When a company is looking to reinvent itself, revamping its collection of watches, it's often better to go outside the company for a fresh take on things.
And that is exactly what Dunhill did.
For a little while, Dunhill was a bit adrift, making watches that didn't match the brand nor fit Dunhill's customer. So, the then-CEO Simon Critchell, who has since retired, brought in Tom Bolt to shake things up.
Bolt is a different sort of watch designer. Young, energetic, full of spit and vinegar. Bolt is not your father’s watch designer, nor is he an arty head in the clouds artist.




PARODIE ROSE and CITYTAMER


Bolt is a roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty, no-nonsense watch guy. He rides his Triumph Daytona to work every day, 50 miles each way into the centre of London, and he loves what he does. Bolt is the man responsible for the turnaround of Dunhill's watches and the excitement over the brand’s new collection can be traced back the founder of the company, Alfred Dunhill, and to Bolt.
“I was called into Dunhill as a consultant because Simon wanted to offer vintage complications in the retail store,” Bolt remembers. “I visited several times. I have a company called Watch Guru that deals in watches and I specialize in vintage as well as high-end modern watches. I kept getting invited back and one day Simon asked me what I thought of their watches. I jokingly said that I thought they were crap – well, I didn't like the execution of the ideas and tact has never been my strong suit. Simon laughed and sort of agreed, then asked me to go through the archives and figure out what they should do, and I thought, 'why not?'
”Going through the archives was fantastic, all this crazy, fun, inventive stuff that I didn’t know even existed,“Bolt continues.”I had no idea that Dunhill did as much as they did. I told Simon that I thought that there were very few companies out there that have items that are sought after by collectors and that Dunhill does have a name that is slightly left of centre and products that are wanted. When I saw things like the watches they were doing, it surprised me because it looked like they were trying to do what everyone else was doing instead of doing Dunhill watches."
A tennis player, Bolt uses a tennis metaphor to explain Dunhill's position when he took over as watch designer. “If Dunhill was on a tennis court, they weren’t at the net making cheap watches, nor were they at the baseline making quality watches - they were in the middle and balls were passing them by. To me, you want to see quality and innovation from Dunhill.
”I looked at everything Dunhill ever did, not just watches,“Bolt continues.”Alfred Dunhill had suspended clocks for motorcycles; he was the first person to make a dashboard clock for cars - that innovation to me is what Dunhill is. These products were a little crazy but they were also very functional. Just as important to me was the facet side of the watches, which are elegant yet still slightly quirky. The Facet collection is very English, because it’s set to be derived from the faceted lamps in a Rolls Royce."
Bolt thought that focusing on the motoring direction was the way to go, as well as the facet watches. “You have the elegant side and the funky side,” he says. “I really believe that there is absolutely a way for Dunhill to have a unique, stand alone business in watches. I don’t think we will be a huge watch company, but we will be a cool, niche brand for those who know.”
So Bolt rolled up his sleeves and went to work. He dove into the archives and brought the funkiness back to Dunhill, with watches like the Bobby Finder and the Wheel Watches, while also developing elegant facet watches like the City Tamer. Bolt's favorite watch? The City Tamer in pink and white gold.
In addition to unique designs, Bolt has also introduced innovative touches to the watches, like the gear stick crown on the Excentric and the rotating bezel that reveals the pushers for the chronograph on the Bobby Finder SP 30.
“The problem for me with chronographs has always been the pushers,” Bolt explains. “It’s always been a bane for me. I came up with a system to conceal the pushers - when you rotate the bezel, the pushers pop out and the bezel doesn’t just conceal the pushers, it pushes and holds them in. The factory just wanted the bezel to cover the pushers, but I didn’t want to do that because it would be too large. We have a double compression system, because we didn’t want the chronograph to start and stop when the bezel slid over it. There are even fins in the side to be able to wash out sand and grit. The pushers are polished ceramic, to aid in the glide of the bezel.”




BOBBY FINDER, A-CENTRIC and CITYFIGHTER


Designing Watches
Bolt is very particular about watch design and about who should be designing watches. “I find it offensive today that people with no knowledge of watches are designing watches,” he says. "The most invaluable commodity as far as wristwatches go, bar none, is spirit. It’s imposs-ible to put the spirit into a watch if one has no knowledge of the subject in the first place. If someone asked me to design a car, I wouldn’t even know where to start and I find it offensive that people design watches on a whim.
“You can design something pretty, but you can’t put in the soul, because soul comes from knowledge,“he continues.”I’m pretty cynical about complications today. I think complications are sometimes used as makeup to hide the blemishes. If you take all the complications away, it’s often not a very good looking watch. The same is true for funky watches – the funkiness is often covering up mistakes. I think you have to start with purity and give the watch a difference."
Like many people in the watch industry, Bolt laments that it's so easy for anyone to enter the industry. “I am very cynical about the modern watch world,” he says. “Everybody is trying to get a piece of the pie. When I open a magazine and I see another new brand, I go crazy. It’s so easy to get into the watch market. I find it offensive that people think they can cobble together ideas from other companies and then put them in stores.
”For Dunhill, it's important to be who we are,“he adds.”You can’t be anything but what you are. We went back to the basics. I was inspired by the archives and there were many watches and other items that provided a great skeleton from which to work. Even the old Excentric hinted at something, so we just took it back to something that was honest and pure."

The Future
Bolt is excited about Dunhill's future and committed to keeping the company a niche manufacturer. “Hopefully we are not going to huge, mass production,” he says. “We want to get to the place where demand outstrips supply, certainly. I would consider Dunhill a luxury brand, but I would not consider Dunhill watches luxury watches - they are functional timepieces with a twist, with style and a heritage.”
The future of Dunhill, new watches imbued with the founder's spirit, is secure under Bolt’s design leadership.




CITYTAMER



Source: December - January 2006 Issue

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