Darren Sher’s love of horology started at a young age: When he was 11 years old, he asked his parents for his first timepiece, a digital Casio Databank, as a reward for good behavior. Over the next few years, his collection swelled.
But while he liked the look and feel of wearing a wristwatch, Mr. Sher, who said he is dyslexic, found it challenging to actually tell the time.
“I only managed to learn the time on an analog watch when I was about 18,” he said recently over a coffee in central London. “Because of my love for watches, I forced myself. I’d often be wearing watches and I couldn’t tell the time.”
A couple of decades later he noticed that his son, Harrison, who was 10 at the time and also is dyslexic, was having similar problems reading watch dials.
“I knew exactly what the issue was — what I had,” said Mr. Sher, 46. “I thought, ‘I don’t want him to go through the same struggle that I did,’ so I went about trying to solve the problem.”
He created the Sher Kids Watch, introduced in April 2025 by Sher Watch Company, a brand he had established a few months earlier.
The watch’s 32-millimeter round dial has a distinctive design that looks a bit like a dart board, with 12 pie-like slivers that are numbered slightly off-center to help the wearer discern which one is being indicated by the hour hand. Small numbers, from one to 59, run around the edge of the dial and are indicated by the larger minute hand.
The steel design, powered by a Miyota 2035 quartz movement, is offered with gray, pink or royal blue dial highlights and matching straps, but all three also come with a white strap. It sells for 95 pounds ($130 in the United States) and is available through the brand’s website and at the Time+Tide London Watch Discovery Studio, a boutique that has carried the watch as its sole children’s timepiece since July 2025.
“I just haven’t seen someone so deftly solve time-telling challenges as Darren has,” said Andrew McUtchen, Time+Tide’s founder. “In addition, he priced it really sensibly.”
Sher Watch is headquartered on the grounds of the home that Mr. Sher shares with his wife, two children and the family cat in Borehamwood, about 12 miles northwest of London. (Since it is an independently owned business, he declined to share sales figures.)
The brand also includes a watch for adults: a 41-millimeter automatic steel dive watch with a Miyota 9039 movement and a textured blue fumé dial (£795, or $949 in the United States). Introduced in December, the 300-piece limited edition was designed in partnership with “The Watch Podcast,” a weekly collectors’ session co-hosted by Mr. Sher. (He also is the co-founder of Just Chrono, a website that aggregates horological information and online sales, and he frequently posts photos of his own watches on Instagram.)
The company line is continuing to expand. Another adult watch is being designed, Mr. Sher said, and he recently posted a prototype of a school wall clock on Instagram. Plus, an additional iteration of the Kids Watch is a possibility. “I’ve had a lot of demand for a larger version for adults, so maybe that will come at some point,” he said.
During an interview, Mr. Sher spoke about his children’s influence on the brand, learning watchmaking online and the satisfaction of doing things yourself. The discussion was edited and condensed.
Your children’s watch looks more solidly built than many other timepieces designed for kids. Did your son inspire that?
He said, “I want it to be a grown-up watch,” because often kids see what their parents are wearing and they want something the same. I was like, “Let me design a kids watch for all the specs I would want.’’
You also have a 15-year-old daughter, Olivia, who has dyslexia. Has she also had a role in the business?
She’s less interested. She had the same issue with telling the time, so she wears the watch, but she’s a fantastic musician — a great singer — so she uses her creative energy elsewhere.
So far you have been assembling the watches yourself, using Japanese and Chinese parts. How did you learn to do that?
It really went next level when Covid hit. I was fascinated by watchmaking videos and watch restoration videos. It got to the point where I bought myself a whole watch bench and tools and starting buying old watches on eBay, watching the videos on how to do different things, and restoring watches myself.
Why did you decide to finish the watches yourself?
I want to ensure that there’s a certain amount of quality control, that I know when I’m sending a product out to a customer that it’s been assembled correctly and that everything passes my checks before assembly.
I suppose my years of learning watch assembly have actually paid off when it comes to my own business.
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