Christine Borg-Mirza

Totally immersed in the luxury world of watches and jewellery.

[Bremont @Bremont]

Have you ever visited, The Wing, Bremont HQ?

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

A Watch and Investment Story Part II

Nearly eight months ago, I wrote a post about my personal investment in @Bremont, a British watchmaker, in which I became Non-executive Chairman, and along with affiliates, became controlling shareholder in April of this year. My investment was spontaneous, inspired by a positive sales experience and the inspired purchase of a number of watches at the company’s Mayfair, London boutique three years ago.

In my introductory post, I promised to provide periodic updates of our progress toward our goal of transforming Bremont into an iconic watch company. Here is our first progress update:

New Board
I have long believed that the success or failure of a company is largely determined by the board. To that end, I recruited a new board. The directors are:

David Berkowitz, Chief Investment Officer, KFO, LLC, the Seth Klarman family office

Davide Cerrato, CEO of Bremont, formerly CEO HYT, Managing Director Watch Division Mont Blanc, Head of Marketing, Design and Product Development at Tudor

Ian Goldberg, Partner at Venrex, a venture capital firm. Ian is a representative of Bremont’s other major shareholder

Andrew Haimovici, my Harvard-educated nephew who previously spent two years working in various roles at Bremont.

Francesca Leone, formerly Chief Brand Officer of Michael Kors with previous Global Communication roles at Valentino, Bulgari, and Hermes

Martin Parker, formerly Director World Service at Rolex and previously International Customer Service Director at Patek Philippe

Larry Pettinelli, who spent more than three decades at Patek Philippe USA, culminating as CEO

New Senior Leadership Team
We have also recently completed the recruitment of our senior executive team. In addition to our CEO Davide Cerrato, the senior executive team includes:

Elen Barnes, Chief Marketing Officer, previously Global Brand Director of Tag Heuer, formerly CMO of Bang & Olufsen

Christoph Bippus, Chief Operations Officer, with two decades of experience at Richemont Group, most recently as Associate Director Customer Service for IWC

Laura Collins, Chief People Officer, formerly HR Lead Consultant at Willow HR

Cos Hayret, Chief Product Development Officer, formerly Watch Development Manager at Montblanc

Stephane Pichavant, Chief Commercial Officer, who previously spent 15 years at LVMH Watches and Jewelry, most recently as Global Sales Director for Tag Heuer

Kurt Williams, Chief Financial Officer, previously Head of Finance, Swatch Group UK and Country Manager Godiva UK

Business Progress
The first priority of management was to rationalize the product assortment so as to provide a coherent product offering for our customers while launching an entirely new product collection.

Bremont has launched three product lines, namely Terra Nova (Land), Supermarine (Sea), and Altitude (Air), watches which deliver vastly superior quality and functionality compared to similarly priced competitors.

Bremont watches are as beautiful as they are rare. Rolex produces more than one million watches per year. Bremont handcrafts fewer than 10,000. When you wear a Bremont, you are part of a small and exclusive club.

All Bremont watches are designed, developed, prototyped, assembled, tested, and serviced at our headquarters in Henley-on-Thames known as The Wing. The company has worked to continuously improve its manufacturing capabilities and is now producing superbly crafted, rugged, and reliable watches.

One of the company’s most important objectives has been to upgrade product design, quality, durability and reliability. The company now uses 904L steel (also used by Rolex) for all of its steel watches, and has introduced ceramic materials, top quality Swiss movements including a tourbillion built at the company’s Wing HQ, new distinct bracelets for each product line, the highest quality straps, and has dramatically reduced service lead times, now six weeks.

The new watches are spectacular and have been recently recognized with multiple industry awards and expert commentary. Here are a few of my favorites (photos below):

ALTITUDE MB METEOR STEALTH GREY

This is a limited edition of Bremont’s iconic pilot watch, for the first time produced in a sand-blasted F35 stealth grey finish in titanium.

TERRA NOVA JUMPING HOUR

This is the jumping hour movement in a montre a guichet style, a nod to World War I trench watches, designed to withstand the horrors of war (or an errant swipe on a door frame).

SUPERMARINE FULL CERAMIC POLAR WHITE

This is a super handsome 500-meter, ceramic watch, with a fabric strap. I wear the green ceramic as one of my daily watches.

ALTITUDE SKELETONIZED PERPETUAL CALENDAR GMT

This is a spectacularly beautiful, titanium, skeletonized, perpetual calendar, GMT watch. If Pershing Square's year finishes strong, I am getting one of these. This one comes in a limited edition of 50 pieces. I own the non-skeleton version. It is my favorite watch.

