Horological Meandering

'Officially Certified' Customised Watches - Hands-On with Bamford-modified Zenith Watches: Huge Potential (Yet Still Not Perfect)!

 

Fancy expressing your own aesthetic creativity on a timepiece while still retaining the full warranty and factory service support? What appears to be a recognised customer desire for haute horlogerie timepieces is now also available a market segment below, thanks for the newly forged partnership with established watch customiser Bamford Watch Department. Our hands-on session with a few select pieces shows the potential, but also exposes that the collaboration has yet to reach its full potential.

With the recent proliferation of active manufacturers, increasingly abundant in-house movements and thus also a much greater number of available references to chose from, more and more potential buyers of fine watches demand more individuality that allows them to distinguish themselves further from the mainstream market.

However, watch brands so far were little inclined to entertain such requests - for a number of reasons, such as fear of diluting their carefully groomed brand identity, logistical implications (overheads on unique pieces are quite high) of lack of managerial capacities.

Sure, knocking at the door of one of the certainly more accommodating independent watchmakers would be an option, but not for everyone. Watches are matters of taste, trust and availability (independents cannot offer a worldwide distribution and service network).

This is where specialised watch customisers such as Bamford Watch Department come in: they can take any watch, even one you already possess, and modify it according to your desires (which is mostly limited to cosmetic modifications). With modern technology your options are considerable, but however you twist it, there are two major limitations: you void your warranty, and the customisers have to reengineer parts as they in all but a few cases have no access to the service parts network of watch brands.

Furthermore, and this applies to all personalisation no matter who did them, the value of the modified pieces is confined to the patrons - the resale value will be significantly below a factory-spec watch.

LMVH is going to change this, and partnered with Bamford Watch Department as their ”officially authorised customiser" for TAG Heuer, Zenith and Bulgari watches.

Watches modified through Bamford now come with an official manufacturer’s warranty, and are supposedly created using official parts just like their standard base models. Thus, LVMH/Bamford offer the best of both worlds to their clients: the flexibility of modification and a factory-certified ‘original’ watch.

To facilitate the design process for the client and channel the logistical implications into manageable dimensions, Bamford has developed an online customiser on their homepage. Using this tool I played around a bit and created a particularly ‘attractive’ Zenith Chronomaster:


Say hello to the Zenith Chronomaster El Primero ‘The Parrot’… I had a good laugh as well, but my design points to a number of issues: first, the colourisation covers the material qualities of the surfaces beneath, resulting in a much too coarse rendering of the final product. The subtleties of the dial surface finishes get lost, which might induce people to choose extremely colourful designs (see my trial run). Closely connected is the issue of too much choice: in order to please as many people as possible, Bamford has placed options into the customiser which likely result in comical outcomes (again, see my idea). These two issues together create a considerable chance for really ugly and unsatisfying customisations.

With careful curation and optimal, high resolution representation such issues could be easily overcome, as this example of the ochs und junior customiser demonstrates: surfaces, colours and reflections are nicely rendered, and choices are limited.

For more ‘out there’ idea, both, Zenith/Bamford as well as ochs und junior offer real bespoke pieces that go beyond what the customiser offers. But the latter at least has restricted unsupervised creativity to fail safe options.

In the following I would like to present to you two Bamford-modified Zenith watches, one straight from the customiser tool and one created in close discussion with the Bamford specialists. The first watch I’d like to show is a really successful version of the Zenith Heritage 146:

This pieces comes with a blue dial, red indices and subdial hands as well as white hour and minute hands. The case is sandblasted.


As a result, we find a very strong contrast in colour, but also in surface finishes: white-red-blue-silver, and lacquer-lacquer-matte-matte. This creates a lot of thrill, and I like it a lot.


The devil however is in the detail. As a Purist, I would have loved an optical distinction between the time and the chronograph hands. This is, at least with the online configurator, not possible (I tried!), and we have to accept that.

The second issue I have is that the sandblasting takes much away from the pin-sharp case shape definition, and effect which looks like over polishing (without being shiny, of course). Collectors of AP Royal Oak watch know what I am referring to.



Third, and this is (for me personally at least) the most disturbing one, the quality of execution is not what I expected when I learned of the official collaboration of the two brands: note the blobs in the lacquer on the permanent seconds hand as well as on the eye of the central chronograph seconds hand. Also, the dial plate shows small imperfections.

Now to the second one, based upon the Zenith Pilot Type 20 Ton-Up, with a DLC treated steel case, an aged-matte black dial and white Japanese numerals. The hands are black lacquered with white lime for hours and minutes or red for the rest, respectively,

The caseback is standard (save colour treatment) with no special inscription, and the watch is worn on a rubber strap with humongous clasp:




Quite a characterful watch, I think!
However, when we look close, we have a déja-vu effect: again, the execution is not as good as I would expect: the Bamford logo is not crisply printed, the lume in the hands look like hand-filled…

… and the hands’ painting appears like an aftermarket effort:


In my view, this is the achilles heel of customisation, and I for one am slightly disappointed that an official partnership between a noted watch brand and an accomplished customiser fails to address exactly this point: I would expect that if you are an official manufacturing partner of a watch brand, you have access to production parts and drawings. This at least was what had been touted when the partnership was announced last year.

Until then, I still think that a higher quality should be aimed at, and be it with stricter quality control, higher skilled labour and concomitant higher markups. It is a subset of watch buyers who venture onto the custom road, and these are the ones who are ready to spend the extra dollar (or better; Swiss Frank or British Pound?) to secure a bespoke piece which meets their requirements in terms of design and quality.
Finally, there is one issue two which I have no answer: service! Usually, brands replace a watch's hand when a watch is sent in for repair or regular service. I have no information as to how Bamford/Zenith handle this with their 'official' customised pieces. Do they keep a second (or third) spare parts of hands? Are they able to quickly reproduce such a set if needed?

After all, it is the quality of design and execution as well as a seemless service and repair experience which determine long term acceptance of such services and the pieces it creates.

What are your thoughts, experiences and wishes in respect to customised watches?

Cheers,
Magnus