Hello
How time flies!
On September 14th 2014 Edinburgh Watch Company was born through my passion for watches and building great relationships with other like minded watch lovers.
My dream was to start my own business following 18 years service with RBS and before that in various roles in the luxury car sector. Leisure time was split between family life, sports cars and luxury watches and doing something that involved either and with a customer was the basis of doing something myself.
A pragmatic decision steered me to pursue the luxury watch business as over the last 30 years as a collector I have built a considerable knowledge through buying and selling a broad range of Swiss watches and following innovation and trends in the market.
The power of the internet has allowed many business to be formed within easy reach of a customer and often without the need of a bricks and mortar retail premises. This was the way I wanted EWC to operate so that a customer hundreds of miles away could engage with us via our website or a local customer with a personal watch viewing in one of our fine partner hotels here in Edinburgh. In essence I wanted a relationship based business rather than just a transactional one.
The last quarter of the 2014 was spent commissioning a website that was built by a very good friend Farrah. She was also responsible for my beautiful branding that is now regularly seen across social media, on the side of racing cars and on our new baseball caps. In the absence of a shop that would see passing trade I needed to consider a social media strategy across Facebook, Twitter, Google, Youtube and Instagram that would quickly get the word out that their was a great new luxury watch business here in Edinburgh.
Social media has been a great contributor to building the brand. Our Youtube channel has now over 300000 hits and 600+ followers where they can see my personal review of watches in our collection.I am regularly told that this really helps to build trust and confidence for new customers considering dealing with EWC especially when they are hundreds of miles away!
Instagram as a channel has massively grown and made perfect sense for us to be a part of that community. Just over a year ago I had maybe 400 followers and today we are nudging on 20,000. This was done with the significant help of Jamie Lees who owns a social media company called Brawnnation. Jamie who like me is also a sports car enthusiast already had a massive following on Instagram and wanted to explore pairing watches and sports cars together so we agreed on a project. This has been a huge success and regularly brings us in enquiries from our short videos.
Video is just so important these days as it just brings to life each topic. The car industry now regularly sends videos of cars that customer have expressed and interest in, Youtube is full of personal and commercial reviews and we have taken a lead in preparing a range of videos of our watches. I sympathise for Cate, Jamie, Sarah and my dear wife Evelyn who have been at the other end of the video camera and listening to me enthusiastically talk about watches but equally I thank them for allowing me to share information with our followers and customers.
While there is always office work to do I try to get out and about meeting customers and other businesses as much as I can to explore how we can help each other in various ways. 2017 has been a very active year with our external events. We have a pop up shop have attended all the major motoring events across Scotland including The Ignition Festival, Speedfest, Royal Deeside Festival of Speed and many at Knockhill Race Circuits. These have been great fun and allows us to meet many new and existing customers. Special thanks to my wife Evelyn,my goddaughter Sarah, my children Jason and Connor and Collette and Jamie for for being great members of the EWC team
Lastly and most importantly I must thank you as my customers and followers for making this dream come true, without you EWC would not be where it is today as one of the fastest growing luxury watch businesses across the UK and respected by you with a 100% score of 5* testimonial reviews.
Tonight I will celebrate this milestone with my family, however as a small gesture of my thanks to you all for your valued support to date we are giving away a new Wolf Heritage watch winder via a like and share campaign on our Facebook page. For a chance to win please visit our Facebook page, share our competition post, tag 3 friends and like our Facebook page. Good luck! The winner will be chosen on 1st October.
