Stephen O’Connor is the man behind The British Bench, an independent website documenting where British watches are designed, manufactured, assembled, regulated, and tested.
Establishing the country of manufacture for any watch can be a tricky endeavor, as not all nations regulate such standards in the same manner, if at all. For example, “Made in the USA” is a strict legal standard requiring that “all or virtually all” components of an item be domestically sourced and assembled, while “Swiss Made” requires that the movement, at least 60% of the manufacturing costs, and final assembly and inspection occur there. Other countries have varying standards, or none at all.
The UK has no Swiss Made equivalent for watches, so to address this, Stephen has created a five-tier approach, recognizing that what makes a watch “belong” to a country is a nuanced inquiry.
We exchanged some correspondence about that question and the site, which led to the following interview.
TTB: Please introduce yourself. Who are you and what do you do when not messing around with watches?
SO: I’m Stephen O’Connor, founder of The British Bench. By day, I work in the IT sector, and I previously served in the Armed Forces from 2001 to 2006. I’m not from the traditional watch industry or horology world. I’m a collector, researcher, and someone who enjoys building websites and projects around things that interest me.
The British Bench really came from combining those two sides of me: an interest in watches and a habit of looking at information and thinking, “there must be a clearer way of presenting this.”
TTB: Describe your journey into the watch hobby.
SO: I’ve liked watches for a long time, but I’d say I only really fell properly into the hobby relatively recently. A Tissot PRX was probably the watch that dragged me further down the rabbit hole. From there I started reading more, looking at different brands and working out what I actually liked rather than just what was popular. Eventually I decided I wanted my next watch to be British, which sounds simple enough. It turned out not to be simple at all.
The more I looked, the more I realised that “British watch” could mean a lot of different things depending on the brand. That confusion is really where The British Bench started.
TTB: What inspired you to take this on?
SO: It was basically that frustration. I wasn’t trying to decide which watch was more British than another, or which one was better. I just wanted to answer what seemed like a fairly simple question: where is the work actually being done?
You could have one company designing a watch in Britain and having it completely manufactured overseas, another assembling and regulating imported components here, and another manufacturing substantial parts of the watch in Britain. All three might quite reasonably be described as British watch brands, but the production stories are very different. I couldn’t find a resource that laid that out consistently, so I started building one.
The five-tier framework came later. It was really a way of taking all those different production routes and giving collectors a shorthand for understanding them without pretending that one route is automatically better than another.
TTB: Do you think watch buyers will ever be convinced that quality and nationality are two separate and unrelated attributes?
SO: I hope so, although I think we’re probably fighting a bit of human nature there. People naturally attach ideas of quality to certain countries, and watches are particularly bad for it. Swiss sounds prestigious, British can sound traditional or artisanal, and Chinese manufacture still gets dismissed far too easily in some parts of the hobby. But where something was made doesn’t tell you whether it was made well. A component made in China can be excellent, and something made in Britain can be poor. Geography tells you where the work happened, not how good the work was.
That distinction is really important to The British Bench. A provenance framework should tell you where the work was done. A review should tell you whether it was done well. I don’t want the two mixed together.
TTB: In an increasingly interconnected world of global supply chains, do you think “Made in” appellations still matter?
SO: Yes, I think they do — possibly more than ever.
The fact that supply chains are global doesn’t make origin meaningless. It just means the story is usually more complicated than a single label can show. I don’t think there is anything wrong with a British watch using a Swiss movement, a German case component or something manufactured in Asia. The problem comes when the customer has no realistic way of understanding what the British part of the watch actually is.
For me, transparency is more useful than purity. I’d much rather see an honest description of a global production route than a vague national label that leaves people guessing.
TTB: Your tiered approach seems like it could be universal. Would you consider expanding the site to include other nations?
SO: The British Bench itself will remain focused on Britain as things stand. There is already more than enough work involved in doing one country properly. That said, I do think the underlying idea could work elsewhere. I could certainly imagine a separate project one day — something like The German Bench — using the same broad principles but built around the realities of that country’s watch industry.
I’d rather keep each project focused than turn The British Bench into a huge international directory and lose what makes it useful.
TTB: What made you decide on the clean, neutral aesthetic and the current absence of watch photographs or brand logos?
SO: That was deliberate from the start. I wanted the information to be the main thing people noticed, rather than whichever brand had the best photography, the biggest marketing budget or the strongest logo.
The idea is that a very small maker and a much larger, better-known company should initially be presented through the same visual language. You should be looking at what they do, where they do it, and what evidence supports it before the branding starts influencing how you feel about them. I also just like clean websites, so there is definitely some personal taste involved too.
TTB: You note that product photos may be added later. Will this be for identification purposes, or something else?
SO: We are going to add photography, yes. Partly it helps people identify collections and makes the profiles more useful, but it also gives the site a bit more life without changing the evidence-first approach. We’re currently working through press kits and asking makers directly for permission to use suitable images. I want to do that properly rather than just lifting images from websites. At the moment, though, the framework and the evidence process are taking priority. I’d rather get the underlying methodology right first and then build the visual side around it.
TTB: Where do you get the information for your site? Is it all publicly available, or do you make inquiries of the brands?
SO: The first stage relied mainly on published information: maker websites, technical pages, interviews, press material and other attributable sources. That was useful for building the pilot, but it also showed the limits of relying on public information alone. So the next stage has been much more direct. I’m contacting makers, giving them the opportunity to provide evidence, correct factual errors and clarify how particular models or production routes work.
Their input matters, but the final editorial conclusion remains independent. The aim isn’t to let a brand choose its own classification; it’s to make sure the underlying facts are as accurate as possible before I reach one. Where something still can’t be confirmed, I’d rather mark it as unknown than guess.
TTB: How have the brands responded to your classifications?
SO: Mixed — which I actually think is healthy. Some makers have been very supportive, offered information, supplied press material or even invited me to visit. Others have questioned whether the project is useful, whether brands will ever disclose enough information, or whether a tier system risks oversimplifying a complicated subject. And some simply haven’t responded.
I don’t expect every maker to agree with the project, and I don’t think they need to. In some ways, disagreement is useful because it exposes where the methodology or the way I’m asking questions needs to improve.
TTB: So, what does the future hold for The British Bench?
