somlo. But we’ve also had a fine arts graduate, James. He openly said in his first interview, “I’m not a watch geek. I’m not going to get the job. I just wanted to try.” He just won us over by saying “I’m really early in my watch journey. I bought a Baltic and now I’m completely hooked. So, I thought I might be able to learn on the job”. Because he communicated so well, and he was really open about it, he made his way through to the final interview. I was, like, “I love this guy. He’s so honest about where he’s at. And he’s so excited to learn”. And it’ll be relatable for people looking at this space through his eyes.
Who are your customers?
Well, you can tell the complete newbies, because they come in and go straight for Studio Underd0g. They've seen the Watermel0n somewhere and they’ve got £500 – and they don’t know much else. And that’s when we send James in. He’s so indicative of the kind of people we have coming in. I mean, were you daunted when you started getting into watch writing?
It never goes away. There’s always someone who knows a ton more.
Always! And they can use it as a weapon. Especially in Australia. We have so many fucking hang-ups. We’re so insecure. We have this tall poppy syndrome. As soon as someone starts succeeding, we cut them down. It’s the same in the UK, to an extent. But Australia is just savage. When I started writing about watches I just had waves and waves of the existing watch community calling out all the mistakes I was making. Or claiming that I shouldn’t be the one to speak on watches. And it just made me feel that the culture of being into watches was so toxic. To this day I keep a little bottle of that particular acidic bile on the shelf – of how it can feel to come into watches without any knowledge. The Studio is so open to anybody. Because that's the other toxic element of walking into a [names a leading luxury watch retailer] – which is, do you look like you’re going to buy something? Are you wearing clothes that reflect some sort of personal wealth? Have you bought from the store before? So, there’s actually a second little vial next to the first one. Which is: all the things that are wrong with retail!
I’ve certainly been to presentations where a PR’s a bit out of her depth, and a journalist – usually old enough to be their grandfather – has delighted in correcting them in front of the room.
Oh, we’ve got one of those in Australia. We have an old chap who will completely disrupt a presentation by focusing on a point that it’s very clear that the PR doesn’t have any more information on.
Like, they’ve got a year a watch came out slightly wrong, or something.
There was one at Ralph Lauren. The presenter didn’t know what kind of ébauche movement was in the watch. And they were just drilling into this poor person. Who fucking cares? Whether it’s [made by movement makers] Sellita or Ronda or ETA or Vaucher, you know? Just pick your moment! I’ve been in that exact scenario many times, and it never leaves me. It can put you off the whole the whole idea of becoming a watch person, because you begin to think “Ok, so that's the profile of a watch person.” I love this word, “persnickety”. That was used in the New York Times [piece about Time+Tide]. The first line says, “Wristwatch enthusiasts can be persnickety”. It’s something that’s so perpetuated in the dialogue around watch lovers. But read our Google reviews [about the London Studio]. The main thing they say is “This was surprisingly welcoming”. [Laughs] “Surprisingly welcoming!” The bar is obviously very low!
When you started the Time+Tide site, the point with the writing was that it wasn’t persnickety.
It was an accidental win for Time+Tide because we needed to speak to Australians about watches. We needed to appeal to a less watch-literate culture, and country. And it turned out that that [tone of voice] became our thing. That was part one. Part two, in spite of that more open and less judgmental tone, is that you still need to have authority and gravitas. And that’s been the harder part of the equation. How does Time+Tide become a world watch authority when, in practically every story we write, you have to assume no knowledge? With the Hodinkees of this world establishing a certain tone that connotes [sometimes fairly elitest] “watch writing”. It’s taken some time to establish legitimacy around a different voice, and different styles.
It's the same with music or film reviews. The best writing is specialist knowledge worn lightly.
I completely agree. I remember that being drilled into me at the [daily tabloid] Herald Sun in Australia. Write for the alien! Assume nothing! You can still write a fantastic piece about mid-Century Patek, or whatever it is. The historical element we tell as watch journalists, is critical. It’s just how you handle it. I maintain that watches are largely emotional. It’s the right [side of the] brain. I’m not an engineering type of person at all,
As we know, more people are into more watches than ever before.
There’s lots of cultural factors for that: the pandemic, the rise in secondary prices, finding a Rolex in your sock drawer and realising you’ve got a small fortune and then entering the game. We had a party [at my house] last night – there were seven people here. [When he realised what I did] this guy started pulling out pictures of his watches. Off we go again! I reckon, on average, every seven-person party I go to, there will be one person that’s deeply into watches. “Oh, my gosh! You’re into watches too?” But I still think there's this silent majority of watch lovers who don’t even know that there’s a cultural web to connect with. To bring it back to the Studio, we’re finding it’s a place of discovery for those kinds of people. “Ah! Here are all the watches that are hard to find in one place!” Or: “Here’s a place where it’s not transactional. Somehow this experience is more community based”. We’re out to connect all that.
There are also the prices. The independents now offer proper value for money compared to some of the megabrands. It’s exciting.
And to be able to access a micro-rotor piece with Baltic [a micro-rotor replaces a traditionally sized rotor in an automatic, or self-winding, watch. They allow for thinner movements, and can have design advantages, with better visibility of the movement through the watch’s case back. Micro-rotors typically up the price, however – examples include the Patek Philippe Calatrava and the Bulgari Octo. Baltic’s MR Classic line of watches use micro-rotors, and cost £450]. Or the Echo/neutra Rivanera, this incredible grade five titanium “Tank” with a mirror-polish bezel that looks amazing, for £1,200. It’s endless. Our goal at the Studio is to offer a microcosm of horology. What would you like to discover more of? Is it about materials? Is it about movements? Is it about complications? And being able to show people things they can access, but at a point that is not as egregious as a new Omega. Which, for the average person, is not going to happen at Christmas! Whereas I could probably cop the Echo/neutra Rivanera as something new and exciting, without it causing spousal discomfort. You’re able to tune into whatever’s turning you on in watches and walk out with something.
Will there be more Discovery Studios?
Look, it’s hard not to cast your eyes to the biggest watch market in the world. The thought of America is ever-present. We’ve looked at a few properties and we’ve started thinking about the details. But London is still early days. And to me there’s enormous pressure to keep delivering excitement. The focus will not shift from delivering a 2025 of extravaganzas in the London Studio. It’s got to be hit after hit. And if we can keep that momentum rolling as it is at the moment – then we’ll look elsewhere.
This story is taken from Esquire's About Time newsletter, style director Johnny Davis’s straight-talking take on the wonderful world of watches. Sign up here
You Might Also Like
