When Andrew Brabyn was at art college, he gained a reputation for being a bit of a disruptor of sorts. “I used to pimp up Swatch watches and sell them to everybody else in the class,” he grins while sitting in Zero West’s HQ – The Boat House – down on the South Coast of England. Brabyn’s signature, he tells me with glee, was to customise the crown and do a “camo thing” on the strap in bright colours because “everything was really bright back then. I was really into spray painting and had all the air canisters.”
Like Brabyn, his fellow Zero West watches co-founder (and long standing friend) Graham Collins has always been into watches too. “When he was a kid, Graham took his dad's Omega apart and then struggled to put it back together,” Brabyn tells me, still grinning – I suspect from regaling his college antics.
Before 2016, neither had ever worked in the watch industry, their backgrounds coming in graphic design and mechanical engineering. Then one Christmas, somewhat out of the blue, Collins sent Brabyn a 3D render of a watch body alongside a simple question: What do you think?
“It was beautiful,” Brabyn recalls. “My wife had gone on a Christmas do so I designed him a dial, a logo, I turned it into an A4 advert with a chrome biplane. It looked really good, like a Breitling. I emailed it back and just said, There you go, with no intention of getting involved.” A few minutes later, Collins replied with one line: Do you want to start a watch brand?
“I called him and he goes, Yeah. No. I'm serious. I can design a watch, you can design a brand," says Brabyn. Within a few months, they had drawn up the semblance of a business plan so decided that the best place to go and do some research was, naturally, a trip to Switzerland.
“We were like a couple of school kids,” jokes Brabyn. “On the plane, there was this really good-looking guy next to us in a suit, the whole lot. He was Swiss. He goes, Where are you going?" And we replied, We're off to Basel. We're setting up a watch brand!" He looked at us like, Oh God, no! You guys have no chance."
Fast forward seven years, and it turns out the good-looking gent on the Swiss Air flight to Zurich that day was wrong. Since launching in 2018, Zero West has quickly grown an impressive reputation for itself as a watchmaker doing things differently.
“The engineering and quality is every bit as good as the big Swiss brands,” says Ivor Findlay, who has eight Zero West watches in his collection, including a DB-1 Lancaster and a custom S1 Spitfire. “But the main thing I love about this brand is the history they put into some of their watches. Owning a pilot watch with a piece of Lancaster metal displayed in the back that flew during WW2 is super cool, especially as they are only making 100 of that model.”
Drawing on their respective expertise, and not being beholden to anyone other than themselves, Brabyn and Collins have been able to create the kind of unique watches that are inspired by iconic moments in British history, and are consequently driving more people towards investing in independent watchmakers – like Zero West.
“They really delved into the depths of what makes people like me tick and have created a timepiece which whole heartedly captures the soul and history of The Flying Scotsman, whilst maintaining the class and wearability people expect from a luxury watch,” says Alex Fletcher, a big name in the steam train world. “Steam enthusiasts are very particular when it comes to detail and when I received my Zero West I honestly felt quite emotional.”
And it’s not just customers who agree. Alistair Audsley, CEO of the Alliance of British Watch and Clock Makers, believes Zero West is a perfect example of the new wave of British brands driving British watchmakers’ resurgence. “They are helping to define our modern design identity, but with a nod to our heritage,” says Audsley. “For Zero West that’s exemplified by their understanding of aerospace design, materials and engineering which they apply to honouring our ‘Finest Hour'. It’s no surprise the brand is gaining international recognition and raising awareness for British watchmaking in general so we’re proud that Zero West was one of the first of the 86 British brands to have joined the Alliance.”
Be it refreshingly-honest advice on how to set up a watch brand, to discussing the state of the industry as a whole, here’s what else Brabyn has to say.
Can we go back to your custom Swatches first?
The first one was really just to a mate but when people were asking me for requests it was really hard because they were giving me their Swatch watches to custom and do art, which was a bit of a responsibility. So I ended up buying them and doing my own thing. I’d do it in the cafeteria and everybody would be round the table so it became like a mini watch club. It was great fun.
OK, Zero West. When setting up a new watch brand, how do you go about choosing a name and logo?
For me, the name is massively important. I know this may sound really trivial to some, but even down to which letters are in it. Graham was really into maps and had spent a fair bit of time at Greenwich so we thrashed out some names and when we were looking at the meridian line, we saw Zero Degrees West. It was one of the names that we put down on the mood board and I specialised in typography at art college so those things were really important. Zero West is made up of two words and each of those letters, from a typographical point of view, fits a nice space.
