Mr Giles English, cofounder, Bremont

Messrs Nick and Giles English’s “‘chocks away” aviator sprit was potent from take-off in 2007. Their first interviews were held at their late father’s vintage-aircraft firm’s Battle of Britain Nissen hut with mugs of tea and biscuits. Fifteen years of full-bore expansion later and the brothers now have a rather shinier curved roof over their heads: a multi-million pound factory near Henley-on-Thames called The Wing, which makes cases and several parts of their new in-house movement in the most cutting-edge fashion. The PG Tips has been swapped for Gusbourne English sparkling wine.

“It’s incredibly easy to underestimate the challenges if you want to own your intellectual property and move up the food chain,” Giles English says. “At the start, we thought we’d be selling watches within a couple of years. That turned out to be five years. It was another three before we were assembling them ourselves.

“If I could give my younger self any advice, it would be to pep myself up about how hard it will be and explain how to spot a truly great engineer, because they’re the people you’ll need.”

Bremont has been investing in its own machinery and expertise and trading knowledge and swapping engineering tips with the nearby Williams F1 team. It would have been easier to rely on Swiss suppliers, but that is to miss the point.

“It’s been our mission to bring watchmaking back to the UK from day one,” English says, “but we couldn’t grow in the first place without control of our supply chain. If you want your case made in Switzerland, you go to one of the big groups, which ultimately harbours one of your competitors, so you go to the back of the queue.”

Mr Carlos-Antonio Rosillo, cofounder, Bell & Ross

French-designed, Swiss-made Bell & Ross needs little introduction. More than 30 years of age, it is the old man of the new wave, which lends some philosophical expansiveness to its cofounder and CEO Mr Carlos-Antonio “Ross” Rosillo. In 1992, he joined forces with his childhood friend and brand creative director Mr Bruno “Bell” Belamich to reimagine how military, astronautical and civil special forces keep time during their operations.

“Sometimes, it’s easy to consider that being just you in an established industry is difficult, that it handicaps you,” says Rosillo. “I like to think of our brand as a separate human being. And at the start, there is nothing happier than a newborn baby, especially when it has fond parents.”

That fondness translates to how he and Belamich nurtured the Bell & Ross brand from the outset. “We established the logo, the collections, our baby,” he says. “And then we grew the family, surrounding it with love: a godfather in Lothar Schmidt, who had just bought [early manufacturing partner, the German watch brand] Sinn and then a godmother in Chanel, which invested in 1997.

“The trouble was that when our baby arrived, everyone from Le Figaro to Vogue, the FT, they all thought we were this big brand. We were, as the French say, bien né or well born. They thought the people behind Bell & Ross were, like, Nasa, not just two guys. We couldn’t cope with the demand, but like any child with a gift, it’s very hard not to encourage that gift to grow too fast.

“You learn from the lessons of your failures. They give you better and longer lasting comprehension of who you are. At the start, Bruno and I had such high aspirations. We went to these points of sale that carried Patek Philippe and the like. We were pitching at the very peak of luxury. We didn’t care enough about getting the sales.”

Chanel’s investment enabled Bell & Ross to move into a gleaming new factory in the Swiss town of La Chaux-de-Fonds. It was a bold move for a French newcomer, but Rosillo learnt fast. “In the beginning we didn’t know much about Swiss culture, but we respected it – and them – a lot,” he says. “Combining a bit of Parisian creativity and coolness with their knowledge brought the best of both worlds.”

Mr Edouard Meylan, CEO, H. Moser & Cie.

The 21st-century H. Moser & Cie. is not so much a start-up as a jump-start. The brand, which dates back more than a century, was first revived in 2006 and racked up disastrous losses. Then, in 2013, Mr Georges-Henri Meylan came to the rescue. The former CEO of Audemars Piguet appointed his charismatically rebellious son, Mr Edouard Meylan, to the helm.

“I remember listening to my father 20 or 30 years ago, saying the industry’s a mess,” Edouard Meylan says. “And in a way it still is. The pandemic really hit capacities, which means with such strong market resurgence yet so many small-scale suppliers who couldn’t anticipate anything, we have a perfect storm of supply chain issues.”

Meylan and his team’s take on Mr Heinrich Moser’s approach to horological industrialisation in the 19th century remains refined but, importantly, agitante on every other front. Think in-house mastery of hairspring manufacture and top-class tourbillons allied with notorious PR stunts such as a one-off watch made of cheese that poked fun at the concept of 100 per cent Swiss-made watches.

“The people in our industry take themselves very seriously,” he says with typical verve, “never referring to their peers. We changed this when we took over in 2013. We inherited some issues with quality and reliability, but we also inherited a treasure of products. It was just me and my brother, in our thirties, needing to bring something modern and sexy, to bridge the traditional with the modern.”

One look at Moser’s sleek Streamliner sports watch is all you need to understand this new approach to the top end of watchmaking. “I just wish I’d been brave enough to move into the sporty acceleration point sooner,” Meylan says. “We stayed classic too long.”

Mr Benoît Mintiens, founder, Ressence

Mr Benoît Mintiens was still working at a design consultancy in his hometown of Antwerp, Belgium, when he quietly launched Ressence in 2010. It was a stark contrast to the new generation of electricity pylons he was draughting for the Belgian countryside, but not dissimilar in terms of brief: lack of obtrusion.

Like old regulator clocks, which separated out the hours, minutes and seconds dials to adjust your pocket watch, Mintiens did the same on a watch dial, separating each unit of time into its own display, laying it all flat and allowing the whole dial to rotate.

This approach was helped by his disconnect from the traditional world of watchmaking, but it was this disconnect that also planted the seed of doubt.

“It was possible to do this sort of display 50 years ago, so I didn’t think my idea was a shocking thing or novel,” he says. “I was nervous because when I took out the patent, I worried it existed already.”

It didn’t. Ressence blossomed on the indie scene. Mintiens found himself overwhelmed by support from incumbent characters such as Urwerk and MB&F, brands he assumed would be dismissive. “My first year at Baselworld trade fair, they came up and said, ‘How can we help you?’”

His biggest lesson was not to rush. This decision was informed by a previous business venture with university friends: a mobile petrol station called Pitshop, that could be rented by Belgian roadside stops while they upgraded their forecourts. “We lost a lot of money because someone didn’t pay us. That failure taught me the most important lesson: you do things slowly,” says Mintiens. “It’s why I kept my day job at the start. But also, if you don’t do it, you will regret it.”