TIME+TIDE: From Down Under, on top of the world

There is a strong case for TIME+TIDE being the most relevant and forward-thinking company in the entire watch ecosystem. Founded in 2014 as a watch media platform by Australian journalist Andrew McUtchen, the brand is almost unrecognisable today, having expanded into physical retail in some of the biggest cities in the world. Except this is not retail as the watch industry knows it. Andrew spent some time with Watch Insider’s Daniel Malins to explain his ‘Discovery Studio’ concept and why he doesn’t think he’ll ever retire.

Watch Insider: What originally made you move on from what everyone knew TIME+TIDE to be, into a physical space?

Andrew McUtchen: I have this chronic optimism bias. I can always see a way that things will work out, but I was flagging in terms of my optimism around the path forward for a pure watch media business as early as 2018. My CFO was telling me that he couldn’t see a way to unlock a viable business that’s going to do more than sustain you on a hand-to-mouth level for the rest of your life.

I did look around the landscape and saw that Hodinkee had a long and storied history with limited editions, I saw Revolution doing a limited edition every week, which they seem to have resumed. I saw that was a way forward, but without being on the world stage and being down there in [Australia’s] Melbourne, it was tough to get that going. 

I saw Doxa appear at Basel in 2019, they reappeared out of nowhere, and I offered to be a distributor and we did an okay job, we sold some watches. That led to enough credibility for me to take on Hamilton. We sold 1,000 Hamiltons in the first year in Australia alone, I started to feel like this was a string we could add to our bow. 

From that, because we started getting some credibility with sales, we did a Doxa limited edition, which was successful, and we started to get some runs on the board commercialising or creating other revenue streams aside from media, and the momentum started to build.

WI: You mentioned Revolution and Hodinkee—seeing things that competitors are doing can be inspiring. But did part of you think it comes with a bit of a health warning in the sense that diversification is amazing until it’s a disaster? I mean that generally, but those two companies in particular have had tremendous successes and some epic failures too.

AM: I think in business you look at your competitors and see what’s working, but also, because we were significantly behind several other watch media that had begun to diversify into retail, I did consider that I had some fair warning of business decisions or hybrid versions or saturation. I had seen enough of that to be fairly warned and to change tack.

We never built a business purely off the back of editions, we’ve spaced out our editions, and even though now the world is our oyster a little bit, in terms of the potential to do editions, we are very strategic and patient and quite self-controlled in the way that we deploy those opportunities.

In terms of evolving into physical retail, the fair warning was no-one had achieved it, despite getting agonisingly close in Hodinkee’s case. I’ve learned since that some of the issues they’ve faced with that evolution in New York related to the specificity of that city, and we are also not immune from those challenges as we speak. We’re not as in control of that build as we were in London [the New York Discovery Studio opening has faced a number of delays]. So, we definitely learned from some of the cautionary tales around over-saturating limited editions, and we have been very quiet and very humble with retail. There’s certainly no singing from the rooftops about our greatness, it’s still very much a tough fight, every day. It’s been a good 12 months but New York is keeping us very humble because we are facing a new set of challenges there. 

There’s a little bit of sympathy there for others that have come before, but also we will succeed. We will open as planned and there’s never been a question about that. As soon as we signed a lease, it was just a matter of whether it was this date or that date.

WI: Understanding where some of the issues lie — whether that’s in bureaucracy, taxes, planning, or whatever else it is that makes New York difficult to open a store in — is a good thing, but it doesn’t prove that you’re going to solve them. Why do you think your plans are going to work where Hodinkee’s didn’t?

AM: Our business model is completely different. I have gone left where they’ve gone right; I’ve gone exclusive when they’ve gone mainstream; I’ve gone independent where they’ve gone big box. TIME+TIDE’s model is almost a neat inversion of the Hodinkee evolution, which was based on the notion that they had built up a loved brand and that would be a gravitation, and people would feel a sense of loyalty or attraction to them as opposed to other high street retailers. Whereas I love my people, but I don’t have that much faith in them buying a watch at full retail from us versus a high street retailer, who can pull all kinds of tricks with other brands to incentivise them and so on.

I don’t dream of being a retailer. My dream is to create new communities and to create new spaces for people to congregate in. I have, again, an eternally idealistic view that what we’re doing here is more meaningful than selling stuff, and that is borne out every day when people come in here [a Discovery Studio] and feel that they’ve found a place for themselves as watch enthusiasts.

