Born into a third generation of luxury watch distributors, Edward Margulies inherited a deeply rooted love of watches. But the business in general? Not so much.
“There was quite a bit of status and ego within the industry,” said Mr. Margulies, 54, during a recent video interview from his home in central London. “And I really struggled with that.”
Hoping to shake things up a bit, he co-founded Split, a watch company that is celebrating its first anniversary this month. “We don’t want to be a protagonist, but we want to be a slight disrupter,” Mr. Margulies said.
The company’s tagline? Time for Change.
Mr. Margulies — who is the son of Marcus Margulies, the owner of the prominent British watch distributor Time Products — was 19 when he moved to Switzerland in 1992 for training at the headquarters of Longines and Vacheron Constantin.
“I wanted to try and learn every aspect of the watch industry,” he recalled, in preparation to lead Time Products’ British distribution of high-end Swiss brands such as Audemars Piguet and Vacheron Constantin. Eventually, he became the managing director of its luxury watch division.
But in 2014, Mr. Margulies, who said he had relied on therapy and antidepressants since age 12 and had long battled feelings of being an impostor in the watch industry, had a mental health crisis that began to affect his physical health. He was prescribed the opioid fentanyl and quit the director’s job that same year.
“Next thing I know,” he said, “I’m five years into being basically a heroin addict, falling asleep at the dinner table.”
Once the stay-at-home father of two had completed four years of rehabilitation, he started to question what to do with his life. “The only things I know,” he said recently, “are mental health and watches.”
The result was Split, a brand named for Mr. Margulies’s love of split-seconds chronographs — which can time two events simultaneously — and his belief that “people have become a little bit split” from reality and from one another since the arrival of smartphones.
Dara Amjadi, the founder of the consulting firm Brightwood Young and a longtime friend of Mr. Margulies, agreed to co-found Split over dinner in the fall of 2023. Mr. Amjadi said the two men realized that, when it came to therapy for personal crises, “there’s people out there who just can’t get it when they need it, so let’s try to do something,”
With each sale, the brand, which debuted in June 2025, donates the cost of an hour of therapy for a young person at the Anna Freud Centre in London. Mr. Margulies said the amount varies, but each donation is a minimum of 100 pounds ($135); he declined to specify how much had been donated in all.
The first Split watch was the MC, named for the American ’60s rock group MC5 (Motor City Five), a 42-millimeter automatic chronograph with two subdials powered by Seiko’s NE86A movement. Each of its five colorways was produced in a limited edition of 250 pieces and priced at £1,800 or, in the United States, $2,057.
In contrast to most luxury watches, the MC was made and assembled in Japan. “There is a playbook for the luxury watch industry,” Mr. Margulies said, “and we didn’t want to follow that playbook.”
The case was made with the brand’s proprietary Ceramod+ material, which it has described as a scratch- and temperature-resistant fusion of polymers, nylons and ceramics, and the completed watch came on an FKM rubber strap.
Both the Japanese production and the specialty materials have become standard for Split timepieces, which are sold online and at Aimé London, in Notting Hill. (The brand has one employee, a brand manager who, Mr. Margulies said, oversees the entire business.)
Ian Montone, a talent manager in Los Angeles, said he has purchased three MC watches over the past year, including an addition to the collection called In The Skies — a fully luminescent timepiece (a world first, according to the brand) that was released in January.
He wrote in an email that he was drawn to the MC’s original look and durability. And importantly, he added, it was “a watch I can take into the ocean and be active with.”
In May, Split introduced to the MC collection the Ozzy, a black and purple limited-edition tribute to Ozzy Osbourne. It sold out all 50 pieces at £2,350 each. (The Ozzy was the eighth variation in the MC series, which includes the canary-yellow Sub-7, introduced in July 2025.)
Mr. Margulies said the Ozzy was the first of what he intended to be annual tribute watches, with all proceeds donated to MusiCares, a charity that provides health and welfare services to the music community in the United States.
“The togetherness, doing the charity, the rock ‘n’ roll, these are things that are at the core of what we do,” said Mr. Amjadi, 53. “And everything else sprouts from it.”
Reinforcing the brand’s mental-health messaging, all Split watches are photographed on the site with hands positioned at 7:23, creating a frown on the dial rather than the industry-standard 10:10 smile. Mr. Margulies calls the position Brave Face.
“We’ve been slightly uncomfortable as a human race to say we’re struggling,” he said. But “there’s nothing wrong with vulnerability, there’s nothing wrong with frowning, and there’s nothing wrong with having a bad day.”
Initially puzzled by Split’s messaging on its mental health focus, Mike Christensen, the lifestyle director at GQ UK magazine, said the MC watches took him by surprise.
“They feel different,” said Mr. Christensen, who owns a bespoke jungle-theme version with a dial hand-painted by the Dial Artist, as the Scottish artist Chris Alexander is known. “That, combined with the storytelling around the brand, makes it feel slightly braver. Not everyone wants to talk about healing or helping one another.”
On Wednesday, the brand was scheduled to unveil its second collection: a 40-millimeter GMT watch produced in four colorways. (GMT is an industry label for a watch that can display multiple zones simultaneously. Split is also using it as the name of the design.)
Powered by Miyota’s 9075 movement, each of the £720 models is set to be produced in a 250-piece limited edition.
Emphasizing the brand’s focus on music and bringing people together, Mr. Margulies said the GMT collection was inspired by “seminal moments in music that pushed people outside their comfort zones” — and each colorway was named for a related body of water.
Among them are the Hudson, a beige style that Mr. Margulies said is a nod to the Ramones, the Hudson River in New York and New York City’s ‘80s punk scene; and the blue Delta, named for the Mississippi River region that is widely regarded as the birthplace of the blues.
Assessing the design of both collections, Mr. Margulies said, “It doesn’t have a busy dial, it’s not shiny and it’s not in gold; and we’ve done that intentionally.
“We wanted to create the best modern watch we can create, given the best modern materials we have available to us. And we don’t want them screaming, Look at me, look at me.”
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