Issue 151: Christopher Ward's C12 Loco Could Change The Entire Brand
Whether it will or not is another question. An essay on brand value, credibility and design
Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that aims to deliver an unbiased take on all things horological. I still have so much to unpack, metaphorically and literally (anyone for a branded tote bag?) from Watches & Wonders, but the focus this week is closer to home. Long-term readers will know I haven’t always been kind to Christopher Ward but there is a first time for everything, and I am cautiously optimistic about the arrival of the C12. I also have a C60 Lumiere on loan that has been keeping more prestigious watches in their boxes. What’s happening to me? Please, don’t answer that.
I’m noticing a few people dropping likes on older issues, which I love to see, and it reminds me that I don’t always do the best job of advertising the TFW back catalogue. You can read the entire archive here, with my list of hands-on reviews here, and AMA sessions here.
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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:
Going Loco Down In Berkshire
I write quite a lot about watch design as it relates to brand strategy. Recently I took Bremont to task for its Terra Nova jump-hour, and in issues gone by I’ve focussed on the same notion at Patek Philippe and others. The importance of ‘brand’ is sometimes overlooked in watch media in favour of assessing whichever watch happens to be in your hands at the moment, but I think it’s an essential aspect of understanding whether a watch ‘works’ - not on a mechanical level, but on a conceptual one.
Brand is the cumulative public perception arrived at by combining your product design, your marketing narratives and your other visible behaviours - advertising campaigns, retail placements, charitable initiatives, ambassadors and so on. It’s a nebulous concept that customers understand on a subliminal level rather than devoting much conscious time to examining, but it informs our innate sense of whether a new release (or other activity) feels ‘right’ or not.
Today I want to talk about what happens when brands change. When, through gradual evolution or more accelerated switching of tracks, our perception of what works for a watch brand can change. The brand that’s front of mind as I write this is - unsurprisingly - Christopher Ward, which has just unveiled the C12 Loco to great fanfare. The question it makes me ask is: 20 years after it sold its first watches, has Christopher Ward found its true brand identity? Or is there another reason that the C12 is being so well received?
First I want to revisit my theory of Christopher Ward’s brand identity thus far. I won’t dwell too long, because I’ve covered this ground before, but in a nutshell you could sum up CW’s founding philosophy as “We’re like those Swiss brands you know and love, but cheaper.” There is nothing wrong with offering great value, but the problem with building your entire brand identity around it is that it’s fundamentally comparative; you define yourselves in relation to others, and not in terms of the intrinsic desirability of your own products. Couple this with the frequent, and I think justified, complaint that CW’s designs were often far too similar to established models from the brands they were looking to undercut, and you see why I’ve historically thought that the brand’s identity, whatever the merits of individual watches, prevents it from being considered a true equal among mainstream luxury watchmakers1.
So the cynical response to the C12 - and indeed the C1 Bel Canto, the watch that proved transformative for the brand and gave it the confidence and financial freedom to evolve in this way - is to say that Christopher Ward has simply gone from imitating mainstream tool watch brands to imitating high-end independent brands instead. I don’t think this is entirely fair and I’ll explain why, but the brand has made a rod for its own back by being so eager to homage others in its earlier years, because now the knee-jerk reaction from a lot of commenters is “looks like X/Y/Z”2. I’ll get into what X, Y, and Z might be and whether the criticism is justified this time, in a minute.
One of the consequences of CW’s comparison-based, value-led identity is that it has proven much more flexible than a brand identity rooted in genre watchmaking. Sure, the brand became best-known for dive watches and field watches but that’s because that’s what sells best; it has made dressy watches, moonphase watches, skeletonised watches and more recently, integrated bracelet watches and avant-garde-ish chiming watches3. Compare and contrast the reaction - including my own - to Bremont’s attempts to move beyond its aviation heartland; you can argue quite validly that Bremont’s two decades of built-up brand identity was more credible and its deeper, narrower investment in product design had resulted in a stronger brand, but I think it’s also unavoidably true that it has been restrictive. One of the most impressive things to collectors has been how nimbly Christopher Ward has been able to pivot into an entirely new style of watch and present it as a perfectly natural evolution of what it has always done (namely: make watches that look a bit like X, but cheaper)4.
There is one thing you need if you are to be anything other than a less expensive version of other things, and that’s a coherent design language of your own. Which brings us back to my original point that design and strategy are inherently interwoven. Let’s talk about whether recent Christopher Ward watches have made strides in that direction, and the other industry-wide shifts that I think might make the C12 a qualitatively different proposition from what CW has done before.
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