Awards
Bremont was nominated for six awards. Our Jumping Hour Bronze won Best Trend Watch

Nominations:

WatchPro Awards US (September 10)
o Prestige Watch Brand of the Year
o Best Pilot Watch (MB Meteor)

WatchPro Awards UK (September 30)
o British Watch Brand of the Year
o Prestige Watch Brand of the Year
o Best Pilot Watch (MB Meteor)

Winner: Trend Watch: Jumping Hour Bronze

Distribution
One of Bremont’s weaknesses has been limited physical distribution, particularly outside of the U.K. Management has made significant progress, particularly in the U.S., opening many new doors including The 1916 Company, Ben Bridge (owned by Berkshire Hathaway), Lux Bond & Green, and others. The company is in the process of opening new doors in Italy, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Germany, and other locations in Europe.

If you are a top watch retailer interested in carrying Bremont, please contact:

[email protected]

Our only U.S.-owned store, our New York boutique between 52nd and 53rd on Madison Avenue, has seen a more than 50% increase in sales over the last year.

Our website at https://t.co/6gN7MkN6dX continues to be an important driver of sales.

Challenges
While the company has made enormous progress over last two years, transforming a brand while the plane is flying, has been an expensive proposition.

Great brands are not built overnight. One of the benefits of Bremont now being a family-owned company with a well-capitalized controlling shareholder is that we are not subject to the typical pressures associated with private equity owners or public company shareholders.

We are taking the long-term approach in building a generationally valuable company, and are very pleased with our progress to date.

Ideas and Input
We welcome your ideas, input, and advice. To that end, we will award the best ideas with free watches. We sent a MB Meteor to @JoshBobrowsky for his excellent input. Please reply with your best ideas or email [email protected]. We will read all of the comments and replies.

Please also take a look at our Holiday Campaign Video:
https://t.co/fYIHcVBXnB

[David Sinclair @davidasinclair]

The first generation of humans to control their biological age is alive today. Think about that

[Bremont @Bremont]

Introducing the Terra Nova Jumping Hour in Steel.

Following our award winning success with the release of the Terra Nova Jumping Hour in Bronze earlier this year, discover the latest variant in 904L steel: https://t.co/FD1FfNCeZd

#Bremontwatches #BremontJumpingHour

[Christine Borg-Mirza @CBorg_Mirza]

A great post by @BillAckman and such an interesting read! Please do visit the Wing in Henley-on-Thames, it’s incredible to witness British made watches come to life in the @Bremont facility!

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

A Watch and Investment Story

I have been a watch enthusiast since my dad got me interested in watches decades ago. About three years ago, I was in London and walked by a watch boutique called @Bremont. I stepped into the store, fell in love with the watches, thought they were fairly priced if not somewhat inexpensive for the quality, and bought a number of them as gifts for friends and one for myself.

As I was completing the purchases, I asked the store manager: ‘Who owns the company?’ He said, “The English brothers” – Nick and Giles English – and then he proceeded to tell me Bremont’s origin story that begins with a tragic plane crash of a 1942 Harvard trainer aircraft (an American plane purchased by the British beginning in 1938) which killed their father and almost Nick.

In their ‘What does not kill me makes me stronger’ new world, Nick and Giles were inspired to pursue their dream of creating and building a British watch company, and Bremont thereafter was born. The manager gave me their contact information and I sent an email congratulating the brothers on the company, the brand, and the watches. I also offered to invest and help the business grow.

Sometime later, I did a Zoom with Nick. He explained that my timing was good, as a long-time investor in the company was looking to sell some of their shares. Within a couple of months, an affiliate of mine invested coinciding with the purchase by a legacy Bremont shareholder of primary shares to provide the company with additional growth capital.

I thereafter bought more shares of stock from other selling shareholders and I invested a substantial amount of additional growth capital in the company just this past week. Affiliates of mine and The Bremont Long Term Trust, a trust I recently established, now own 63% of the company.

Bremont is a luxury British watch company that produces adventure and exploration watches. About one-fourth of Bremont’s sales are to the military, where the company has made custom-designed watches for more than 500 British, U.S., and other American ally squadrons around the world.

While today there are very few British watch companies, the British actually created the watch industry – Rolex, notably, was a British company before it moved to Switzerland – with many of the most important technical innovations and complications of the industry having been invented in England in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

For the watch industry, the Swiss can be thought of like the Japanese of the U.S. auto industry, where in the early days, the Swiss made cheap imitations of British watches, but eventually by the 20th century, came to dominate the industry.

For compliance reasons, I have been limited in my personal investments to private situations, principally startups, real estate, and private equity, directly and through funds. Because of my personal time limitations, I spend very little time on these investments, but through a combination of good luck, investment experience, and a good eye for talent, my collective private investment outcomes have been excellent, with a few huge successes outweighing some disappointments.

I have always viewed my non-Pershing Square investments as an opportunity for learning and insights that I can apply to my day job. For example, I have found that closely following the venture investment world has provided important insights into disruptive technologies and companies that can soon become serious threats to even the largest and best capitalized public companies.