So the process was smooth? Easy peasy, done.
[laughs] When we were setting up, we submitted the logo to be trademarked and had to wait three months, which felt like an eternity. The very, very last day of the three months the postman turns up, registered delivery and he goes, Can you sign here? We said, Brilliant. Love it. But it was a letter from a Swiss brand objecting to our logo. A major Swiss brand. We thought, Shit! What are we going to do? Graham's going, Don't worry about the logo, forget the wings… As the graphics guy, I was like, "No. That's like saying ‘leave off the wind on a watch’.” So we phoned a couple of trademark lawyers we know who told us how to get around it. I redesigned the logo, we had to wait another three months and got it signed off.
Once you had the name locked in, how did you go about ensuring it linked to the design of your watches?
It was almost like a light bulb moment. I said, "If we're commemorating great moments in history, we can put a latitude and longitude on every dial." It has proper meaning, because our brand name is a coordinate, so it's not just fluff marketing. It literally fell together within a morning. What we'll do is we'll commemorate great moments in history, British engineering achievement, a human element to the story and then an actual event. And, what we'll do is we'll bring the design attributes from that event and mark that moment in history and it all kind of wraps up. Zero West’s meaning runs through the core of everything that we do and why we do it, so we have quite a tight stipulation of what we will actually bring out and the criteria for that.
Is being a British watchmaker a core part of the brand’s DNA?
Definitely, but I wouldn't necessarily say it's just a British thing. With the watch world in general, you have the independents and the micro brands then there’s this void in the middle up to the bigger brands, and it's just to do with marketing budgets. So for small independents like us, the struggle is actually getting anybody to talk to you. What's so disappointing as a British brand is when we look at the quality of the product that we're putting out, we feel it's on par with a lot of the big Swiss brands that are mass market. We're trying to create something that's individual, high quality, low numbers. And that's the trump that we can do against the big Swiss brand who have a massive marketing budget. It's just trying to connect with that audience that are looking for that and the things that we believe in.
You are a part of the British Alliance, which was set up recently to help the British watchmaking industry centralise I guess, and come together in various ways. Is that a fair assessment of it?
What's important is the exposure it gives brands like ourselves. We've definitely been introduced to new people and customers as a result of that, and the British brands have got closer and are talking to each other more. I mean, there's WhatsApp group going on where there's an element of imparting knowledge and experiences. Everybody wants to help each other so it feels like you're not on your own.
Do you find that Zero West fans are watch fans or just fans of what you do?
It’s interesting, our client base is quite diverse. We have people who have five or six of our watches and that's quite common. But a lot of those people would still not consider themselves watch collectors, or even have probably heard of Watches and Wonders. There’s a guy who’s now on his fifth watch but three years ago, had never bought a watch before in his life. He just loved the history and suddenly got addicted to buying watches. We're very story driven and history led. A lot of people buy our watches because we make really small quantities of beautifully engineered watches that many have historical reference. So the Lancaster... We did a Spitfire watch that had bits of Spitfire in. That sold out.
When it comes to the big watchmakers, who stands out for you – in terms of inspiration?
There are a lot of aspects to Panerai that we love. Both myself and Graham are fans of the case design – it’s like a pillow. It's beautifully engineered. We also love the crown guard, that's pretty cool. Then, obviously, it's got the crystal and what they've done with the sandwich style with the dial and the lume is amazing. They have kind of owned that sandwich style, a bit like TAG with the Monaco.
Are you a fan of square-shaped watches?
We've actually designed a square watch. We've got 3D models of it. It is a watch for the future, because we're working on a two-year rolling process. We've done it in a subtle way. It's really clever, really cool, mixed finishes.
Given a lot of your watches are linked to things from the past, does mixing up your designs help you to feel aspirational to more people?
Some of the topics we are looking at aren't as old as previous topics. It's really important for us to remain relevant and contemporary and not only appeal to people over 60. We are aware of that and it's something that we're working on with future models, so it's more relevant. We're trying to be innovative with our design, we really stick with what we believe in. We don't want to sell out as a brand and maybe that's not massively commercial and we could do bigger things, but, that's what we believe in and as a British brand, we stay true to our core beliefs, which don't get watered down as we go on. It's something that both myself and Graham are steadfast on as a brand. It's not about being the next Bremont.
