Why servicing is important to us
You know when you land at an airport and there are only one or two passport control booths open, even though they know exactly how many planes are arriving and how many people are on board? You can’t help thinking: why hasn’t someone joined the dots and staffed this properly, rather than maximum wait times and inconvenience?
Watch servicing is a bit like passport control… and also not at all!
When a watch company has thousands or millions of watches out in the world, there’s simply no way of knowing how many will arrive at the service department on any given day. Unlike airport passport control, the numbers are a complete lottery. Some days a handful arrive, other days dozens turn up in every imaginable condition: well cared for, heavily abused, badly “repaired” by someone else, or occasionally just a bag of parts and, very rarely, in a sock!
Add in complex automatic movements and a plethora of minute component spares and you have a recipe for getting bogged down very quickly.
“You may not know that Alex (Alex Brown Co-Founder) and I met because of watch servicing. We had an extreme sports brand that was selling thousands of watches and were farming out our servicing function to a specialist in London’s Clerkenwell. For our other products, we were used to providing fast, efficient turnaround, but farming it out made us anxious, even if the service was actually really good. So… we approached Alex who was clearly a very talented horologist at the service operation and asked if he fancied joining us in Dorset to run our watch servicing dept and also advise the designers on what was and wasn’t possible in their watch design ambitions.”
“Famously, Alex turned down another opportunity he had secured with Cartier to make the move to Dorset and over the years we became great friends. In our time at that first business, we saw, experienced and corrected everything that could ever happen to a watch, thousands of them. That not only allowed us to have the conversations about starting Elliot Brown, but setting up the most efficient servicing department from day one was totally natural. All we knew was to treat people like we would wish to be treated ourselves.” ~ Ian Elliot Co-Founder.
Back to passport control. As we said before, unlike airports, we don’t know what’s coming through the door each day, but what we can do is resource for the busiest periods, not the quietest. That way, every calm day is a bonus. Sure there are a few exceptions but our norm doesn’t seem so normal.
It still amazes us when brands with decades of experience boast about “industry-leading” service times of four to six weeks. Imagine taking your car in for a service and being told they’ll need it for six weeks. You’d walk straight out.
The maths is simple: understand how long jobs take, how many watches arrive on average, and resource accordingly. Whether service time is measured in days, weeks or months is a choice. We choose one to two weeks. Many watches are turned around in days, sometimes even while you wait. Fully serviced, tested, and ready for the next round of daily abuse.
It’s a state of mind and every watch business has the same choice. If the servicing time stretches months into the horizon, that is down to the brand to invest in sufficient resources (or not) to turn your watch around quickly. As one of our friendly British brands states, “do your research.”
Are you getting the gist that we’re a little bit frustrated with how our industry treats its customers? Don’t even get us started on service pricing.
Most of us wince at a car service bill, forgetting that we caused the wear by driving it. Watch servicing is no different. Yet when a watch has been away for months, there’s an assumption that loads of work must have been done. Often, that’s not the case.
Delivering delight to keep it ticking
“I’d like to put this out there, we don’t make money out of watch servicing. Our choice is not only to allow sufficient resources to turn your watch around fast, but it’s to only charge what it costs, so instead of anxiety, there’s genuine delight when we reveal the cost of a new crystal, a movement service or battery refresh, seals and pressure test. Not only that, we send every watch out in a protective servicing case via next day delivery (UK shipments) that you can re-use time and again.
These are all choices we made at our previous business and have carried over. To us they are normal, to our customers the service reviews are exceptional and that’s the way it’ll stay.” ~ Ian Elliot Co-Founder.
As we expand, new challenges arise, both at home and internationally. In the USA, we searched hard for a partner who shared our ethos, which is why we’re proud to work with Grand Central in New York. A highly respected retailer and service operation, and one we’re delighted to recommend to our US customers.
If you have any questions about loving your watch and keeping it ticking, everything you need to know about our servicing can all be found here.
