BRAND IDENTITY: How do you solve a problem like Rotary?

The former giant of the sub-£500 price segment in the UK watch industry has fallen on hard times in recent years. Between 2013 and 2020 annual turnover had declined by 75%, and things only got worse subsequently. That was until Midlands-based watch group Peers Hardy entered the scene at the last minute to provide the life support machine that the brand dearly needed. After initially shaking hands on a global licensing deal, Peers Hardy quickly became joint owners of Rotary, and the plan to turn the ship around is well under way and bearing fruit already. Peers Hardy’s managing director, Nick Baker, and sales & marketing director, Paul Harry, sat down with Watch Insider’s Daniel Malins to reflect on the past with a keen eye on the future.

Daniel Malins: How did your work with Rotary originally come about?

Paul Harry: After 20 years at Seiko, I was delighted to team up with Nick at Peers Hardy in 2006. During my time at Seiko, we were rubbing shoulders with Rotary in all the top retailers. It was a terrific brand. Since the Dreyfuss family sold the brand to Citychamp [Watch & Jewellery Group Limited] of China in 2014, Rotary went off the radar as a top UK brand. Over the past few years, our customers would say to me: “What is going on at Rotary? Is there anything you can do to help us?” So we asked a few of our senior friends in the industry: “What’s going on at Rotary?” The story was always the same: poor service, lack of stock, no direction. We got the contact details at Rotary UK and approached them time and time again to discuss how we could help but always received the same “thanks but no thanks.”

Nick Baker: Through a friend of a friend, I got a meeting with the top guy at Citychamp at the International Commerce Centre — the joint most prestigious office in Hong Kong. We got up to the 19th floor and were led into this beautiful boardroom overlooking Victoria Harbour. I ran through my history and talked about the opportunity. I mentioned some of the things that Paul had said about how wonderful the Rotary brand was and how we couldn’t believe what was going on. I said: “It must be giving you a headache. I think I can help relieve that headache.” There was an interest from them for some kind of deal and so we decided to go back to talk about a license. With our successful Radley license spanning more than 12 years as a benchmark, we signed a similar licensing deal with the usual guarantees. To start, we needed the help of key Rotary retailers with information on bestsellers, because we simply had nothing else to go on. I have to say that our retail partners were fantastic. Frankly, had we waited another year, I think it would have been too late. The brand last year made less than £3 million — it was disappearing.

Rushing product into the market by last September/October, Christmas proved to be very good and gave us a very clear indication of the potential for Rotary. It was then we had the confidence to buy 50% of the brand.

DM: You both said about how retailers were losing patience with Rotary, but was that because they simply weren’t selling anymore? Or was it more the operation behind the scenes that was on its knees?

PH: I think the number one problem was that there was no stock. However, stock would only have steadied the ship. The brand also needed innovation.

DM: And you felt like that, on the right terms, you could fix that fairly easily?

NB: With the licensing deal, we said we absolutely have to have full control over design, manufacturing, and distribution. It had to be UK-focused to start with. We were treating it as if, even with a license deal, it was our brand.

PH: We never had any doubt that it was a popular brand from retailers and consumers, because they were still selling whatever stock they had.

DM: The wider Peers Hardy operation has so many moving parts, and yet Rotary feels like it should be a full-time focus. How do you plan on managing marketing resources and priorities in a way that gives Rotary the best chance of success possible, while not neglecting the rest of your business?

NB: The thing I’ve been saying to everybody is that we’ve got to make sure that Rotary isn’t the straw that breaks the camel’s back. But so far we’ve managed it, and the reason is that it’s almost as if we’ve lived for this moment. The work comes quite naturally in our approach to everything that we’ve done. Adding Rotary is a big thing, but we have an amazing team. We have such a low turnover of staff. While our people work really hard, they tend to stay with us for years and years. We are doing what we know we can do well. If we’d taken on Rotary five years ago when we were in the midst of trying to work out the complexities of smartwatches, then no way. It just felt like the right time.

