Issue 145: Should Bremont Sue Nico? Plus My Verdict On British Watchmakers' Day
From possibly-defamatory insults to the reversible bucket hat, plus Rolex's new store, AI-worthy copywriting and a new British watch you didn't see at BWD
Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that’s unashamedly focussed on all things British this week. We’ve got Rolex’s new Bond St store, the latest from Frodsham, and (extending that remit to the whole United Kingdom) all the way from Northern Ireland we have some distasteful YouTubing that I believe should not be allowed to pass without comment (at least). And of course the main event: my thoughts on British Watchmakers’ Day, or as I found myself thinking of it, Comic-Con for watch geeks. The full version is behind the paywall but in a nutshell: great success, room for improvement, and everyone has gone absolutely bananas for piss-takes and pop-tastic merch. Enjoy!
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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:
In Brief
Phwoar! A Four-Floor Rolex Store!
Rolex and Watches of Switzerland open new Bond St flagship
Yesterday Rolex CEO Jean-Frederic Dufour flew into London to personally cut the ribbon1 on the brand’s largest UK boutique, which opens to the public today after 15 months of redevelopment. Situated at 34 Old Bond St, it is a green, gold and sandstone temple to The Crown. Journalists were given a tour, and I have to say it is the truest manifestation of Rolex in architectural form that I have seen. It’s bigger than you’d think a single brand watch shop would ever need to be, but space is the ultimate luxury - especially on Bond Street. There’s a service centre on the top floor, CPO below ground and hard-to-find, out-of-catalogue gem-set pieces on the first floor (where you’ll also find a bar serving a bespoke cocktail, the Old Bond St 1905. It’s green and has gin in it; the recipe will no doubt remain a closely-guarded secret).
It’s very polished, in every sense. It wows with great slabs of green marble, there isn’t a hair out of place and everything is fluted or otherwise decorated to remind you of Rolex watches (best detail has to be the second-floor chandelier light fittings shaped like Cyclops lenses). Truly a metaphor for the brand: it’s very well put together, equal parts practical and opulent, and some bits are more ostentatious (and more hand-crafted) than you were probably expecting.
As a statement it’s unignorable; although obviously not the intention, in the current climate it’s a powerful reminder that Rolex is unharmed by downturns, and asserts its dominance over London’s most prestigious strip of horological real estate. The question many were asking was whether it would have any greater stock on hand than any other Rolex retail spot; it’s all very well having a magnificent location but not being able to buy a Rolex there will be a very similar experience to not being able to buy a Rolex everywhere else. I would imagine - as hinted at by the presence of stone-dial and gem-set pieces - that it will provide better access for UK customers to the very rarest of Rolexes. But in the immediate future, I should think the wait for a GMT-Master or Daytona will be unchanged. Rolex plays the long game, though, and if the forthcoming manufacturing expansion does lead to a slightly freer flow of steel sports watches, this will be where you’ll find them first.
Frodsham Loses Seconds
Not, thankfully, in a chronometric sense
Charles Frodsham & Co. Ltd, usually known as Frodsham, didn’t participate in British Watchmakers’ Day. But if they had, attendees would have been able to see a long-awaited update to its Double Impulse Chronometer Wristwatch. I caught it at Phillips London’s mini-showcase of independent watchmaking - a celebration of five ‘next generation’ talents currently on display in Berkeley Square.
The watch, as you can see, is a simplified version of the DICW, as no-one calls it, which does away with the seconds subdial and instead displays the running seconds via a tiny - really, really quite small - window cut into one of the bridges and sited directly over the gear train on the back of the watch. It’s a nod to an old carriage clock design, apparently, wherein the only person who needed to see the seconds advancing was the person winding the clock.
It reduces an already sparse dial - I’m told future versions won’t have the two crests, or ‘ciphers’, either. As reward for a seven-year wait for the next development from Frodsham, it’s restrained in the extreme, but given they only make 10 watches a year and have a huge backlog to satisfy, I can let them off. Plus, they did say that a few more obviously different projects are bubbling away - but no confirmation on exactly when we might see them.
Is Swatch Group Using ChatGPT Already?
A proud, visionary tribute to the most elevated and refined copywriting
A reader sent this screengrab of a press release sent out by Mido (the brand doesn’t operate in the UK, so it’s one I had not received). It is without doubt some of the most overwrought and incomprehensible gobbledegook ever summoned to promote a watch, and it raises two equally terrifying possibilities.
One is that Swatch Group - or at least, one of its brands - has caved in and just asked ChatGPT to write its PR and marketing materials. This is a sad prospect not just for those of us who get paid by the word, but for anyone who would hope that a watch company would care enough about its watches to have a human explain why they’re good.
The second, perhaps even worse possibility is that this was written by a human and all involved thought it sounded just fine. There are plenty of writers out there - cough, cough - who would happily transform this into something that someone might actually say in the real world.
p.s. the watch itself is actually not at all bad looking. It doesn’t push anyone or anything in to a new era of watchmaking excellence, but very few things do. Check it out.
Should Bremont Sue Nico Leonard For Defamation?
When outspoken content goes too far, it can’t just be ignored
There’s a fine line between provocateur and troll and the more boisterous you are, the more easily the line is crossed. Perhaps without you even realising it. The full-volume Nico Leonard van der Horst posted a video recently titled ‘Ten Watch Brands You NEED to AVOID at All Costs’ [his emphasis]. One was Bremont.