How do we remain optimistic and why do we think we’ll win? Because this has simply never been tested. If the idea has been tested in a small market, like this was in Melbourne, and it succeeded, and then it was tested in a bigger market in London, where it continues to exceed our budgets month on month, despite them being increasingly bullish, there’s definitely enough of an evidentiary basis for us to believe that creating an exclusive channel for micro brands and small independent brands that are internet famous and have huge household name status amongst enthusiasts, but no other place to be seen and touched, is proving to be a good horse to back.

WI: You mention community and having that at the forefront of your business, but you’re not principally a philanthropist or a charity. How difficult is it to remain focused on both the concept of building a community, but also making sure that that eventually feeds through into a bigger business that can employ more people and then move on to the next city or project?

AM: This gets to the heart of the matter. The way that you manage to grow a successful business in addition to growing a nice community of goodwill around your brand, is to be obsessed with two things. You need to be authentic in your call out to the community — that needs to be real, that can’t just be a sort of marketing ploy. Secondly, you need to be obsessed with profitability and EBITDA. You need to be continually finding ways to bridge the gap. 

There’s a huge pitfall for working with these internet-famous brands — they don’t have a margin built in for a retailer. So there’s a reason I continue to say to our team, “Yes, our revenue per month looks extremely high for what we’re doing, but our margin is less than half of what the high street retailers are skimming off their watches.” I am obsessed with finding authentic and on-brand ways for us to grow our profitability as well as grow and serve that community. 

The way that we do that is through things like the Tudor activation, which took place last November. We finally settled into a traditional retailer margin and we also put a frame around a brand that I think reinvented the retail experience of people who came here to see Tudor.

You can never lose sight of the fact that, without the good graces of a profit margin, you don’t actually exist as a business. Since this business steeply hit an upward trajectory, I have formed I would say a triumvirate with a CFO [Luke Martin] and a global general manager [Scott Jungworth]. One of them is my viability checkpoint, so I’ll say “Hey, I’ve got a cool idea,” and he’ll run the numbers, and then the next point is our implementation checkpoint of Scott saying, “Let me see if I can implement this, let’s see the practicalities of implementing this within our bandwidth and within our existing headcount.”

So, I’m obsessed with great ideas and I’m obsessed with creativity and I’m obsessed with continuing my father’s legacy of congregation, but I have also become strangely obsessed with finding that margin that will sustain our business. But again, interestingly, it doesn’t take business acumen and commercial mouths to find profitability, it takes creativity and the things that I actually really love to do. 

When I went to Tudor two years ago and said I have a concept of an immersive, experiential retail that reframes Tudor in an historical, storytelling context, they were interested and it was a two year journey. But what got me across the line with that was the strength of our media and also the creative approach. I have found a way to play to my strengths in both fields, but not for a second am I just some sort of happy clappy idealist that wants everyone to come and have a free coffee on me. This is a place where if you’re a watch enthusiast, you’re going to struggle not to spend money anyway. It is truly just a den of iniquity and temptation, and that’s what makes it a step out of that idealism and community focus, to acquire a pointy financial side to what we do. There are just so many watches that you can’t buy anywhere else here, and so many of them are actually probably under their secondary price. You come in here and get sorely tempted. 

WI: Specifically on the Tudor activation, you hear of brands like that doing their own exhibitions, where you see the history and where it started etc., but it’s not an environment where you can buy products. For that, you’d have to go into the local jeweller the next day. Is what you’re doing the coming together of both sides of that scenario, or am I being a bit reductionist?

AM: No, that’s quite a sensible breakdown. As journalists, we see the best of the brands, we see these wonderful exhibitions, we see these historical contexts, and we meet the historian or the archivist or the librarian from each brand, and we get this rich dimensionality to the way that we appreciate these brands. But if you’re a punter, when you walk into a high-end jeweller and say, “I’m here to see a Tudor,” you can get handed off to a salesperson who’s on a lower rung in that store and just can’t wait to get to the Rolex counter. There’s a huge disparity between our experience as journalists and media people versus punters.

I just want to give them what we have. What we have is a great appreciation of the brands and their backstories, a great appreciation for the world that this brand unlocks for you when you buy into it. Again, none of that is accessible through traditional retail, so it’s not so lofty when you consider that it’s what journalists already have.

My immense love for Tudor has come through 12 years of fantastic experiences with the brand where I’ve gotten to know them even better. I just want to bring a slice of that to the punter.

WI: Final question on the Tudor activation. How long will it go on for, what models will you have access to, and to what extent do you see it as the blueprint for  new partnerships?

