BRAND IDENTITY: Bremont’s new dog with new tricks
Say the word ‘Bremont’ to watch lovers and they’ll be sure to give you an opinion. Some will be very positive, and others less so, but everyone will have a view. The brand has been on a rollercoaster ride of barely believable highs, and some lows, since it launched its first watch in 2007. Three years ago, industry stalwart Davide Cerrato was parachuted into the CEO hot seat, on the back of the transformational work he’d done at Tudor and Panerai. Since taking over, he has spearheaded a radical ‘simplify to amplify’ strategy, repositioning the Henley-on-Thames manufacturer from an aviation specialist into a versatile powerhouse of ‘Land, Sea, and Air’ exploration. At the recent Watches and Wonders fair, Cerrato sat down with Watch Insider’s Daniel Malins to share why he believes the premium tool watch segment is ripe for a new kind of storytelling.
Watch Insider: I wanted to start first with the changes you’ve made since you came into Bremont. Some of them are cosmetic, some of them more than that. I guess the simple question is: why? And the follow-up question would be to ask which changes you think have worked very well and which haven’t worked as well?
Davide Cerrato: So, I joined three years ago, and I joined a fantastic company: independent, British, very entrepreneurial, and with ties to the military. I’ve been doing watches for 23 years — in 17 of the 23 I’ve been in the same market segment, which is sport watches. So that’s really my thing, and I could really see all the opportunities and potentialities of the brand.
The brand was British, very rooted in the UK with our first step into the US, but I was seeing that the potential of the brand was much bigger than that. It was a brand grown organically for a number of years, and with any organic growth you get to a point where there is complexity everywhere, and in a way you have reached the top of what you can do. And then, if you want to go a step further, you need to reset and reorganise a number of things: the first one was bringing talents from the industry — really bringing knowledge so that we can professionalise and help the team shift to the next level.
For three years we have run a big programme that is called “Simplify to Amplify” — fundamental in simplifying things to be capable of scaling up. There were a lot of limited editions and 200 references that were a bit unclear on offer and positioning. So, we cut the references in half.
We focus our messaging around adventure and exploration — that is what the brand has always been. With the military as a fantastic pillar to show that, we test our watches every day on the field through tens of thousands of officers that are using them in real situations.
A number of ambassadors and ex-special forces now have turned into adventure explorers, so everything has become very consistent. The inception of the brand was ‘Let’s do the indestructible pilot watch,’ so durability has always been at the very heart of what we did.
Speaking to a younger generation is very important, speaking to a wider public, organising our product offer in a very understandable way — sea, land, air — and improving our watches in terms of quality with better suppliers; that’s why last year, we announced the extension of the warranty to five years. We reworked the operation to be much more agile and thank god we did, because the market situation has been very challenging in the last two years. The improvements that we’ve done allow us to really produce to demand.
Focusing on the US market, we have a change in our president who’s coming from within the industry. We have a fantastic team of super passionate people, and we are now extending our presence into the US in a very strong way. It is the only market that is skyrocketing. And we’re starting to look at the rest of the world and how we extend in such a way that we can phase it in a clever way.
We are lucky that [investor] Bill Ackman has taken over and has created a trust to really manage the company in the long-term, so now we have a very long-term view and we can focus on our healthy growth.
We changed the brand to better reflect the brand pillars of land, sea, and air — as the brand was no longer purely focused on aviation. I really felt the need to translate the grammar of the brand in a more contemporary, fresh, dynamic way, and it is working very well because now we are launching a very technical watch that is going to go to the moon — the watch head of the Supernova Chronograph will be embedded within the chassis of Astrolab’s FLIP rover.
It makes so much sense what we have done — it shows that the brand is future ready. The market is growing; we have a lot of new customers coming. We are starting to expand in Europe, we should open in Japan just after the [Watches and Wonders] fair, which is a fantastic market. We are looking at the rest of Southeast Asia. We are in Australia. We have a boutique in Hong Kong. So, now the brand is really getting fantastic traction. The limit is awareness, we are still not known enough. We really hope that the moon project can help us to get to that energy that we need to be known by many more people.
WI: Unprompted, you just mentioned Bill Ackman. I think the impression I get from a lot of what you’ve been talking about is that the relationship between him and the brand is very long-termist. There are some easy quick fixes that you could have gone for that might have undermined the brand message a little bit, but what you’re talking about is changing the brand in a way that sets it up as much for the future as for today.
DC: Absolutely. He has created trust. The investment in the company has made that trust. He is a watch geek and a watch collector — he has a crazy watch collection. We spent two hours speaking about his collection and I realised: “Wow, we are really speaking the same language.” And then you realise “Wow, I have a guy that really knows what he’s doing.” Three years later, we are here. He is in charge of the company, he is backing us, we have a long-term view, and we have done a crazy transformation.
One of the important things that we have done is enlarge our offering and notably extend our offer towards the entry part of the market.”