DM: We spoke before we started recording the interview about your interest in the new Basilia trade show in Basel. I presume part of that is not only to get the name out with key clients that you know are going to go there from Geneva, but also maybe gambling on there being distributors from around the globe that could be of interest to you.

NB: Yes, we have said we don’t want to attack the rest of the world yet, because the number one job is to sort out the domestic market. We are going to have some things that work and some things that don’t work, and if you then put that on a global scale, you’re asking for trouble. So, let’s get our market right first.

Since throwing some ideas together for Christmas last year and seeing some of it work and some of it not, it’s given me and the design team a lot more time to understand the brand. As a result, the watches we are introducing are much more considered, and we’re having some really nice successes with new products. This is phase two, and phase three is our collaborations. I think it’ll still be a tough job for Paul, but it will make the job a little easier to go into the world because we’ll have a blueprint of what we’ve done in the UK.

PH: I want to do that when the time comes. First, as Nick’s done with the product, my focus has been on getting our sales force up and running, re-establishing Rotary with the key accounts that had delisted the brand, such as Beaverbrooks, Goldsmiths, Ernest Jones, and Fraser Hart, while also securing John Lewis, who were understandably getting nervous. All these top customers were not only aware of how big the brand had been but could also see the vision that we outlined for the future. We made the promise that we’re going to make Rotary great again and, so far, so good!.

We are very hands-on because we’re so passionate about getting it right. Once the domestic train is firmly back on the tracks and we are back into full store distribution across our target customers, then we can start thinking about expanding internationally.

DM: Regarding the product itself, will you be reinventing the wheel, or is it just tweaking what was there before?

NB: There are some bestsellers that have been bestsellers for years, and they will continue. What we’ve done is we’ve re-sourced them and, if there were any quality issues, we’ve ironed those out. But we’ve also got to attract new consumers. We’re looking at collaborations, focusing very much on Britishness and British icons. To start with the MOD [Ministry of Defence], it felt like there’s a big gap between Breitling, Bremont, Christopher Ward, and then the rest. I thought, with the heritage of Rotary, MOD sounds like a no-brainer. As I researched a little more, I realised there are some really wonderful stories. When people talk about Second World War watches, they tend to talk about Dirty Dozen with the 1967 film, including Jaeger-LeCoultre, Omega, Longines, IWC, and some other big brands. I realised that these brands of the Dirty Dozen didn’t launch until 1945. So, I wondered what happened before then?

Lo and behold, we find out about the ATP story: Army Trade Pattern. In 1940, the MOD needed some watches for the army, so they went around some Swiss manufacturers and 132,000 watches were made, all service watches to the same look. I was reading this and then saw that Rotary was one of the brands! These are watches that were worn by active servicemen from 1940. So, we managed to get hold of one.

DM: Did you find it online?

NB: We went to a collector, and we bought it for £1,000. We had to pay £300 for the strap because when it came out in 1940 it was on a leather strap, but by 1943, with the jungle involved in the Southeast Asia part of World War II, there was an army AFO10 standard issue khaki strap. On the back, it’s got ATP, the individual serial number, and the arrow denoting the MOD. This now forms the basis of what we’re going to do with our MOD range and our story. Our strapline is going to be: “Continue the story” because, as I was reading this story, the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up. There is so much emotion.

PH: For the design, we’re taking the DNA but making it a little bit more commercialised. There are also Navy and Air Force — they’re only small collections. The point here is this is from the 40s, inspired by the 40s, and we want to keep it relatively simple. There are automatic watches in every collection as well.

NB: There’s also a smartwatch! I remember going with Paul last year to F. Hinds and they said: “What are your plans? You’re not going to put a smartwatch into Rotary?” and I said that if I do, it needs to be a little bit special. It can’t be what we have done with Reflex Active or even Radley.

So, we have our Army smartwatch. We’ve reproduced the main watch, putting it on the same strap with dual-band GPS, which means it picks up the signal really, really quickly and it is even more accurate. It has Gorilla Glass, it’s aluminum and stainless steel, and it’s quite a sturdy piece. There is going to be a multitude of dials — you can put about six or seven into the watch — and then you download as many as you want from the Rotary Connected app.