AM: We are open from the end of November last year until March/April this year. We have the Daring collection, we have the blue dial Chrono, we have the pink dial Chrono, we have the carbon Chrono, we have the most sought after watches currently available or not available from Tudor, as well as the 2025 novelties. We will, I expect, have a line at the door on day one because we will have an egalitarian approach. I won’t be hitting up my VIPs and saying “Come and hoover these up before the people get here.” We’re going to practise what we preach and break down a lot of the typical retailer back-of-house games, 

In terms of it being a blueprint, it has to be case-by-case. Tudor is particularly underappreciated in my view, and it is particularly well aligned to the enthusiast and to the adjacencies in this space, so that can’t be overlooked. This isn’t just something that I can roll out for Roger Dubuis, for instance. This feels particularly snug because a lot of my team wear Tudor, and Tudor has the exact same ethos as TIME+TIDE, which is the best possible watch for the best possible price. We’re trying to find the best possible examples of watchmaking for the best possible price, and that’s what the micro brand cohort gives you. So there’s a real snug match there. But would I love to continue this into Longines, who has the best archive of all brands? Would I love to continue this specifically for TAG Heuer around motorsport? I would love to. So there are some other snug fits, but we’re starting with the snuggest and we’re starting with a brand that is just curiously present in the enthusiast space, and that is hierarchy-agnostic. It’s neither an entry level brand or a ‘grail’ brand or a solid middle brand. It truly sits in its own matrix and people that collect Pateks can also love vintage Tudor at a very high level. The brand has achieved something quite remarkable in its position, and I couldn’t be happier to be starting with them.

WI: Saying that there’s no waiting list and that VIPs don’t come to the front of the queue is achievable on day one, but must become increasingly difficult as you expand?

AM: It does, I’m not going to lie. The expectations of people that buy everything from us are already quite high, so I can see how these things develop. 

These brands are starting out and creating the same amount of excitement as Rolex and Omega did in the mid-century. In the 50s and 60s and 70s there was a period of great innovation and it was a really exciting world. But then you reach a period of equilibrium, and then it just becomes about 1% changes. The [Omega Seamaster] Planet Ocean is now 3 millimetres thinner, so it’s all just nips and tucks as opposed to revolution.

So, we are at the revolutionary point of the cycle, but I would like to stand for the fact that we will remain a creatively driven business, because we’re currently fully independent and able to do whatever we want without being beholden to any major stakeholders or other hidden clandestine partners. We will continue to evolve so that there can be this creative edge to what we’re doing. It won’t be exactly the same and VIPs may get a tap on the shoulder in the future, much like they do in traditional retail.

I think what ultimately leads to the manifestation of your leadership team and your business is the team behind it and its drivers and agendas. We just do not have anyone driving us beyond our own personal ambition to increase EBITDA as a business. We have no one else driving us to increase revenue and cut down on costs, and we’re in a position where we are getting traction through the concept itself. This is not a business that is running on debt or that is waiting to stabilise and eventually become profitable—we’ve been profitable from day one. However, we’d like to increase that, so the drivers in this business and one of our true mantras internally is ‘service before sales’ at this point in our cycle, and we set goals to try to hit 200 five-star reviews in the first 12 months and we achieved that.

As long as those sorts of drivers exist, then there’s no danger of ending up levelling out the same sort of experience as a retailer. We’d have to have the same commercial drivers and pressures, which we don’t. We’ve taken a lot of pressure off ourselves by being on level one. That’s a 70 or 80% rent reduction fee. We’ve taken a lot of pressure off ourselves by having a media business that reaches 25 million people a month across all channels. I don’t need to advertise, so we’ve found a world where we cannot be immediately under intense pressure to sell. Therefore, we don’t ever discount. Ever. You will never find one person that’s had a watch discounted at TIME+TIDE.

WI: I really relate to you talking about service before sales, because you don’t get the second bit without the first bit, long-term at least. I find it amazing how many businesses either don’t care about the method and the detail enough, or get bogged down in it too much. The best businesses that I’ve met never lose sight of processes and strategies being a means to an end, and ensuring that the link between the two is always clear.

AM: I love this point because the vision or ‘end’ that we have for this business is something we are very focused on. We want to change the way the world experiences watches all the way through from discovery in media to discovery in person and then to conversation and then to community.

We’re crystal clear on this end, and I will suffer many innings lost to win a series, if we go down the cricket metaphor. To me, winning the series is just this escalating and seemingly endless positivity from the people that are coming in here. We have had the most powerful people in the industry come into this place to try and discover it for themselves, maybe debunk it, look behind the cabinets and under the rug. It just proves to me that we’re focusing on the right thing.

