Outside Context

Watches. Why do some people take them far too ser­i­ously, spend­ing unknown amounts of cash on seem­ingly over priced kit that doesn’t offer much more than telling the time?

For example, James Bond wears a £1200 Omega watch and has always per­son­i­fied the lux­ury watch life­style, but in the latest Bond film he has his pur­chase mocked by the love interest as an unfash­ion­able macho atti­tude (of course he even­tu­ally sleeps with her as after all this is Bond we are talk­ing about.)

So, if these “big man”, “look at me”, “I have a big… watch” type watches are out of fash­ion, what is there left for the mod­ern manly man?

Why does this mat­ter? Beef­cake dies a death and good rid­dance yes? Well, I for one think that it is more import­ant than that. Simply because, for the vast major­ity of men, their watch is the only jew­elry that they wear. It is their only chance to express some­thing about them­selves. Hence the watch cul­ture of Rolex and Omega. Much like buy­ing a lux­ury car such as a Porsche, Omega sells an expres­sion.

Buy­ing into “cool” is every­where now. I thnk that It has unfor­tu­nately become cheapened by this. Remem­ber that FCUK and Bur­berry star­ted life as high end brands full of expense and lux­ury. Now they are bog trot­ting, FHM garbage worn only by Chavs; a social group­ing almost uni­ver­sally reviled.

The “Omega-style” watch is going that way. By being able to simply buy class, class loses all mean­ing as an iden­ti­fier. David Beck­ham, X-Factor, Coleen, Paris Hilton, etc have all cheapened the exper­i­ence of pur­chas­ing things as a route to class.

So where now? I found myself step­ping into the very deep end of a very large pool that threatened at every turn to leave me with some­thing I would not like.

Every­one takes a stance with their watch, what would mine be?

Con­sider that even wear­ing a cheap watch is a stance. I know a man who has a lav­ish life­style of wealth and hard won priv­ilege and his watch is a 99p Casio. Why? Because he is mak­ing a statement?

What will be my statement?

If I wasn’t going to buy into the Bond, fast cars, super high end bull­shit where could I go?

/Start Digres­sion

When dis­cuss­ing this art­icle, someone com­men­ted to me, “What about your wed­ding ring?” Firstly, the ring was jointly chosen by my wife and I and matches hers so it is not unique, it is part of a matched pair. Secondly, the ring is not jew­elry at all. It is actu­ally a ward; for warn­ing off single women, remind­ing them that I am taken. Thus, my watch is the only truly indi­vidual thing I wear.

/End Digres­sion

For the last few years I have been wear­ing my beloved Cit­izen Pro Diver. Beloved for two reas­ons. Firstly, it was pur­chased for my by my wife as my wed­ding engage­ment present and secondly it is a bril­liant watch for diving.

Not that I dive often, but I have qual­i­fied for diving and liked wear­ing it.

How­ever, it was start­ing to wear heavy on my arm and over the last year or so, I have been work­ing up the impetus to only semi-retire it and only use it for diving. I am much more a Lon­don city-man these days and I need a watch that reflects me in 2007.

With the “big man” watches out of the run­ning, I came to con­sider the other major type of men’s watch; the mil­it­ary models.

I am an avid Air­softer, Fen­cer and Mar­tial Artist. I am typ­ic­ally con­sidered to be a man’s man and thus I wondered if the mil­it­ary world would offer me what I was look­ing for.

Mil­it­ary mod­els tend to be low in spe­cific­a­tion but high in build qual­ity. They have a large prac­tical aspect that cor­res­ponds to the mil­it­ary need for ease and speed of use. They also gen­er­ally have rugged features.

My search imme­di­ately hot upon a likely can­did­ate, the Jack Bauer watch called the MTM Black­hawk. This £350 hard­core watch is time pared down to the most basic fea­ture set; the time and the abil­ity to see it. It lacks even a date fea­ture, which is apt when you think about it as why does Jack Bauer need a date marker? Everything always hap­pens in 24 hours!

Jack is a fant­astic role model for a real man, as he cares about people and yet is a con­sum­mate pro­fes­sional who has amaz­ing courage.

I was very excited about this watch for about a month, and then I took a closer look. It is actu­ally ugly and hard to read. Sure it has a gim­mick in that it lights up, but this was not enough for me.

