When the Orient watch brand recently started referring to two of its more popular watches – the Bambino and Mako – by name, it wasn’t because of some decision within the company. ‘It was consumers who had named watches which until that point had just had reference numbers,’ says the brand’s senior business manager for Europe, Wiebke Bird. ‘And the names given work because they refer to what people like about the watches – that the Bambino, for example, perhaps speaks to that mid-1950s Italian lifestyle.’
This isn’t the first time the consumer has taken over, of course: fans have given Seiko watches, for instance, nicknames such as the Monster, the Samurai and the Tuna Can; Zenith watches, the Cover Girl and the Superman Blue. It’s a testament maybe to just how unwieldy watch reference names are from the consumer perspective.