One of the other very important things that we have done is enlarge our offering and notably extend our offer towards the entry part of the market. We were starting at £3,500, which is quite expensive, so we changed it to £2,500–£3,500, and it has paid off with turnover with the new line that we launched.
After 25 years next year we have a lot of very young collectors that want special pieces. We really worked on value for money. We know that we are small, that we are a challenger, and that we need to buy the knowledge and the trust of our future customers. So, while everyone was raising prices everywhere, we have no plan whatsoever of increasing them. Now, when I present the watches and we tell the price, people are mindblown.
WI: You made reference in your last answer to some troubling months — what specifically were you referring to there?
DC: In the last two years, the market has gone into a very tough recession.
WI: Do you see that changing?
DC: It’s picking up a little bit in the last four to five months. China is coming back as a market, and that’s the engine of the whole luxury industry. Things are starting to move: we had an exceptional month of March, and it’s also thanks to new things that we are presenting — the Altitude MB x Felix the Cat special edition that we launched at the beginning of March was incredibly successful. People are seeing the consolidation of the brand and much more clearly what the brand stands for with the quality that we are injecting.
WI: Do you have any aspirations, even in the very long-term, to bring back the mission of watchmaking in Britain? Or is that just something that was a noble effort and in the past?
DC: Watchmaking was born in Britain, on board of vessels to help them to navigate and find longitude. We are practically, with the development of the brand with the scaling in other countries, the only British brand to ever be an end-to-end luxury watch manufacturer in the UK. We are working with the military; we have a partnership with the Ministry of Defence and we continue to play and to leverage our Britishness.
WI: Do you think that plays a role in the States as well? Do you play up to the quality of the watches or is there a sense that they love an authentic British brand?
DC: I think that everyone loves the idea of British things and Britishness, the only limit is there is no level of British-made. When you say German-made, engineering is strong. When you say Swiss-made, it means a watch is well done. British-made doesn’t mean anything. But, still, when you see it written about British craftsmanship, the things about tailoring or things about the crown, there are definitely elements. I’m missing for the moment that future vision of what being British means, and I think we are participating to stand out.
WI: One final thing on the USA — what does growth and scale look like over there?
DC: We are growing, 100%. The business is skyrocketing thanks to guys like Hodinkee but also others. The maturity of the brand has grown. There are many more watch lovers — people know what a mechanical luxury watch is. There is a lot of excitement. There is a lot of economic attraction and the business is doing well. Once again, we are relatively small there. We need to expand our presence so that the brand becomes visible. We have been opening 30 new points of sale in the US in the last 12 months. We have a plan to open even more next year. We are looking in every State and in the most important cities for a nice jeweller partner that can display our brand and watches so that people going around start to see us everywhere and become more and more familiar with the brand.
WI: And how would that model look in other countries?
DC: In the states we have local affiliates, with 15 people between New York and Miami. In Italy we have just appointed an agent that is active and will open another point of sale here at Watches and Wonders. In Japan we will go directly with our retailers and we’ll open in a couple of months. We’re really working on good sales, developing partnerships with retailers, and making the brand known.
Embedded in British culture is this fascination for complexity, which, in a way, is good.”
We are very strong in the US; we are starting discussions in Japan, Mexico, Argentina, and South America. We are looking at Europe. We just signed one in France and had a discussion in Germany. We see Sweden and Finland and Singapore, and we are already in Hong Kong.
It is just a question of phasing things cleverly so that we’re not in a rush. We want to look for good partners and to build up the brand properly. We are there for the long-term, we know how to do it. I’ve been in the industry for 23 years, I’ve done this a number of times, and we are really in a good way.
WI: Until recent geopolitical events, would the Middle East have previously been a big part of future plans?
DC: It is on our plan. We are there with the biggest retailer, Seddiqi. We have four points of sale active as of now and we are growing. We’re still in a kind of early stage of development, so we are nurturing that region as it’s important. A lot of Middle Eastern clients spend a lot of their time in London during summer, so already they know about the brand, so there is a fantastic connection there. We are working with Ethos in India, so we are growing there.
WI: Do you notice many cultural differences with the way a UK company is run? Is there anything you wish was more Swiss-like, or anything that you’re glad is very much not Swiss?
DC: I think there are no major differences. Perhaps the only thing that I can say is that embedded in British culture is this fascination for complexity, which, in a way, is good. But, in other ways, speaking with a lot of heads of companies, this theme about complexity being the limit of business growth is quite recurrent. The idea of over-engineering because you are fascinated with complexity can be good in a way, but then you need to find the balance between being innovative and, on the business side, working on economies of scale. Sometimes when you get too much into complexity, you lose all of this. Then the company becomes slow, becomes complex because it’s frozen, and costs rise too much.
If you are too fascinated into pushing the boundaries, you cannot do it on an industrial level. If you want to scale it up, you need to embed the economies of scale and simplify everything enough so that the economies of scale can kick in. That’s the only limit which probably comes from fascination and a celebration of tradition. Tradition is good, but also you need to evolve. The world is totally changing.
This article was first published in the May 2026 edition of Watch Insider.