Experiences at small companies also very often apply to big ones, so in my hobby of making personal investments, my returns have been both financial and educational, from my successes and from my failures. Other than tennis, I don’t have any real hobbies, but perhaps my personal investing qualifies as my second passion.

To date, I have been a passive investor in @Bremont, but perhaps the activist in me caused me to step forward, to recently seize the opportunity to materially increase my investment in the company, and become the non-executive chairman of a newly refreshed board.

I don’t expect my chairman role at Bremont to take much of my time as it is a private company of limited scale, but I do expect my experience here will provide some helpful learnings and insights. I also thought it would be fun, interesting, and rewarding to take the @X community along for the ride – at least those that are interested in watches, operations, and investing. I intend to provide periodic updates of the company’s progress on @X, about our successes, our struggles, and our failures – so that we can learn and have some fun together.

Think of my periodic updates as “Drive to Survive,” but for watches on @X. “Time to Succeed”? You can probably come up with a better name for the series, and perhaps then I should reach out to @netflix to see if they are interested (while holding back my tears as I have watched the stock massively appreciate since our exit!).

Bremont can greatly benefit by your feedback so I strongly encourage you to share your insights, critiques, and other ideas about the company and its watches on @X so we can learn and improve. We will periodically award the best ideas with Bremont watches so you can have an opportunity to earn an appropriate in-kind return on your time invested in helping us succeed.

In the modern era, building an independent watch company into a major company, let alone one in the U.K., has rarely if ever occurred. The watch world is littered with many such failed attempts so it is far from guaranteed that we will succeed in building a profitable and sustainable company, let alone a major independent player.

My Investment History to Date with Bremont
Prior to my investment in the company, Nick and Giles had taken Bremont to a reasonable scale for an independently owned watch company at about £21 million in revenues with a modest operating loss, which is an incredible accomplishment for two young men with no watch industry experience.

Nick and Giles accomplishment is particularly significant in an extremely competitive industry characterized by well capitalized incumbents that control many of the top brands, e.g., Richemont, Swatch, LVMH, as well dominant, independently owned companies like Rolex, Patek Philippe, Audemars and Piguet, and a few others.

Despite their progress, both Nick and Giles and the other shareholders agreed that bringing in an executive with watch industry experience would help to take the company to the next level.

Shortly after I invested, we hired a search firm to identify and ultimately recruit our new CEO, Davide Cerrato, who joined in May of 2023. Davide’s entire career has been spent in the industry at Panerai, Tudor – where he famously created the Black Bay, Montblanc, and with a brief stent at HYT.

Davide in turn hired other industry notables to round out the executive suite, and then the team went to work with the ambitious goal of transforming Bremont into a global industry leader.

Bremont has some important competitive advantages. First and most importantly, the watches are handsome, extremely well designed, and overengineered. Davide’s team has materially upgraded materials (for example, the company now uses 904L steel for all of its steel watches – the same as Rolex – unprecedented for watches at Bremont’s price point), parts, and movements from what was already a good standard to a level comparable to watches at multiples of the price.

The watches are developed, designed, manufactured, and serviced in Henley-on-Thames using principally Swiss movements. While making its own movement is an aspirational goal for Bremont, the Swiss still make the highest quality movements so that is what Bremont uses.

Bremont has a unique brand story and heritage, particularly for a 23-year-old company, with two decades of credibility in war zones and air combat missions with the best war fighters and military pilots in the world.

Bremont also makes a limited number of watches, around 10,000 per year, compared with more than 1.2 million for Rolex and 70,000 for Patek Philippe, and scarcity drives value in luxury goods.

The combination of battlefield credibility, rarity, quality and a fair price make Bremont an extremely attractive alternative to the typical Rolex or Patek, which everyone seems to be wearing in my industry, a ubiquity in my view that loses its luster over time.

Over the past 23 months, Davide and team have redesigned and focused Bremont’s range around three core offerings in Land, Sea, and Air – the Terra Nova, the Supermarine, and the Altitude – while upgrading materials, movements, and quality, updating the logo to reflect the new Land and Sea offerings (Bremont was previously perceived to only be an aviation brand), and dramatically improving manufacturing and service. The company has extended its warranty from three to five years on its new watches reflecting these improvements.

Bremont benefits from having overinvested in its spectacular 35,000 square foot combined headquarters, manufacturing facility, and showroom in Henley-on-Thames, aka “The Wing” (email [email protected] to arrange a superb tour), with the capacity for substantial growth without the requirement for incremental capital investment.

Lastly, Bremont now has a well-capitalized long-term major owner who would like to see Bremont become a big success and achieve its vision of returning watchmaking to the UK, and who is not looking for dividends or a liquidity event in this lifetime.

I have learned over time that permanent capital and a truly long-term orientation are enormous competitive advantages for any business, and they should be very helpful here.

