British watchmaking has been firmly on the rise over the last two decades – after a long period of decline – as emphatically displayed at the 2024 British Watch Fair earlier this year, which saw some 80 brands on show. And the industry is metamorphosising yet again as brands and makers look to balance a surplus of design and heritage strengths with the need to rely on manufacturing capabilities from abroad. Counter-intuitively perhaps, but the more globalised the watch market becomes, the harder it is to manufacture away from the established centres in Switzerland, Germany, Japan and China.
Among British watch brands to know, Bremont and Roger Smith already have a global profile (and we recently covered Schofield), so who’s next to match their profile?