We’ve been successful with smartwatch because when we launched it in 2020, there were four years of research. I was looking at what Fossil did and they just wanted to be first to market. Every time Paul would say: “Are we about to launch smart?” I’d say: “Sorry, not yet, it’s not as good as we thought,” because you only get one chance to launch it. Thankfully, we launched it and it hit the ground running. Putting digital dials with a little bit of emotion did the trick.

With our Radley brand, we sell 60/40 smart over quartz. Because they [the customer] can get 30 dials and they can get notifications and their steps, and we make it really simple to operate.

PH: That is the key. It is the personality we put into that product to make it simple for that typical Radley consumer. It wasn’t necessarily going to be cutting-edge on tech, we just made the product appropriate for the consumer. Radley is personality, lots of fun, easy to use, and a really nice way to enter into that smartwatch market. It’s been phenomenally successful for us.

DM: Does the work you’re doing day-to-day with Rotary feel different, both because you have ownership in it and because of the type of watch it is? It’s not fast fashion.

NB: The people who don’t know us very well probably thought: “Peers Hardy buying Rotary — what are they going to do with that?” The people that do know us well are thinking: “You’re made for this.” We’ve had to work so hard with nothing. We’ve come up the hard way. This is actually a joy, and it does come quite naturally. There is something really nice about being able to have a little more money and spend more. I’ve spent my life negotiating two cents off the price of a strap and all the rest of it, and now all of a sudden we’re paying more for a strap than we were the complete watch for some of our brands. But it’s a really good discipline.

DM: Who do you see Rotary taking market share away from?

PH: We have a simple ambition of reclaiming our rightful position as the number one sub-£500 brand.

DM: My 18th birthday present was a Rotary, and it felt very special at the time. I always think that, whatever you do with merchandising, marketing, packaging, etc., you should try and make the customer feel like they are buying a Rolex, even if it’s actually a fraction of the price.

NB: It is also about the staff and getting across the fact that this Rotary watch in two years’ time, three years’ time, should look pretty much like when you first bought it. Consumers don’t look in the window thinking: ‘This brand is alloy but Rotary is stainless steel,’ therefore the shop staff need to be able to say it’s durable and it is going to look like it does today in a couple of years’ time.

DM: Rotary is not the only brand that could do with a bit of resuscitation. Do you feel like you’re in the market to give the kiss of life to any other former institutions at a similar price point?

NB: We both had full-time jobs before Rotary and in the spirit of making sure it’s not the straw that breaks the camel’s back, let’s get this where we want it to be and then we’re open to conversations. We’re well aware that we were profitable before Rotary. So many watch brands at the moment, the first thing they’re looking at is the bottom line and profit. “How can I make this watch cheaper? Can I put a cheaper movement in? Can we reduce the plating?” We’re not doing that with this. In fact, if anything, we’re going a little bit the other way. That’s going to help this brand a lot. If you keep cutting costs, the consumer soon starts to spread word. We want to do this right, because this is the biggest opportunity Peers Hardy has ever had, and we don’t want to be distracted by the others.

DM: When you reach the point where you’ve had Rotary for a bit over a year, how would you define how successful you’d been?

NB: More than doubling the business!

PH: Getting the brand back to where it was in its heyday.

DM: Which would be almost entirely UK-based?

PH: Exclusively UK, yes. I think it’s not impossible. With the product that Nick and the team are developing, the marketing initiatives we’ve got, the distribution we’ve regained, I think it’s very doable. As I said from the outset, and as Nick’s alluded to with the fact that we’ve got working capital, there’s nothing to stop us from doing anything — marketing initiatives, new product development. If an opportunity comes up to do a collaboration with somebody, something we think is really exciting in addition to MOD, we can do it. We are focused on making this brand the number one sub-£500 brand, as it always was.

This article was first published in the August 2026 edition of Watch Insider.