SPOTLIGHT: Nomadic puts Belfast watchmaking on the map

Founded in Belfast in 2021 by founder Peter McAuley, independent Northern Irish watch brand Nomadic Watches has achieved more in five years than many accomplish in five decades. Inspired, but not limited, by the Titanic and Belfast’s general shipbuilding heritage, McAuley spoke with Watch Insider’s Daniel Malins about his one-man mission to put Belfast watchmaking on the map.

Watch Insider: As a starting point, can you sum up how the whole Nomadic project came to be?

Peter McAuley: Everybody knows the big Swiss brands and there’s a whole host of really strong British brands, but there isn’t really an Irish brand, and that’s where I saw a gap in the market. I thought there’s a story to be told and we could be telling that story with our watches. That was the crux of the idea.

Then, I put together my first watch and kept it very classical in terms of the designs, but brought in enough subtle elements of Irish history and design. I used to sit in the Titanic Hotel to design the initial watches, which used to be the former drawing offices of Harland & Wolff, where the Titanic was built. So, I just drew on a little bit of that inspiration and heritage to put together the first pieces and launched it into the world and people loved it. That gave me the confidence to go full time into it, and the brand kind of exploded.

WI: And how organic has that growth been? It’s one thing to be a hobbyist in the evening, drawing some sketches, but when you start to scale there are huge opportunities and enormous cost implications. 

PM: It took about a year and a half to two years of doing it as a side project before deciding to go all in on it. Going back in time to that, it was probably a bit of a scary moment. I had two young children, my daughter was about four weeks old, so going home to say to my wife and saying: “I’m going all in on this, let’s do it,” was probably perceived as a bit of a risk. But I had the confidence that we had tested it enough and that enough people were giving us great feedback and coming back to buy again so we knew the product was good. It just needed a bit of focus to tell more people about it, and that’s where I decided to go. So, it was slow and steady at the start and then once going all in and hiring some great team members into the business, we were able to scale it.

At the start it was just me on my own — no outside capital, no major investors, and we’ve kept it that way up to this point. It’s all been entirely self-funded through the business. All the profits we make, we just put straight back into the business to develop new products, to expand the footprint, to invest into retail. We took on a little bit of debt last year, but we haven’t taken on any investment in terms of equity yet. That allows us to maintain full creative control and do what we want to do without having to answer to an external board. Maybe there’ll come a time where outside capital is needed to take it to the next level, but we haven’t reached that point just yet.

I’m sitting now in our headquarters in the city centre of Belfast looking straight onto the high street. Our office is on a mezzanine floor above the retail store, which is down below and the watchmaking is down below as well. So, when you come into the retail store, there’s a glass wall at the back and you can see the watchmakers working on the pieces and actually hand-assembling everything here. It makes it that real piece of theatre when you come in. It’s not just about buying a watch, you’re getting the full experience, and it makes it quite immersive. We invested about a million pounds into this facility to make this work and make it what it is.

WI: One of the last things brands tend to do is create a retail environment because of the costs attached to it and you’ve got to have a certain amount of brand equity to have any resonance in the market. What made you dive in so quickly, and would you consider broadening the product offering to other brands so that the store has more operational independence?

PM: We’re building a brand and we want this to be a brand that’s here for 100 years, not to make a quick profit on selling other people’s products through retail. Retail is a great business model, but that’s not the primary focus of the business. We’ve invested so much into this particular retail store because it’s our flagship headquarters. We need to have an office somewhere, we need to have watchmaking somewhere, so why not create it into this incredible retail experience as well and put it onto the high street? And we probably benefit a little bit from the location because Belfast is a great, vibrant city, but it’s still relatively small compared to London, Dublin, Manchester, so rents and things are not what they are in those sorts of places.

We had clients last month fly in from California specifically to come and visit us to buy a Nomadic and take it home with them. And then last week we had a similar client from Arizona who had flown in specifically to come to this destination to see this store, to experience it, see our watchmakers, and again left with a few watches. They could have stayed in Canada to buy a Tissot or a Longines, but they’re choosing to get on a plane and fly for eight hours to come and see us here at Nomadic.

Retail is a whole different business model to a watch brand, and there’s probably a lot more nuances to it. I’ve worked in retail before, my family used to own a small newsagent shop. We want to have a complete flagship store that is just Nomadic, so it creates that experience and helps increase our brand’s awareness and perception, and then in other key cities where we’re maybe not quite as well known — in London, say — it might not make sense to have a flagship Nomadic store, but we would then work with a retail partner to have us in alongside the other brands.

