It’s not hyperbole to say that Bremont’s presentation at Watches & Wonders 2024 was one of the most hotly discussed and contentious events in the watch industry in years. The British brand, long associated with their founders, brothers Nick and Giles English, was now under the control of a new CEO, watch industry veteran Davide Cerrato, and a new ownership group. We knew ahead of time that the watches presented at the show would represent a new direction for the brand, one that would apparently see them reaching for the mass market, well beyond the deep enthusiast core audience they had cultivated so carefully since the brand’s founding. What we didn’t know at the time was the watches, a new logo, and a surprising new look and feel for the brand itself would cause so much consternation.
It’s a common complaint that watch media types are soft on watches that are objectively bad. Think of all the times you’ve seen a comment on an Instagram post or a watch article asking sarcastically if a piece of editorial content is bought and paid for by a brand. That somewhat ridiculous line of thinking is a topic for another day, but I think it’s fair to say no one accused any real writer of being soft on Bremont during Watches & Wonders 2024 and in the weeks shortly thereafter. Our own post was, I thought, a fairly balanced critique compared to some.
My opinion in the days after the show was very much a first, hazy impression of a brand that had suddenly lost its footing. In 2024, I wrote, “…time will pass, and eventually there will be enough space between the old Bremont and the new to really consider these watches on their own terms. Rebrands are jolting and take time to settle, and the Bremont rebrand has definitively not settled just yet.” A year and several months later, they’re still settling, but the temperature of the conversation has come down a bit.
I met with Davide Cerrato during Geneva Watch Days in Bremont’s suite at the Hotel President Wilson. The President Wilson is a very nice hotel, but pretty well isolated from the nucleus of the week’s events, where most of the activity takes place at the Beau Rivage, a ten minute walk from the comparatively quiet Wilson. To see Bremont at Geneva Watch Days, you have to make it a point to do so – it’s not a meeting you can take back to back with another brand at the Beau Rivage or at one of the boutiques on the other side of the lake. So I was curious to see what the vibe would be from Bremont as they made themselves available in a very different environment from the first tumultuous Watches & Wonders.
“Our moment of moaning is gone,” Cerrato told me when I asked him about any residual impact from that initial launch. He communicated that he recognizes things went poorly from a media standpoint, but his desire now, as you’d expect, is to turn the page and focus on what Bremont is doing now, and their plans for the future.
Cerrato, to his credit, did not shy away from discussing the challenges the brand has faced. He and his team do not have blinders on – they know the watches they debuted in 2024 were not well received by the media and the public, at least in terms of an initial reaction. But Cerrato is a true believer (you have to be when you’re the CEO) and is convinced that when collectors have a fuller view of the collection (including products yet to be released) and spend more time with the watches, they’ll fare better in the public imagination.
He told me that he senses there is a “robust interest in the company” among watch aficionados he encounters in Bremont boutiques and other events. Obviously, this is not necessarily always going to be neutral territory, but he repeated several times an idea that we, and every watch writer, tries to communicate whenever we evaluate a watch: that you have to see it in person. Cerrato claimed that new customers, people discovering Bremont for the first time, are embracing the brand.
It’s hard to know, in the absence of hard data, the extent to which new customers are actually buying Bremont watches, regardless of what they might say about the watches in a boutique. But it’s relatively easy to imagine that a customer encountering the brand’s latest watch, the new Altitude MB Meteor Stealth Grey, would have a positive reaction. This was the brand’s big release for Geneva Watch Days, and I was genuinely impressed – I think if your general vibe is stealthy, modern, military inspired tool watches, there’s quite a bit to like here.
The dial, somewhat confusingly, is not made from a piece of meteorite. The “Meteor” naming convention is actually taken from the Gloster Meteor, the UK’s first fighter jet. The dial has a subtle texture that Bremont says is scanned from a piece of actual meteorite. I’ve seen some comments on Instagram and elsewhere deriding the silliness of this. It is a little silly, or at least kind of on the nose. But the bottom line is that the aesthetic of the watch works, and to put it on your wrist is to understand that it’s a well made thing. The retail price is $6,600, which feels like a lot of money for something with a “scanned” meteorite dial, perhaps because there are few comparison points available. The movement, also, is not exotic. It’s a rebadged La Joux Perret caliber that is not chronometer certified. So, you have to really fall in love with the watch to want to own it at its retail price. As a longtime Bremont skeptic (I’ve never owned one, and never really been tempted) it seems to me this is the bargain you make with yourself for any Bremont (or any luxury watch), even those made in the English brother’s heyday.