With respect to the product, later this morning in Geneva at Watches and Wonders, the industry’s most important trade show, the company is launching its new Altitude aviation line, which builds from the company’s highly successful Martin Baker offerings.

The company will also be introducing some complicated new watches including two unique, jumping hour models, a 12-piece new tourbillion model (the company's first 30-piece tourbillion watch sold out shortly after its launch last year), and the company’s first perpetual calendar (limited to 50 pieces).

I will be back with further updates as we continue to make progress. In the meantime, please check out https://t.co/2zsK8oeOug and visit the Wing ([email protected] ) and our boutiques in Mayfair and throughout the U.K., on Madison Avenue and 53rd Street, in Hong Kong, and in Melbourne. Pictures don’t do Bremonts justice so you should go in person and tell the store manager that I sent you.

Also, please take a look at our new launch video, and don't forget to let me know what you think.

[Christine Borg-Mirza @CBorg_Mirza]

Today I am having a proud mum day, my son has passed his Masters with a distinction in Obesity and Clinical Nutrition from UCL!

[Bremont @Bremont]

"I’ve been exploring the most rural parts of the UK for as long as I can recall...As we encourage people to get outdoors, the necessity to highlight how to do this sustainably becomes crucial."- Joe Higgins

Sustainable camping tips by Joe Higgins 👆 https://t.co/EkFGHMrTyC

[Christine Borg-Mirza @CBorg_Mirza]

England played well and gave their best, the team should be proud ! #England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

[Christine Borg-Mirza @CBorg_Mirza]

Despite the terrible weather, a lovely day was had yesterday at the Henley Royal Regatta with @Bremont wonderful to see @AlexGregoryGB

[Bremont @Bremont]

The Wayfinder - celebrating our past, present and our future.

The Wayfinder design builds upon Bremont’s founding propeller identity, overlaying the marks of a nautical compass and weaving in elements of Bremont’s home nation’s Union Flag.

Find out more:https://t.co/mEJydTMKtb

[Bremont @Bremont]

Introducing the Terra Nova collection, perfect field watches inspired by military pocket watches of the early 20th century.

Featuring a geometrical cushion case, crafted from 904L satin and polished stainless steel, the Terra Nova is #BuilttoExplore

🔗 https://t.co/HoDobaWBSo

[Bremont @Bremont]

Bremont Terra Nova - New horizons, New lands, new journeys ⛰️ Explore the collection: https://t.co/HoDobaX9HW #Bremont #Builttoexplore #Takeitfurther #Watchesandwonders2024 #WatchesandWonders

[Christine Borg-Mirza @CBorg_Mirza]

This watch oozes coolness and LOVE the fact that this new Bremont Bamford Aurora watch comes to life in the dark!!
@Bremont @BamfordDept We still have a few left, contact me directly if you want one [email protected]

[Bremont @Bremont]

Introducing the Limited Edition Bremont x Bamford ‘Aurora’ - Limited to 500 pieces.

Bremont and Bamford Watch Department present a spectacular sequel. A fusion of bold design and a passion to create the world’s greatest tool watches.

Discover the Aurora: https://t.co/jDC67urUAN

[Bremont @Bremont]

Still looking for that perfect Christmas gift?🎄

No need to panic as ‘The Wing’ boutique will be open on Saturday from 10am-3pm and you can book an appointment here.👇

https://t.co/P7IPMz9O0N

#bremont #Christmas #TheWing

[Christine Borg-Mirza @CBorg_Mirza]

Last chance to boom your appointment this week with the @bremont team, and yes this week we are open on Saturday from 10am to 3pm! Call us on (0)800 817 4281 we would be delighted to talk through our collection in store!

[Christine Borg-Mirza @CBorg_Mirza]

Please message me directly if you would like to browse our @bremont collections this Saturday or next? I would be delighted to meet you.

[Bremont @Bremont]

Come shop with us at Bremont HQ 'The Wing' every Saturday 10am-3pm until Christmas to shop your favourite festive gifts.

Book an appointment with the team: https://t.co/P7IPMz9O0N

See you soon!

[Christine Borg-Mirza @CBorg_Mirza]

This should not require debating, The Parthenon Marbles must be returned to Greece!!
https://t.co/GUv6qrJwN3

[Christine Borg-Mirza @CBorg_Mirza]

Come on England! #Rugby #rugbyworldcup2023

[Bremont @Bremont]

The rain won’t stop us! Come and take shelter at the Bremont Boutique this weekend and check out a selection of Bremont’s Military & Special Project watches, at @airtattoo ✈️
@BremontMilitary

[Christine Borg-Mirza @CBorg_Mirza]

My son Stefano known as Skizzy, produced this new drum and bass beat, take a listen. For more of his work, check him out on Instagram @prod_skizzy