Bill Ackman is known among investors for making bold calls that nobody believes in. But the billionaire activist investor and founder of Pershing Square Holdings, which had $16.1 billion of assets under management through March, said his decision to invest in the British watch company Bremont was not one of them.
“I was at a conference where Jeff Bezos spoke, and he said that in life it’s really important you have some whimsy,” Mr. Ackman said in a call last month.
He found that whimsy in the summer of 2022 when he was in Britain to attend his daughter’s graduation from Cambridge and visited a Bremont boutique in the upscale London district of Mayfair, where he bought eight watches. Shortly after, he got in touch with the company’s founders, the brothers Nick and Giles English, and by that October had taken a small stake in the business. “I started out as a very passive investor in the company,” he said.
His passivity didn’t last. In January 2023, it was announced that Mr. Ackman and a longtime Bremont investor, the New York-based Hellcat Acquisitions, had taken a substantial minority stake in the company in a funding round worth 48.4 million pounds (then $59 million), at the time giving it a market valuation of over £100 million. Mr. Ackman, who Forbes recently estimated to have a net worth of close to $9 billion, had invested privately.
It prompted a period of significant change for the watchmaker. By the end of that year, the English brothers had stepped away from the day-to-day running of the business, and, under Mr. Ackman’s recommendation, the watch industry veteran Davide Cerrato had been installed as chief executive.
Mr. Cerrato, who had worked at Panerai, Tudor and Montblanc, moved quickly to close down Bremont’s vaunted, but loss-making, movement manufacturing program, selling off most of the company’s machinery at its headquarters in Henley-on-Thames, a town in Oxfordshire. He also rebranded the company, with a new logo and visuals themed around adventure and exploration, and overhauled the collection. It prompted a backlash from consumers and critics and a turbulent period for the company.
But instead of spooking the company’s new owners, the changes encouraged them to double down. “Davide made a lot of changes pretty quickly and shook up some of the hard-line Bremont customers,” Mr. Ackman said. “There was a little bit of negative chatter on social media and the board was getting nervous. I was confident Davide was heading in the right direction. So I ended up making a large incremental investment and taking a nonexecutive chairman role and going all in.”
Last April, Mr. Ackman created the Bremont Long Term Trust and took a 63 percent stake in the company, which he said had since increased to around 70 per cent. Hellcat and the English brothers remain shareholders, but Mr. Ackman confirmed that Hellcat had in January ceased to have any control of the company.
According to Mr. Ackman, the company is not yet profitable. In its last full set of published accounts to the end of June 2024, Bremont posted operating losses of £9.8 million. “This was not an investment where I was looking for a quick return,” Mr. Ackman said. “Our focus right now is not profitability. That will come.”
Mr. Ackman said his view was long-term. “To build a global brand in a competitive space — it’s not something you can do overnight,” he said. “You want to do it without compromise. And that means we’re prepared to lose money for a meaningful period of time and invest capital until we get it right.”
Bremont’s ambitions were illustrated last week, when at Watches and Wonders Geneva it announced a partnership with Astrolab, the company behind the FLIP lunar rover that will be deployed to the moon later this year as part of an unmanned mission.
The rover will be fitted with the new Bremont Supernova Chronograph, which the company believes will make it the first British watch on the moon and the first watch deliberately left on the lunar surface. Omega and Bulova watches previously worn on the moon are believed to have returned to Earth.
In an email ahead of that announcement, Mr. Cerrato said he hoped the partnership with Astrolab would “propel our brand into the rapidly expanding space domain,” and “place the brand firmly on the global stage.” He said it showed that Bremont was “committed to shaping the next chapter of human exploration.”
Mr. Ackman said exposure through Astrolab could give Bremont a “breakout moment” similar to that experienced by Omega in 1969 when its Speedmaster was worn by astronauts during the Apollo moon landings.
“It’s the only thing missing for Bremont,” he said.
Bremont’s founders had thought the introduction of the British-built ENG300 would provide that fillip, but having been years in the making, the caliber was mothballed in 2023, 18 months after it was released.
“The movement was not viable,” Mr. Ackman said. “The failure rate was way too high. It was a gutsy move, but too early.” He said the idea behind it had not died, and that, “someday, I do want us to create our own movement, but we’re not ready yet.” He said the company now makes around 10,000 watches a year, up from about 8,000 two years ago.
Mr. Ackman said his investment had left Bremont shooting for the moon. “Bremont has everything it needs to become extremely successful,” he said. “It’s got the financial resources and the human resources: The final thing we need is more brand discovery.”
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