This execution of the MB feels like a step in a more confident direction for Bremont after introducing the Terra Nova line in 2024, a series of watches that had people genuinely confused about the brand’s identity. This one, at least, feels tied to the brand’s lineage in a real way. But part of the conundrum for Cerrato and his team is surely that leaning into the lineage of Bremont might not do them any real favors if they’re intent on growth. As a company based in the UK, Bremont is required to publicly open their books once a year and file a report detailing their full financial picture. This year’s report, released at the tail end of Geneva Watch Days, paints a challenging picture for the brand, with an operating loss of £9.8 million in the fiscal year ending in the summer of 2024.* That’s a snapshot of the financial picture largely taken before the rebrand and Bremont’s new strategy had been fully executed. For all the handwringing about Bremont’s shift to a more mass market focused product (which the conventional wisdom would suggest is a viable business strategy) the fact remains that this was not a company experiencing financial success before Watches & Wonders 2024. A call from the brand’s most loyal followers to return to the old ways might spell Bremont’s doom more quickly than flooding boutiques with Terra Novas ever could.
Cerrato seems to be interested in finding the right balance between a niche indie with a great reputation and a more accessible luxury product. According to Cerrato the annual production still sits at around 10,000 watches per year. “Even 20,000 to 30,000 is still small,” he told me, discussing hypothetical production numbers in comparison to some of Bremont’s competitors.
One advantage that Bremont has always had over those competitors is its unique British sensibility. So much of the brand’s identity was tied to its quintessential “Britishness,” and a good deal of it was extended into the brand’s long term goal of making watches in-house on UK shores. When I asked Cerrato about how this has been prioritized following the rebrand, he talked about watchmaking at a macro level. “Making a watch is designing it, building it,” and a number of other things that don’t necessarily involve physically making a movement on your own. “If you master these things, you are a real watchmaker,” he told me. This might be moving the goalposts a little (or a lot) from Bremont’s original goal, but I tend to agree with Cerrato that watchmaking has to be more than vertical integration simply for the sake of it. This is one of the great recent developments in American watchmaking, as small manufacturers collaborate freely and openly with a variety of brands to produce watches that are bespoke in some way.
Cerrato continued that the previously held idea of bringing watch manufacturing back to the UK in the vision of the English brothers was a “utopic” view and that manufacturing their own movement now would be “nuts.” Cerrato estimated that annual production of 750,000 to 1 million units is what would be required to finance the manufacture of their own in-house movement, in terms of capital, so they are indeed a long way off, if that’s even a goal they ultimately want to pursue. This all seems like an objectively reasonable stance, but it was striking to me to see such a shift away from the ideas that drove Bremont through their early years. It was the clearest indication I had during my conversation with Cerrato that the long-term vision for the brand is wildly different now than it had been under Nick and Giles English.
Bremont’s continuing story remains one of the more interesting that is unfolding in the watch industry in 2025. My own opinion on the watches themselves, now that we have some distance from Watches & Wonders 2024, is that they remain, largely, a mixed bag, something that’s true of almost every brand that aspires to wide adoption among a public that is made up almost entirely of consumers that are not serious watch collectors. It’s also clear to me that the quality of the product is improving year to year. It should not be surprising that the aviation inspired watches launched at this year’s Watches & Wonders feel more assured than the field watches from last year. Success for Bremont might mean a commitment to executing on the new vision over the long term, which in turn might mean some of the original clients who supported the brand through its early days jump ship. Bremont
*Bremont’s financial reporting can be found here. WatchPro has also published an analysis of this year’s report here.
Zach Kazan
2025-09-26 17:00:00