So, dis­traught, I went search­ing into the city and even­tu­ally into a watch shop near Liv­er­pool St, resigned to drop­ping over £1k to come out with some­thing I would not be that happy with and my wife would kill me over.

Of course, the man in the shop saw me com­ing from a mile away. At this time of year the whole city is wal­let bul­ging, spend-crazy and shop-me-happy due to the bonus cheques hav­ing come in. The man in the shop tried to sell me an Omega for half a hour, but he did not know my feel­ings I out­lined above and so he failed.

I went back to my office, lost, and star­ted to take a final look around the web…

Then I found it.

Chris­topher Ward is a watch maker of the old school. He doesn’t believe in high mar­gins, or films stars wear­ing his watches. He only cares about two things qual­ity and mak­ing an hon­est living,

We are a new watch­maker with a simple aim.

We want to put high qual­ity lux­ury watches within the reach of everyone.

To achieve this we have inver­ted the usual busi­ness model used by brands such as Rolex, Cartier and Omega. Instead of their extremely high mar­gin require­ments and the myriad of middle­men and retail­ers in the equa­tion, we take a small but fair mar­gin and have the ulti­mate dir­ect busi­ness with not a single middle­man and no retailer other than ourselves.

We can’t begin to match the hun­dreds of mil­lions spent on advert­ising cam­paigns, spon­sor­ships and “A” list celebrit­ies of our bet­ter known com­pet­it­ors. Instead, we con­cen­trate our efforts on design­ing beau­ti­ful timepieces and rely­ing on delighted cus­tom­ers to recom­mend the brand to fam­ily, friends and col­leagues on our behalf.

This was like music to my ears. A watch maker that sells qual­ity, but is still exclus­ive. That’s how I (like to) see myself. I care about refined qual­ity sure, but I like to be savvy on price and not to buy my way into “cool.” Rather I try to let my own sense of style reflect itself through the watch. They say that the clothes make the man, but I would like to think dif­fer­ent. A true man is prac­tical, strong and eleg­ant. Not a Metro-Sexual clothes horse. Like Tyler Dur­den com­men­ted to the nar­rator in the film fightclub,

The bus is crowded. As Tyler and Jack walk toward the back, the nar­rator stud­ies the faces of OTHER PASSENGERS.

They hold hand grips. the nar­rator looks up an ADVERTISEMENT; a CALVIN KLEIN ad fea­tur­ing a tan, bare-chested MUSCLE STUD.

The Nar­rator (V.O.)
I felt sorry for the guys pack­ing into gyms, try­ing to look like Calvin Klein and Tommy Hil­fi­ger said they should.

The Nar­rator
(indic­at­ing the ad)
Is that how a man looks like?

Tyler looks at the C.K. advert­ise­ment and laughs.

Will CW have some­thing that speaks in this voice?

Well, his cur­rent line up includes many types and it was this model that caught my eye,

The raven black fin­ish that dis­tin­guishes the watches in our Corax col­lec­tion is cour­tesy of our state of the art IPK ionic plat­ing pro­cess that deliv­ers superb looks and a dia­mond hard finish.

Fea­ture List:

* Mus­cu­lar 42mm IPK case and brace­let
* Advanced, Swiss ISA 8154–220 move­ment
* Uni-directional 60 ratchet bezel
* Engraved, unique serial num­ber
* Risk free 60 day trial

* Ionic plated 316L stain­less steel case & brace­let
* 9 Jewel Swiss quartz move­ment
* 12hr alarm
* Split-seconds / stop watch / tachy­meter
* 5 year move­ment guar­an­tee
* Screw-down case & engraved, unique serial num­ber
* Screw-locked crown
* Cambered sap­phire crys­tal glass
* Water res­ist­ant to 50 metres
* Uni-directional 60 ratchet bezel
* Super-Luminova indexes and hands

A fant­astic fea­ture set and then I saw the price: £175. That’s right, 1750 pence.

Amaz­ing!

At this price, I can take the plunge and testdrive the watch with no fin­an­cial wor­ries. Truly CW has broken the mould that says, “you must PAY for entry.”

Check­ing around the web pro­duced some very good reviews of CW watches, as well as a ded­ic­ated fan forum that was full of happy users and some pre­view con­tent. This star­ted to feel less like a watch pur­chase and more like a rela­tion­ship between designer and wearer. Some­thing that a cor­por­a­tion could never offer.

