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Christopher Ward

United Kingdom · Founded 2004

Founded 2004 by Christopher Ward, Mike France and Peter Ellis as the world's first exclusively online, direct-to-consumer luxury watch brand, explicitly designed to cut out traditional retail markups (self-described 'the cheapest most expensive watches in the world'). First watch shipped 2005. In 2014 CW took a majority stake in Swiss movement house Synergies Horlogeres SA (led by watchmaker Johannes Jahnke) and released Calibre SH21, its first in-house movement and the first commercially viable mechanical movement developed by a British brand in over 50 years. Co-founder Christopher Ward departed the company in 2020; Mike France has continued to lead it. Showrooms in London, Maidenhead (UK HQ), Liverpool, plus US locations in New York, Frisco TX and Falls Church VA, alongside its core online/telephone direct-sales model. Won 'British Watch Brand of the Year' at the WatchPro Awards 2025. Reported turnover approx GBP 30.5m in 2024. Known for stretching Swiss Sellita/ETA-based watches to unusually high value, alongside a growing family of in-house calibers: SH21 (120h reserve automatic/manual base), CW-003 (144h manual, C12 Loco), CW-002 (GMT module on in-house CW-001 base, C63 Sealander True GMT), plus in-house complication modules JJ01 (jumping hour), JJ03 (worldtimer), JJ04/CW-M28 (moonphase, naming inconsistent across sources) and FS01 (Bel Canto chiming module). Sourcing note: WebSearch quota was exhausted almost immediately in this research session; all data below was gathered via WebFetch against Wikipedia, Monochrome Watches, Hodinkee, aBlogtoWatch, GPHG.org, and DuckDuckGo HTML search results (some routed through the r.jina.ai read-through proxy where direct fetch failed with header-overflow/403/CAPTCHA errors). The official christopherward.com site itself could not be scraped directly (cookie-consent interstitial only, even via proxy) so all specs are via secondary sources/aggregators - flagged per-reference below.