Ben Holgate talks to two brothers whose mechanical timepieces can cost up to £30,000

Aviation has played an integral role in the genesis and growth of an Oxfordshire-based watch-making company that has global ambitions and recently opened a new retail store in New York.

The idea for Bremont was conceived after co-founder Nick English was involved in a plane crash in Essex in 1995 while flying with his father, Euan, who was 49 at the time. Euan did not survive and Nick suffered more than 30 broken bones.

Bremont co-founder Giles English, 41, recalls that his brother Nick, 44, said to him afterwards: “Life’s too short. Let’s go and do something we want to do.”

The brothers inherited a passion for watches from their father, whom Giles describes as “a wonderful, mad, aeronautical PhD from Cambridge” who made his own timepieces.

The pair then spent five years in the home of watch-making, Switzerland, learning the craft, hiring staff and sourcing suppliers. They started selling watches in 2007 and transferred their watch-making operation to Henley in 2009.

Today, Bremont has an annual turnover of about £18m and employs 30 watchmakers. Famous customers, said Giles, include actors Tom Cruise and Orlando Bloom, celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, and Prince Philip. Although the design and manufacturing is still done at Henley, last year a new machining plant was opened at Silverstone to expand the operations.

The brand name Bremont appeared as an epiphany after Giles, who lives near Banbury, and Nick were forced to land a biplane in a French field after encountering inclement weather. Their rescuer: a farmer in his eighties named Antoine Bremont.

Giles said the company essentially sells itself on its Britishness, a point of difference from the 750-odd watchmakers in Switzerland. Britain, he reminds us, was once a global centre of watch-making, producing half the world’s watches in the late nineteenth century and establishing the international Greenwich Mean Time. Britain’s dominance evaporated when the two world wars subsumed UK engineering talent for military purposes.

Giles, who has a degree in engineering and naval architecture (Nick’s degree is in geography), said Bremont’s watch designs were characterised by being “classical, understated, but very tough”.

All of Bremont’s watches are mechanical, not battery operated. “The parts may wear but in essence a watch will last 200 years.” Giles admits to an obsession with the precision engineering required. “You’re building a watch to a couple of microseconds of accuracy. Unless you’re in watches or medical instruments, you don’t need that level of quality.”

But that sort of engineering doesn’t come cheap. Bremont’s watches sell for between £3,000 and £30,000 each. The English brothers, who were born in Cambridge and raised near Norwich had a shared business background before establishing their own enterprise. After university they both worked in the City in corporate finance and later ran their father’s aviation restoration business.

At Bremont, they share management duties, although Nick maintains a focus on the US, the company’s biggest offshore market, while Giles looks after sales and marketing. Giles describes their duties as being “more project-led than specific roles”. Both are married with three children. While the company mostly sells wholesale to high-end jewellers, over the past two years it has opened three retail stores. The first was in Mayfair, followed by a second London shop at the Royal Exchange, another in Hong Kong and the latest, which opened in May 2015, in New York.

About 45 per cent of its sales, which in total are up to 8,000 watches a year, are exports. “We’re trying to grow our brand globally, but we’ll always be a small player,” said Giles.

Bremont has co-marketed special edition watches it has created for corporate partners such as aircraft manufacturer Boeing and car-maker Jaguar. Earlier this year, Bremont was appointed the official timing partner of the 35th America’s Cup, the first British firm to receive the honour in the yacht race’s 164-year history.

The aviation sector generates about one-fifth of total sales.

Fittingly, aviation plays a part in the firm’s most successful watch, the Wright Flyer – inspired by the plane of another pair of brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright – the world’s first successful heavier-than-air powered aircraft of 1903.

Orville Wright kept some muslin cloth from the plane’s lower left wing, which was handed down through the family. The English brothers negotiated with the Wrights’ descendants to use small bits of the muslin in their watch.