In Dublin, for instance, we have a retailer called Weir & Sons. They’re one of the major players in that market, and we’re shown amongst Hamilton, Tissot, and Bremont, and that helps us gain that brand awareness and credibility in a multi-brand store. I think it would be a bit of a stretch for us to pivot and enter multi-channel, multi-brand retail as a business model. For us, it would be too much management, time, and attention in a separate thing, but that’s where we’d work with retail partners.

WI: In terms of your Irish roots and that being a key part of the inspiration behind the brand, people love a backstory and it helps to make you stand out in a very crowded market. But I wonder to what extent it also becomes a glass ceiling because that Irish story may only resonate up to a certain point with collectors?

PM: 100%, I think that’s a great point and it is something that we think about. Having our brand deeply rooted in Belfast and in Ireland is great to kind of anchor the brand and it sets us in our own category, but as we grow into international markets, it becomes less and less relevant, and that’s where the product still has to be incredible. The designs still have to be great, it has to wear well, people have to enjoy it, the product has to speak for itself.

Even with the name Nomadic, it links through to the SS Nomadic, which was the tender ship to Titanic, so there’s a cool little backstory with that. But on its own, the name Nomadic is just a cool-sounding, rugged, adventurous name that translates globally and people resonate with that, so if you’ve no connection to Ireland whatsoever, Nomadic is still a cool brand that translates.

As we grow globally, the message is more around having incredible products and having great customer service and “Oh, by the way, they happen to be made in Ireland as well.” That’s just another point of differentiation, it’s not necessarily the main thing that we will always lead with, but it will always be central to the DNA of the brand.

WI: In terms of the wholesale operation, internationally it comes with a lot of high pressure decisions and cost implications. Where are you at with it now and how do you see your international retail network expanding in the coming years?

PM: It’s still something that we’re fully trying to understand as a business and how well it works for us. Because yes, there are major cost implications. Retailers need a lot of margin for it to make sense for them, and it has to make sense for everyone. You have to also market the brand in those new territories as well, so there are definitely challenges to it. 

But with watches, they are such a tactile thing; people love to get hands on with them. I think it’s great to be able to buy a watch online anywhere in the world, but I think it’s nice to be able to have seen one, held it, and got to touch it first before you maybe take the plunge. Our price point is not the most expensive watch out there, but it’s certainly not the cheapest and it’s a considered purchase. You want to think about it a little bit before you just spend that sort of money.

Having retailers in key cities across the globe we see as being important to building the brand, and what we’ve seen so far is that it also boosts our e-commerce in those territories. Right now, we’ve got a retailer in Dublin, one in Dubai, and then two in the US. We’ve seen so far that when we activate a retailer, it helps that very local market, but it also boosts e-commerce sales in the wider area near it, because it gives people a little bit more trust that there’s a physical store there. I can go and try one on, or, if I don’t quite like it, there’s somewhere I can go and speak to a human and deal with someone face to face. That helps build credibility and trust.

We see it as part of an omni-channel strategy that we have a presence in the key markets we want to play in, but that will help us drive e-commerce sales as well.

WI: In terms of the operation behind the scenes, how different does it look now compared to when you started out? The challenges you faced on day one must be wildly different to the challenges that you face now?

PM: Definitely. It’s about constantly growing and evolving and adapting to those new challenges. Like they say in business: “New levels, new devils.” That’s definitely been the case as we’ve grown. Right at the start, the biggest challenge is just building trust and credibility with the audience, because you’re a one-man band. It’s difficult to get someone to make a significant purchase, particularly when you don’t have that history and heritage. As we’ve built those early adopters and they’ve given us feedback and built reviews, that has gradually scaled.

Right now, as we grow, it’s about getting incredible subject matter experts who are much better at any one individual role than I am. When you hire a watchmaker, that elevates the brand straight away; hiring a salesperson, that helps straight away. Every time we add in a marketing manager, that takes the brand to a whole new level, or an operations manager. Every time we make new hires, it just boosts the overall business so much more.

During the early stages, it feels scary when you’re taking on those hires, the overheads, the risks, and making payroll every month. You still have those real struggles of growing that small business, but we’ve seen those pay off pretty much every time, and if we’ve made any mistake running it so far, it’s probably not been hiring people soon enough. 

WI: How have you used social media from day one? It’s often seen as an easier gateway to gain access to a certain community today versus 30 years ago, but also to what extent can that become a bit of a distraction because of the different views from your fans on what Nomadic should be doing next?

PM: In terms of how we utilise social media and how important it is as part of our marketing mix, it’s a very important channel for us. It is the core area where we build initial brand awareness and it definitely helps. Especially right at the very start, it was the only thing we had and it was totally organic. We had a lot of DMs [direct messages] and personal conversations, one-to-one with people. Then, as we’ve gradually grown and you add a little bit of paid ad spend on those channels, that helps push the brand further and more people see it and become aware of it.

