There are watches and there are “themed” watches. The latter, gimmick brands that spring up on Kickstarter, have generally not gone over well with watch enthusiasts, in part because they’re a dime a dozen, but also because they’ve created a large community of burned micro-investors. Only a tiny sliver of these brands succeeds.
So one might be initially skeptical of William Wood watches, which feature crowns made from melted 100-year-old British brass firefighter helmets and straps of upcycled firefighting hose. And yet, these ebullient, eye-catching watches — a love letter from founder Jonny Garrett to his grandfather, a veteran of the British Firefighting Services — have been embraced by watch lovers.
The enthusiastic response to the seven-year-old brand has freed Garrett from the Kickstarter platform and launched him into the conversation of great British indie watchmakers like Paul Sweetenham of Farer, Lewis Heath of AnOrdain and Mike France of Christopher Ward.
William Wood watches are a study in texture and color. Their domed crystals, big colors (majestic purple, for the Queen’s Jubilee) and checkerboard chapter rings are all flash and glam. Their cases are chunky and classical.
Then there are the straps, hand-stitched out of used firehose. The stuff just happens to make for a great silicone-esque material, with the scratches, marks and patina watch nerds love.
“It’s like being in a candy store,” says Garrett with an infectious smile. “People don’t realize how hard it is to source used firehose. We get them from fire stations around the world.”
He then lists a bevy of different colors and their sources: purple from the Japanese Fire Service, desert tan from the British Fire Service, red from the U.S. Fire Administration. “Every color has a different meaning to its fire service.”
Garrett’s pride in his family’s firefighting history — in 1966, he tells me, his grandfather Billy Wood saved five children trapped in a burning building — has clearly bled into the watches he’s created. His design language is personal and confident. “If I like it,” he theorizes, “surely someone else in the world is going to like it.”
That energy is a far cry from the kind he had working at a bank in his 20s. An aspiring entrepreneur his whole life, Garrett began to feel something was off in 2014.
“The job I was doing was quite square,” he says. “You really tie yourself into knots, you know, when something like that isn’t right in your life. It’s actually painful. And I had a wacky, crazy, blue-sky idea at the bank. And the day I had that thought and realized I was going to go make William Wood, that burning itch suddenly felt almost comforting.”
Two years later, he successfully funded the Chivalrous series of Swiss quartz dress watches. His next launch was the Valiant series of higher-end Swiss mechanical dive watches. They’ve since been joined by three other watches, all of which can be bought online and at select retailers.
But that’s not all. The brand contributes a portion of proceeds to firefighting charities, and has already donated more than £100,000 ($118,000-plus). Garrett is “90 percent sure” William Wood watches will someday soon be assembled in Great Britain. He also aspires to refurbish an old fire station and turn it into a William Wood boutique. Ambitious, yes, but we wouldn’t bet against him.
“I do this in honor of something that touched my life the most — that was my grandfather,” he says. “Pride. I feel a lot of pride, knowing my grandfather’s name is on the dial.”
