What's the Beachmaster like to live with?
As the co-founders of Elliot Brown, we know first-hand what it takes to craft a watch you can rely on without question. The Beachmasters we wear have become part of our lives, worn on adventures, everyday tasks, and unexpected situations that have occasionally pushed us and our watches to their limits.
It took us four years of honing to deliver on our self-imposed brief, from the ultra-resilient build to the easy functions that get us through our days, it’s proven to be a watch we not only depend on but have personally come to love.
The Beachmaster isn't any old watch or just about telling the time, it’s about having a watch that tells a story — one that we’re proud to share with you.
Here are our own very personal experiences of wearing the Beachmaster and what it means to us:
IAN ELLIOT
I remember strapping on the very first prototype bronze Beachmaster more than three years after we first began working on it. It had taken so much to bring it to life that I shed a happy tear and couldn’t stop looking at it. It really meant something to finally have it on my wrist. That very same watch hasn’t left my side for more than a few days in the three years since, and giving it up to take the images for this article felt slightly uncomfortable. And that’s as someone who has the choice of any watch in our collections!
About the same time as I acquired the prototype, I took up wing foiling so it gets strapped over my wetsuit using the adjustable bracelet every time I'm on the water. It was with me in the Alps this summer when I came off on an MTB downhill course, landed head first and managed to bend the webbing clamp buckle on the strap I was testing in the process. The watch? Covered in clay and gravel and having had a significant scrape down a rocky path.. absolutely fine. The owner? Not so fine.
It's been with me around the world, the GMT function coming into its own and it has shrugged off timing more events than I can remember. It's held its own at some incredibly prestigious events from formal to tropical paradises yet it seems to be in airports and at the beach that I get asked about it the most.
I’m currently missing it like mad, about to go away for a week without it and so far today I’ve worn four different watches deciding what to replace it with (Holton Auto if you must know). Funny things watches, once one has been with you on adventures and survived a few near misses, over a period of time the bond between watch and human seems to grow beyond anything you could describe rationally, with fond memories and a fingerprint all of its own. The bond between me and my original prototype Beachmaster is stronger than any watch I have owned.
ALEX BROWN
"We always say that design takes us a while and the Beachmaster project was no exception. The initial request and design work started in 2018 and a mere 1000 days later, we had our initial prototypes to trial, after several false starts trying to finesse the complex case machining to our standard.
Although they’re outwardly very similar to the production watches available today, there was some fine-tuning we felt necessary for the production models. We made the crowns a little larger and grippier, we made the arrow markers on the GMT a little larger with more area for the luminous infill and we were able to make final haptic tweaks to the action of the click-lock timing crown. The prototypes arrived with us in November 2021 and I’ve worn mine, a steel model 0H0-A01-B07 almost every day since.
Here are my very subjective thoughts over that period:
Although I wearer-trial all our new models as soon as they’re made, I keep going back to my well-worn Beachmaster prototype. As an all day, every day, go anywhere, do anything watch I love it. I’ve got a soft spot for the new Holton GMT automatic, but my Beachmaster proto remains the high watermark.
It’s smart enough to wear wherever whatever, and despite some fairly rough treatment, the movement runs within COSC specs week after week. The countdown outer bezel (as opposed to the count-up bezel on the Holton for example) works brilliantly and gets used a lot. I don’t use the inner timing bezel so often but when I do, the click lock means it stays put – important when you’re timing over hours and hours.
I usually wear our webbing straps on my watches, but the B07 bracelet is fluid and comfortable day in, day out and the ratchet micro-adjust buckle is a treat when it’s hot and you need a little more breathing room.
The dual colour luminous works well, glowing well into the night, holding its own even against the mighty Holton. The sapphire glass is unmarked and there’s only a small scuff on the bezel at 6 that shows its thousands of hours of wear. The hands are easy to read at a glance and the GMT hand is there when I want it but doesn’t distract me when I don’t.
After thousands of hours of wear, the overall design still feels really well resolved and comforting and equally importantly, nothing ‘grates, even after years of wear - there’s nothing I wish we’d done differently."
These images haven't been edited. They are raw and natural to deliberately show how our watches have taken the knocks and abuse we treat them to. Making watches capable of standing up to our lifestyles is why we set up the business in the first place - good to know we're still on point.
