COMMENT
COULD SOMEONE PLEASE HURRY UP AND INVENT SOCIAL NETWORKING SO WE CAN PROMOTE OURSELVES A BIT…
Mike says: “People would also be paying a huge amount for high profile brands’ marketing campaigns.” You’ll have seen promotions of various luxury brands with celebrities fronting them and this type of campaign doesn’t come cheap.
The internet gave the fledgling Christopher Ward the chance to get away from that, although the web wasn’t as widespread as it would later become. This was why an ad for one of it’s first watches, the C5 Malvern Automatic, ended up on the pages of UK newspaper, The Independent. The idea was that you bought the watch direct from the manufacturer, cutting out the middle people, so you’d end up spending a lot less on your timepiece.
The C5, then one of the only two watches Christopher Ward made, had an ETA 2824-2 calibre automatic movement. In watchspeak this means good quality, and under the normal retail pattern it would have cost between £500-£2000, Mike estimates. This one was sold for £175. It went steadily and then there was a sudden uptick in the sales. People were suddenly interested and the staff and founders at Christopher Ward didn’t know why. The answer was that Timezone
didn’t believe what customers were getting for the price. Let’s be more specific. A particular member of Timezone didn’t believe it. Dave Malone had become a highly influential watch blogger. He looked at the price and he considered that the watch was too cheap for the quality of the components. He bought one, took it to pieces and found that the movement as well as the other luxury parts the company was claiming to use were genuine. “To his credit, having set out to knock us down, he published a completely accurate review on Timezone,” explains Mike. He was influential. Other people
To his credit, having set out to knock us down, he published a completely accurate review
started to take notice and put their orders in, and by Christmas 2005 Christopher Ward watches were attracting more mentions on the Timezone forum than Rolex. Then someone else on
Timezone didn’t believe it. And the bad news is that it was the owner/moderator who was suspicious. You can see where he
was coming from. He assumed that Christopher
Ward must be buying off these forum participants, and removed them from the forum. Of course, Timezone is completely free to run the forum
exactly how it chooses to, and rightly so, but a number of those removed were actually quite well respected in the watch world. They included one Hans Van Hoogstraten who was pretty annoyed, but wanted to turn his experience into something positive. He approached Christopher Ward personally to ask whether he could set up a forum dedicated to the company’s watches.
was a sudden uptick ...
It went steadily... then there
The company now realised what had caused the sales spike around Christmas 2005 and, whether by accident or by design, the company started to get some of the basics spectacularly right. “We agreed that Van Hoogstraten could do a dedicated forum and that we’d link to it. But it had to be properly independent – we weren’t going to sponsor it,” says Mike.
By insisting the forum should be independent the company ensured the forum’s longevity and success. “We do support it,” says Mike. “We comment sometimes, share new designs and listen to the feedback – positive and negative.” In fact, in allowing and insisting on the negative feedback as well as the positive, the company has
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