At first, Benjamin J. Adams thought the image must have been Photoshopped.
Earlier this month, when an advertisement in Fortune magazine for a new line of watches by the Swiss luxury brand Patek Philippe made its way online, Mr. Adams was skeptical. Patek Philippe had not produced a new collection in 25 years, after all, and the brand was not commenting. Was it an elaborate hoax?
Last week, though, Patek Philippe made it official: The three watches that made up its new Cubitus collection would soon be available (presumably to the über-rich) for suggested retail prices ranging from $41,240 to $88,380. Mr. Adams was floored.
“Some of the biggest watch news in a while,” he said.
But Mr. Adams was personally taken aback for another reason. Though he knew it was a total coincidence, he could not help but notice that the Cubitus — specifically, the stainless steel version with an olive green dial that Patek Philippe identifies as reference model 5821/1A — bore a resemblance to another watch: his own.
Mr. Adams, 27, is the founder of Benjamin James, a small watch company that he and his wife, Maxine, run out of their home in Birmingham, England. Earlier this year, Mr. Adams unveiled his first watch, the Scarifour, named after a family cottage. Like the Cubitus, the Scarifour features a thin, angular case in stainless steel, a ridged dial and an integrated H-link bracelet with polished center links.
The original price, as listed on Mr. Adams’s Kickstarter page? About $350 for a quartz version and $600 for one with a hand-wound movement. His first production of 300 watches sold out.
Benjamin Baron, a watch enthusiast from outside Zurich, was among those who purchased one. And last week, as the Cubitus began drawing so much attention, Mr. Baron posted several photos of his Scarifour on Instagram along with a reminder that Mr. Allen “had the design first!”
“It’s quite a sleek, simplistic, well-proportioned design,” Mr. Baron said in a telephone interview.
In the watch world, smaller brands have typically taken their design cues from behemoths like Rolex and Omega. In the case of Benjamin James vs. Patek Philippe, it was, quite by chance, the other way around — or at least a bit of a full-circle moment. Mr. Adams acknowledged being inspired by the genre of watches that the Nautilus, one of Patek Philippe’s most iconic models, helped birth in the 1970s.
“It is interesting to see a new wave of young brands come in that can be a bit more nimble than the big players,” Mr. Adams said, “especially with brands now coming from enthusiasts who see the changing tides of the industry.”
Mr. Adams’s experience this month is another example of the rapid democratization of the industry. Producing decent- to high-quality watches used to be much more expensive, said Michael Holst, a watch enthusiast and business executive whose YouTube channel, “This Watch, That Watch,” has more than 70,000 subscribers. But improved equipment and technology have streamlined the process at factories, resulting in lower costs. For small watch companies that are known in the industry as microbrands, those savings are often passed on to consumers.
“The base manufacturing is at such a high standard now that there’s the potential to make a really decent watch that’s pretty damn close to what you can get from high-end brands,” Mr. Holst said in an interview.
Haute horology brands like Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin and Audemars Piguet, whose watches cater to the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent, feature components that are handcrafted, a labor-intensive process that obviously plays a part in raising the cost of production. But at a certain point consumers are paying a stiff premium for the brand name, along with the status and the prestige.
Those exorbitant price tags may be getting more difficult to justify given how many well-made watches from smaller companies have entered the market in recent years.
“The difference between those watches,” Mr. Holst said, “isn’t as big as it has been.”
Mr. Holst criticized Patek Philippe in a recent video, stating that the price of its base model Cubitus, which is comparable to the sales tag on a mid-tier sport utility vehicle, would be indefensible even if “the ghost of Mother Teresa polished this case by breathing carefully on it from the afterlife for over a year.”
There are, of course, some notable differences between the Scarifour and the Cubitus, aside from the high-end components and hand-assembly that come with the much more expensive watch.
The Scarifour has a rectangular case, while the Cubitus is more square-ish in design. The Benjamin James watch, coming in at 31 millimeters wide, is also “more classically sized,” Mr. Adams said. The Cubitus, by comparison, is a brick at 45 millimeters, which makes it more dimensionally akin to a Bell & Ross or to a Panerai. The heft of the Patek Philippe watch is augmented by steel bumpers, or ears, on the sides of the case. If you wear it, people are going to notice it. And perhaps, Mr. Adams said, that is the point.
Mr. Adams recalled how his grandfather, John Leslie Adams, fueled his passion for watches. Indeed, on his brand’s website, Mr. Adams has a photo of them together from when he was a young boy in which he has his grandfather’s gold, rectangular watch on his tiny wrist.
“Very old-school, classy bloke,” Mr. Adams said.
For his 18th birthday, Mr. Adams picked out a Tag Heuer Aquaracer with a chronograph complication. He soon discovered that he could not function without it.
“If I forgot to put it on, I’d feel sick,” he said.
His obsession was in full swing by the time he began working as a designer for Geckota, one of a growing number of British microbrands that prioritize creativity over more anodyne homages. (Doesn’t the world have enough Rolex Submariner facsimiles?) During his six years with Geckota, Mr. Adams found his tastes gravitating toward vintage-style watches.
Mr. Adams left Geckota about two years ago to pursue work as a freelance photographer, but he still had the itch to design watches — a realization he made while vacationing in Hong Kong with his wife. Mr. Adams had hoped to buy a watch there to commemorate the trip. He was unsuccessful.
“It sounds massively clichéd,” he said, “but I really couldn’t find what I was after.”
For reasons both practical and aesthetic, Mr. Adams wanted something a bit more modestly sized than what he was commonly seeing in shop windows. “I’ve got quite small wrists,” he said.
Taking matters into his own hands, Mr. Adams began sketching out some designs that eventually would take shape as the Scarifour. He drew inspiration from several watches, he said, including the Cartier Santos, older Seikos and Credors, and an out-of-production version of the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak from the early 1980s with a small rectangular face and an integrated bracelet.
“It was a real process to get it to this stage,” Mr. Adams said, “and I think I’m lucky that my taste in watches coincided with a time when the industry was shifting away from being obsessed with steel Submariners and larger watches.”
Mr. Adams outsourced production of the Scarifour to a factory that delivered the first batch of 300 watches to his home in September, he said. He and his wife spent the rest of the month packing them up and shipping them out to customers. They included a handwritten message with each watch.
Last week, Mr. Adams opened preorders for his second installment of the Scarifour, which will come with an automatic movement. He has also been working on a second watch with a new design, the dreaded sophomore album. The hope, he said, is to do something unique and special — something, in other words, that further distinguishes his brand from the maker of the Scarifour’s $40,000 doppelgänger.
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