And when it comes to focusing on the war and not the battles, we never say “We’re down this week, what can we discount to make budget for this week or for this month?” We just don’t do it. We trust the process. 12 months in a row we’ve hit and exceeded budget and 12 months in a row there’s been some WhatsApp message saying, “Hi Andrew, it’s X from Y and we’d like to explore this or that in 2026.”

There’s a confidence around the bigger picture and the vision. When you start a business, and you probably thought this with Watch Insider, you have to say that I believe this idea will succeed. I believe this USP is something that is missing, I believe in this vision. You can drive for so long on that fuel and those fumes, but at some point you need to start getting actual service stations of top-ups. We started with a full tank of belief internally and we have just been continually topped up by some of the biggest institutions, some of the biggest personalities, some of the biggest media titles, as well as industry players like Tudor, who have come along and continued to fuel the vision there even more. There is a real confidence that we’re right in foregoing some of the traditional day-to-day measures as a primary motivation. 

You have to have a full tank of gas because people will start to scrutinise. “What is your model? Do I believe you have a sustainable or potentially zeitgeisting model?” You have to make sure that you have equanimity with your team. I balance myself with the world’s most pessimistic CFO and then the world’s most obdurate and stubborn and unyielding GM, who is a battering ram for progress. The acceleration of the business is because of that relentless force. If you look at it, our risk profile is always well managed because I will go in saying, “We’ll sell 100,” and Luke will say, “We’ll sell 30,” and Scott will say, “I can create infrastructure and sell 50.”

WI: You clearly enjoy what you do, and the process of balancing creativity and being business savvy. What is the end point? At what stage do you say: “I’ve done my job here, we’re in every major city in the world,” or is it that you love the work itself? 

AM: You can stagnate in everything that you do, and I have stagnated in watch media several times over the 12 years, where I’ve just thought “I can’t do this anymore, this is just relentless.” If you’re stuck in a rut in what you tend to do, that’s when I tend to make drastic moves to get out.

I’m presenting with TIME+TIDE in its new form, in its new vehicle, where it is highly adaptable, and it has a team that believe in the vision and that will follow directions wherever we decide to move to next. I’ve realised that this is my happiest place, and if we continue to innovate and do things from a creatively driven place, then there is no end point to this for me. I know that if I did reach a point where, let’s say, there’s an exit and I’m tossed out on the street with money in my pocket and no part of that direction anymore, I would be instantly bereft and I would know that I’ve missed the meaning of life with that decision. So that is not a goal.

It’s counterpointing from the periods where I just kept doing what I had always done, and kept getting what I’d always got. The Swiss watch industry is the slowest moving industry. I used to be a music journalist, and I’d look at the big music labels and think “Lord, they just rely on the independent labels going and sourcing all these great brands,” and then eventually they’re just so slow moving and they’re always caught out and they’re so disruptible. But the Swiss industry is even slower moving than big corporate music labels. I’ve gone and found myself an even more dinosaur industry to work in. But because we’re at the bleeding edge of doing things differently and the freedom to do things differently, I can’t see an end to that, as long as we continue to be creatively driven and continue to be reactionary to what’s happening around us.

Boredom comes from coming up with a restaurant recipe or a set menu and then just pumping it out year after year. Of course there’s an end point to that. I would say I wouldn’t want to imagine being out of this business as long as it’s based on those principles and as long as we truly have created this little terrarium where we do things differently to the rest of the industry, and a lot of the things that used to annoy me about it just don’t apply.

It is extraordinary to me that we do have brands now lining up to get in this little ecosystem where we’re breaking all the rules. So, in that sense, I don’t see an endpoint. In many ways, in terms of the financial reward, everything is just reinvested, reinvested, reinvested. There have been no liquidity events, there’s been nothing taken off the table. 

Who knows, my priorities may change. I may actually not enjoy living this cortisol-soaked life that I live now. I just tend to have a stoic view of things, which is that you have today and are you enjoying today? Would you like today to continue tomorrow in the same vein? I’m in a very small bubble of consciousness in terms of long-term thinking because the challenge of what we’re doing — building a business across three regions — is incredibly difficult. I’m fully consumed and, on many levels, I’m meeting my own standards of living a great life. Creativity comes from adversity and I’m in such a state of constant adversity that I’m fully consumed. But, 12 years in, there’s been no real dramatic change to mine and my family’s lifestyle. Ask me that question after some major financial turn of events and hopefully I’ll answer the same, but at the moment I’m hungry as hell and loving it. 

This article first appeared in the February 2026 edition of Watch Insider magazine.