Most of what Nico has to say about Bremont concerns the re-brand which, a year down the line, we have all had our say on. His views on this aren’t particularly outlandish and nor are they anything new - even for Nico; this is all content he’s already monetised at least once. Apparently, following jokes he made about Bremont’s re-brand, Davide Cerrato blocked Nico on social media and ignored him. Boo hoo. That doesn’t justify what comes next. Nico says:
“I have nothing against Davide, by the way; I’ve never met the guy. He looks like a high school professor you need to watch out for with your kids.”
Saying “I’ve nothing against him” might not be the watertight legal caveat Nico perhaps hopes it is. The above would be bad enough in isolation, but to ram the point home Nico also flashed up a photoshopped image of Jimmy Savile with Davide’s face.
I’m aware that in writing about this I’m drawing attention to it. But the video at the time of writing has 406,000 views and 1,199 comments, so the horse has somewhat bolted on that one.
If you compare a watch brand CEO to one of the UK’s most notorious and prolific sex offenders and imply he’s a paedophile, you have crossed a line. If you ask me it’s a clearly defamatory statement; whether or not that would actually hold up in court is debatable, because despite Nico’s substantial reach, he would probably argue that Davide’s reputation is largely unharmed by the statement (the irony that someone who plies a living by claiming to have great reach and influence would defend a libel charge by minimising the extent of their reach and influence is not to be overlooked). But as a statement in its own right, it’s certainly grounds for Bremont to pursue him2.
I can’t really believe any of this needs to be said; I’m sure we all innately understand it, but the fact that Nico made the video, and the fact that of his 1,199 comments none of them seem to be remotely bothered by it (this being the internet, I suppose it’s a mercy that none of them appear to be actively agreeing with it either) maybe it does need to be said after all.
Don’t call me humourless. Don’t pass it off as ‘a bit of fun’. I know fun when I see it. Imagine this was said about you, and tell me it’s fun. We’re all adults, and this is ostensibly professional discourse, one ‘professional’ criticising the work of another. So by all means, tear chunks out of his decision-making. Say the watches are horrible, if you believe them to be. Tell your audience not to buy a Bremont, if you think that’s genuine consumer advice and not - perish the thought - easy clickbait. But try and remember that we’re all human beings; we finish work and go home to our partners and families, take the dog for a walk or whatever we choose. We all have the right to do our jobs well, or badly, and be left alone in our personal lives either way. If Davide Cerrato messes up at Bremont, the consequences will be obvious; he will lose his job. He does not deserve to be insulted, abused and defamed in a smug, smirking, ‘look at me, I’m so proud of how edgy I am’ video that you’ve cranked out to feed the algorithm in between having anything better to say.
One brand founder at British Watchmaker’s Day summed it up with more pith: “If he’d said that about the CEO of Omega, he’d already be dead.” I have no idea what Bremont, or Davide personally, does or doesn’t intend to do about it, but if it were my decision the lawyers would already be billing their hours.
That probably won’t happen. Every public relations expert’s default response to this is to do nothing. Don’t react. Move on. I totally understand why; for one thing, the Streisand Effect is a very real thing, and you don’t want to drag something out for months that might otherwise be forgotten in days. (Again, sorry - but in my defence, people keep mentioning this to me, so clearly it isn’t going away that quickly). You don’t want to elevate your opponent to your level and dignify the provocation with a reaction - it was done to bait you and you shouldn’t take the bait.
But I also hate that this is the reality. You should not have total impunity to be as offensive as you like, safe in the knowledge that the person you’re defaming has nothing to gain from getting down in the mud and fighting it out. The size of your megaphone should not be a deterrent from being held responsible for your remarks. Anyone thinking I’m pro-censorship: not at all. But freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.
Aside from moral outrage, I also feel professionally indignant. In the loosest possible sense, Nico exists in the same broad space as journalists like myself - creating content on media platforms that looks and sounds like consumer advice and expert opinion. Yet if a traditional media title, or individual, published a comment like that, the brand in question would come down on them very hard. No doubt about that whatsoever. Of course, no media outlet would ever publish that, but I resent the double standard. If influencer-creator types are going to compete for the same audience, they should be held to account in the same way.
And another thing. How can anyone say something like that about a CEO in one moment, and reach out to other brands for paid partnership work the next? If you’re a brand, you’re aligning yourself with that kind of comment. Would you endorse someone who actively insults your competitors?
I accept that it’s one comment in one YouTube video and a thousand worse things will have happened on this planet before breakfast this morning. But moral equivalency only gets us so far. The rest of us have to live in a world with consequences, so Nico should too. That’s my bottom line. This pollutes our discourse and legitimises the idea that ad hom attacks on businesspeople we disagree with are an acceptable part of being a watch fan. Nico if this reaches you, do the right thing: take it down and apologise.
Thoughts On British Watchmaker’s Day 2025
It’s for the fans
This is Comic-Con for watch geeks. There is a queue around the hall and out of the main doors to buy a watch from a brand no-one had heard of three years ago, and Studio Underd0g founder Richard Benc, miraculously clear-headed after a boozy launch party the night before, was in his element working the line with aplomb. I saw people getting autographed pizza boxes from Time+Tide founder (and Studio Underd0g collab partner from 2024) Andrew McUtchen: if the idea of a media business founder signing a mini takeaway pizza box with a sharpie for an admiring fan makes no sense to you, you are not watch geeking on the required level). YouTuber Andrew Morgan was thronged by young fans. One person even recognised yours truly, which is quite something…
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