For us, it’s an important channel, but it’s not the only one. I don’t know if it’s easier nowadays to get in front of more people than it was 30 years before social media. In some ways it is, yes, but it also means that there are zero barriers to entry for competitors, so it becomes a very crowded space and it’s very noisy. It’s never been easier to get in front of people, but it’s also never been easier for people to ignore and swipe past your stuff.

What we find has worked really well is blending a social media strategy with a physical marketing campaign. For example, in our local market here in Belfast, we have a large physical clock at the airport. When you land at Belfast City Airport, the first thing you see when you get off the plane is a big giant Nomadic clock. Then, as you walk in, you maybe get hit with an ad, you’ll see it on Facebook, then you’ll look and see our Instagram post, and you’ll be like: “These guys are everywhere.” We find that if you see it on social media, it looks great, but when you see it physically on a billboard or something like that, it adds an additional layer of credibility that takes it to the next level. We blend those channels together and we don’t forget about traditional media channels and print advertising. Seeing it in a beautiful glossy magazine is a whole other layer of credibility compared to how anyone could put up an Instagram post. People know that it has taken a lot of work and effort to get into a serious publication or into a big physical brand activation. I think meaningful connections with people matter more and more now, in the age of AI.

To answer the second part of your question about how important it is to listen to the community, we listen to all of the feedback that we get, though we do take it with a pinch of salt. It’s very easy to get trolls and haters out there, and we don’t really pay too much attention to that side of things. We have a little Facebook community called the Nomadic Watches Enthusiasts Facebook group, which was just set up by one of our fans. I think there’s now a couple of thousand members, and people that buy our watches join the group. We listen to the feedback much more in there because it’s our core audience.

An example of that is when we launched our expedition-style watch, a lot of people gave us feedback that the hands were too short and that it would look a bit more aesthetically complete if the hands were longer. So we redesigned the watch and re-released it with a longer handset, improved the case and proportions a little bit, and tweaked the bracelet, and it’s been really well received. People give us this feedback and we listen to it and act on it.

But also, sometimes I’m reminded of the famous Henry Ford quote, which is something along the lines of: “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” There’s a little bit of that where sometimes people don’t quite know what they want until you show it to them. We have to stay true to what we believe is the right thing to do. When we design a product, we’ve spent hours and hours with people who know what they’re doing, pouring their heart into a piece.

WI: If you could think of the biggest challenges you foresee for the next six to 18 months, what would those challenges look like? And also, where do you see success coming? And by what criteria would you define success?

PM: I love that question. Our mission is to put Ireland on the map for watchmaking, so we define everything we do against that as our North Star. If we’re looking at success, we would want to see more global recognition. So if you were to ask someone in the US to think about Ireland and think about a watch brand, they would name Nomadic in the same way that if you thought about England and a watch brand, you might say Bremont or Christopher Ward. We want to have that sort of level of recognition here — that’s how we would measure ourselves.

One of the challenges is that we’re doing watchmaking the hard way in some regards. There are not that many other brands at our size, scale, or age — at five years, that are doing watch assembly in-house. I think it’s because it is a little bit difficult to do so almost everyone outsources it to Switzerland or the far East, but we want to bring it in because it gives us more control over the quality and control how many units we produce, plus it gives us a lot more authenticity as well.

Another one of our biggest challenges right now, and probably over the next couple of years, is going to be hiring enough watchmaking talent. We’ve got three incredible watchmakers in-house, but what we’re finding is that there aren’t a whole lot of experts here in our local catchment area. What we’re doing is building nearly a mini watchmaking school within the team so that we can take people who are interested and passionate about it, who maybe have the basic requirements like a steady hand, a lot of patience, and a lot of enthusiasm for watches, and then we can teach them how to do what we need in terms of building a watch of our calibre.

We’re nearly building that as a training school internally, and that’s kind of our biggest challenge for the next 16 months — making sure that as we grow the brand and grow the audience for it, we back it up with an incredible level of quality, service, and great watches. That’s nearly the biggest constraint. We’re growing quite fast, but we’re pulling back a little bit so that we can maintain the quality standards at a super high level.

WI: Would there be any government support or support from an industry body for that sort of thing, or would it just be you doing it because ultimately you benefit?

PM: That’s a good question. We are supported a little bit by Invest NI, which is our local industry funding body. That’s helped us a little bit with some stuff. There’s probably more that we could reach out and ask for from other government organisations, but I think the bulk of the burden falls on us to do it. If we were waiting around to have government backing for everything that we do, we wouldn’t have started the business.

We have to take responsibility and ownership of that. We’re passionate about the people from here, and we’ve got some incredibly skilled people, so we’ve just got to show them how to do something on a slightly smaller scale, and we’re there.

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