Sat­is­fied and full of eager­ness I ordered and two days later the pack­age arrived, here are some mobile phone shots,

The pack­aging.

The watch clasp.

The watch face.

First impres­sions,

Wow, what a lovely watch. Smooth, sub­lime and very clean. Not super heavy, but hav­ing a def­in­ite weight. The face is very easy to read and well laid out with the small faces not block­ing any­thing else. It is open, wide and the black and sil­ver digit mark­ers con­trast fantastically.

The really great thing, at this point, was the strap. My pre­vi­ous strap on the Cit­izen was very chunky, which made it very hard to wear while typ­ing, some­thing that I do all day. In con­trast the Corax sits very neatly against the wrist and is far more com­fort­able than the Citizen.

Another fea­ture, and one that I was not expect­ing, was an alarm. The but­ton on the bot­tom left con­trols the alarm on/off con­trols with a small beep/double beep and this was a very wel­come addi­tion. The alarm chime is gen­tile, not enough to wake me, but per­fect as a reminder for things.

With a happy feel­ing I went to wear the watch for a week before writ­ing this article.

Imme­di­ately I hit a prob­lem. I wear watches quite low on the arm; right next to the wrist. The basic issue was that the pin that unclips the metal strap was too close to my hand and whenever I moved my hand down past 45 degrees the pin would get tapped and the strap would flick open. This happened every time I put my hands in my pock­ets, which as you can ima­gine, is not the time to have a watch muck you around. I am pretty sure that this is a prob­lem per­sonal to me. Many people will wear this watch in a dif­fer­ent loc­a­tion, such as higher up the arm, and they will not encounter this issue. Fur­ther I am a very large guy, with big hands and thick wrists and I per­haps fall out­side the design specifications.

Any­way, it was highly annoy­ing and for me almost a deal breaker. Frus­trated, I was about to take advant­age of the 60 day, no quibble guar­an­tee, when I spot­ted and decided to try out a leather strap.

CW sells a leather strap for the gen­er­a­tion that the Corax falls into, but it is not designed for this spe­cial ver­sion. I ordered it won­der­ing if it would do the job at all or even look cor­rect. My fears were put to rest when it arrived. The leather strap is everything that metal ones were not. It hugs the wrist, is much more com­fort­able and will not come off. I love it, and think that the watch looks very eleg­ant in this configuration.

Real­isa­tion struck me that I had been wear­ing my Cit­izen as part watch, part brace­let. This per­haps harks back to the jew­elry aspect of male watch design, or per­haps to just my chav­ish upbring­ing. Nev­er­the­less, The CW watch is all watch and all the bet­ter for it.

I have grown even fonder of this timepiece. The fea­tures are all easy to use and actu­ally use­ful to my life. The watch goes with any­thing that I wear, which the Cit­izen cer­tainly did not, and the leather strap has an under­stated eleg­ance and softens the chunk of steel on my wrist.

It speaks the lan­guage of real men in the year 2007. We are not quite the aggress­ive miso­gam­ist mon­sters of the past, but sim­il­arly we are not the Metro-Sexual girly­ness of David Beck­ham. We are a new breed. Sim­ilar to the ancient Samurai, war­ri­ors; yes, but also gen­tle­men. Poets and artists in everything that we do, our actions must speak for them­selves and we would never sell ourselves short by spend­ing obscene amounts to buy our way into a fic­tional group that exists only in the minds of mar­ket­ing people.

This is the sort of watch my Grand­dad would have bought. WWII Air­force pilot and war hero, he would have liked the ease of use, the firm grip of the strap and the lack of pre­ten­sion and that is more than good enough for me.

Over the Xmas break I have had a lot of com­ments on the watch and every­one is very impressed with the CW busi­ness model.

I am sure that when the future watches come out I will be buy­ing more, as the price level lends itself to col­lec­tion. There is a diver model in the pipeline that I espe­cially like the look of.

Over­all def­in­itely a fine timepiece, one that grows on you and one that you can proud to wear.

Regards, Basho

If you too want a Chris­topher Ward watch then please click this link: Chris­topher Ward Lon­don Limited

The lay­out of the face,

Image taken from the manual and owned by CW.

The move­ment, ISA based:

Images owned as marked