I discovered in the summer of 2004 that many famous brand Swiss made luxury watches often had selling prices 20 times their actual cost price due to the various middlemen, hugely expensive marketing costs and greedy profit margins taken by everyone in the supply chain. Frankly I was astonished (and not a little angry) and with two friends of mine who had also recently sold their business, The Early Learning Centre, decided to create a luxury watch brand that did things differently. Christopher Ward of London was born.

Today, through christopherward.co.uk we sell premium quality, British designed, Swiss made wrist watches for men and women in more than 40 countries and have become one of the fastest growing “affordable luxury” brands in the world.

This is all very exciting for us but nowhere near as exciting or rewarding as creating truly beautiful and luxurious timepieces that most people can afford to buy. This is, and always will be, our raison d’être and it’s what makes it such a joy to be involved with Christopher Ward. This year marked another major move forward for our company when from August 1st we moved our manufacturing base to the famous Bernese Jura watch making region in Switzerland. Our partner has been making watches in his atelier since the late 1800’s and, in fact, was originally a movement manufacturer for brands such as Longines.

They have a passion and understanding of what makes a high quality watch that you can only achieve through years of dedication to the art of horology. They are very excited by what our brand is trying to achieve and we are similarly excited by what they can and are doing for the quality of our watches.

As well as working with them on the eleven new models we launched for autumn 2008, together, we have looked at every component of our established ranges and made countless improvements. Many of these improvements may not be obvious at first glance but the cumulative effect of even small adjustments, to the specification of a case or crown, the sharpening of a guilloche pattern on a dial and higher quality deployment clasp mechanisms for all our straps, has enhanced the quality to remarkable levels.

Design of our watches remains very firmly here in England at our Cookham offices. The small design team I lead shares an ethos which values understatement, simplicity of line and function over form.

We do not like ornamentation for its own sake. It has to have a purpose. And our designs must have an enduring quality that transcends short term fads whilst at the same time being almost viscerally appealing. Beauty is always in the eye of the beholder, of course, but we work endlessly to create a uniquely stylish handwriting which ensures your watch will look as good on your wrist in twenty years as it will on first wearing.

However, no matter how stylish is a watch design nor how precisely manufactured are the components, if the movement isn’t of the highest calibre then you cannot claim your watch to be. This is the first principle of luxury watch making and why we have only ever used the finest Swiss made movements from the finest Swiss movement manufacturers and always will.

I do hope you have a chance to spend some time browsing our website and learning more about our latest collections and, if you find a model you can’t resist, hopefully we will have the pleasure of forwarding you one of our watches in the near future so that you too can experience the very special feeling of wearing a Christopher Ward watch on your wrist.

Kind regards,


Christopher Ward