Christopher Ward

Christopher Ward is Britain’s biggest watch brand and the great disruptor of modern watchmaking. Founded in 2004 by Mike France, Peter Ellis and Chris Ward — the idea famously hatched on a boat on the Thames, the first watches assembled in a converted chicken shed in Cookham Dean — it became the world’s first online-only premium watch brand, cutting out retail middlemen to sell Swiss-made mechanical watches at a fraction of traditional prices. Within a year of its 2005 debut, the brand was being discussed more than Rolex on major watch forums.

The formula is “designed in England, hand-built in Switzerland”: watches are developed at the Maidenhead HQ and manufactured in Biel, where a 2014 merger with its Swiss partner brought production in-house. That same year came Calibre SH21 — a COSC-certified, five-day movement hailed as the most important development by a British watch brand in fifty years. But it was 2022’s C1 Bel Canto, an affordable chiming watch, that turned Christopher Ward into a phenomenon: the “Bel Canto effect” more than doubled revenue to £30.5 million in a single year, and won the brand the Petite Aiguille at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève — the first GPHG award ever taken by a British brand.

Now Everton FC’s Official Global Timing Partner, WatchPro’s British Watch Brand of the Year 2025, and backed by a 60-day return / 60-month movement guarantee, the brand keeps growing — with showrooms in Maidenhead, Dallas and Virginia, and its first-ever retail pilot launched with Time+Tide’s London studio in 2026.

Key products

The Twelve — from £850
The watch that brought the integrated-bracelet sports watch — a genre defined by the unobtainable Royal Oak and Nautilus — to real-world budgets, and one of the most talked-about British watches of the decade. Its twelve-sided bezel echoes the brand’s twin-flags logo, framing a textured 3D dial and flowing into a superbly engineered integrated bracelet. Offered in 36mm, 38mm and 40mm cases, in steel with an automatic movement or titanium with a COSC-certified chronometer, and in a rainbow of dial colours. Reviewers routinely call it the best value in its class, full stop.
View The Twelve collection

C1 Bel Canto — from around £3,000
The modern British watchmaking icon: a genuine Swiss-made chiming watch — a sonnerie au passage that strikes a titanium gong every hour — at a price previously unthinkable for a complication normally found on six-figure timepieces. Developed in-house from the brand’s jumping-hour calibre, the exposed chiming mechanism performs dial-side beneath an off-centre time display, housed in a resonance-optimised 41mm Grade 5 titanium case weighing just 53 grams. It won the GPHG’s Petite Aiguille, sold out repeatedly, and single-handedly transformed the brand’s fortunes. The guilloché-dialled Bel Canto Classic expands the line upmarket.
View the Bel Canto collection

Press coverage

• WatchPro (February 2026) — on the C60 Trident Lumière “Green Fifteen”, a one-week-only collaboration with YouTube’s Bark & Jack: Christopher Ward teams up with Bark & Jack
• WatchPro USA (updated March 2026) — on the historic first retail partnership with Time+Tide, ending two decades of pure direct-to-consumer sales: Christopher Ward signs its first retail partner