How Most Microbrands Actually Start

There's a version of this story the industry likes to tell. Passionate watch lover can't find exactly what they want on the market, so they decide to make it themselves. Years of sketching, refining, searching for the perfect supplier. Finally they launch their dream watch, the community rallies behind them, and a brand is born.

That does happen. But it's about 5% of microbrands. The other 95% start very differently, and nobody talks about it because the truth is a lot less romantic.

The Alibaba Pipeline

I'm going to be blunt here because I think people deserve to know what they're actually buying.

A massive chunk of microbrands start the exact same way. Someone goes on Alibaba, finds a Chinese case manufacturer doing minimum orders of 50-100 units, picks a case shape from a catalogue, chooses a dial colour, maybe tweaks a couple of things, slaps their logo on it, and that's it. That's the brand. The whole process from "I should start a watch company" to having stock in hand can take a few months. Some of them don't even bother with the tweaking — they're literally selling a catalogue watch with a different name on the dial and hoping you don't reverse image search it.

I'm not saying these are always bad watches. The manufacturing quality out of Shenzhen and Guangzhou has got genuinely good. A lot of these pieces keep good time, feel solid enough, and photograph well. For £150-300, some of them are honestly fine for what they are.

But let's not call it watchmaking. It's product sourcing with a logo and a Shopify theme. And the problem isn't that it exists — it's that it gets dressed up in the exact same language as brands where someone has actually done the work. "British designed." "Swiss movement." "Founded by watch enthusiasts." Those phrases mean completely different things depending on who's saying them. One brand means "I spent two years in Switzerland working with movement suppliers." Another means "I designed the logo in Canva and the watch in an Alibaba chat window." Both get to use the same words. 

The Homage Route

Next tier up is homages. This is where someone genuinely does care about watches but either doesn't have the design confidence or the budget to do something original, so they take a proven design — usually a Sub, a Speedmaster, or an Explorer — and recreate it with minor changes at a fraction of the price.

Some of these are done well and I'm not going to be a snob about it. If someone wants a diver that looks like a Submariner but costs £300 instead of £8,000, fair play. The watch does the same job and your wrist doesn't know the difference. San Martin, Pagani Design, Steeldive — they've built real businesses doing this and their customers are generally happy, just don't act like your Gerald Genta because you stick your logo on someone else's design.

But it's a ceiling. You can build a decent business making homages but you can't build a brand. There's no identity there beyond "the affordable version of the thing someone else designed." And at some point you either figure out who you actually are and start making your own stuff, or you stay there forever making the same references with a slightly different bezel insert and wondering why nobody remembers your name. That's not a business I'd want to be in.

The Kickstarter Era

Then there's the crowdfunding wave, roughly 2015-2018. This is when microbrands went somewhat mainstream. Kickstarter made it possible for someone with a 3D render, a founder story, and a half-decent video to raise £50,000-200,000 before they'd manufactured a single watch.

Some brilliant brands came out of this and it genuinely changed the game. People with real ideas could get to market without needing a rich uncle or a bank loan. But bloody hell did it also open the doors for anyone with a MacBook and a dream to take strangers' money on a promise.

The playbook was always the same. Renders that looked like they were shot for an Omega campaign. Founder story about being "frustrated with the options available." Spec sheet that hit every buzzword — sapphire crystal, Swiss or Miyota movement, 316L steel. Early bird pricing that made it feel like you were robbing them. And then six months of delays. Then the excuse emails. "Supply chain issues." "We're perfecting the final details." Then eventually a product turns up that looks like the render's less attractive cousin and you're left thinking what the hell did I pay for.

Not all of them. Some Kickstarter brands delivered exactly what they promised and went on to build proper companies. But enough of them were shit that "Kickstarter watch" became a warning label in the community. And that's a shame because it made life harder for the ones that were actually trying.

The Ones That Actually Build Something

This is the bit I care about. Because somewhere in between the Alibaba flippers, the homage factories, and the Kickstarter chancers, there are people starting watch brands properly. And the way they start tells you everything about whether they'll still be here in five years.

They usually start slow. Someone who's been around watches for years — retail, collecting, journalism, whatever — decides they want to make something. But instead of rushing to get product out, they spend a year or more on design. They go to Switzerland or Japan and sit with movement suppliers. They get samples made, wear them for weeks, hate something about them, get more samples. They obsess over case finishing grades, lume application, crystal coatings, strap quality — all the shit that doesn't make it onto a spec sheet but completely determines whether a watch feels like £200 or £1,000 on your wrist.

They launch small. Two or three watches, not twenty. Because spreading yourself across every category on day one is how you end up with nothing that's actually great. Better to do three watches that make people stop and look than fifteen that are just fine.

And they accept that the first few years are going to be brutal. Margins on a first production run are painful. MOQs from Swiss movement suppliers aren't friendly to anyone without serious capital. Everything costs more and takes longer than you planned. That's just what it's like when you do it properly. There's no hack around it.

The brands that survive this — the ones that come out the other side with a real identity and a real following — almost always had a clear opinion from day one. Not just "I want to make a nice watch." Something sharper than that. A point of view on colour, or case shape, or what a certain price bracket should actually look like. The brands that last are the ones where you can see a watch from across a room and know immediately who made it.

How to Spot the Difference

I'm not going to give you a checklist because this isn't that kind of blog. But if you're looking at a microbrand and trying to figure out if they're the real thing, here's how I think about it.

How long have they been around? If a brand has been shipping watches for three or four years and they're still here, they've survived the bit that kills most of them. The ones that fold tend to do it inside 18 months.

Do the watches actually look like their own thing? If you can find the exact same case on Alibaba with someone else's name on it, you have your answer. If the design is genuinely theirs — even if it's not your personal taste — that's a brand, not a dropshipping operation.

How do they handle it when something goes wrong? Every brand has quality issues at some point, especially early. The good ones own it, sort it, and learn from it. The bad ones go quiet and start deleting comments. You can tell a lot about a brand by watching how they behave when things aren't going perfectly.

And do they have taste? Not whether you like their watches — whether there's a consistent design language running through everything they make. Whether the whole thing feels like it was built by someone with an actual point of view rather than someone who market-tested every decision.

Why This Matters

Starting a microbrand is hard. Very hard. The people doing it right are putting their own money up, making decisions that won't pay off for years, and going up against companies with marketing budgets bigger than their entire revenue. Most of them will fail. That's just reality.

But the ones that don't — the ones that stick it out and build something real — they're the most exciting thing happening in watches right now. They're the reason you can get real design and craft at prices that don't require you to remortgage anything. They're taking risks the big brands won't take because the big brands answer to shareholders and these lot answer to themselves.

I sell a lot of independent watches. I see the good ones and the bad ones constantly. And the gap between them is enormous. So next time a new microbrand pops up on your feed with beautiful photos and a great story, just take a second. Look at the details. Ask the questions. Because in this space, the difference between someone building something they actually believe in and someone flipping catalogue watches with a nice website is everything.

And once you know what to look for, it's really not hard to tell which is which.