Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that is bringing you something different today. It has always been my intention for The Fourth Wheel to be more than a Friday email and today I’m excited to announce a new annual project: The Independent Watchmaking Report. This is an in-depth piece of original research that, to the best of my knowledge, does something that’s never been attempted before and builds a thorough picture of what it means to be an independent watch brand. We’re talking production numbers, sales and marketing strategy, communications, retail operations and forecasts for the future, based on survey data collected from 81 brands. You’ll find the paywall kicking in a little earlier than usual this week, because this is work (a lot of work, believe me) that I want to save for my paying subscribers. Hope that’s ok!

The Fourth Wheel is a reader-supported publication with no advertising, sponsorship or commercial partnerships to influence its content. It is made possible by the generous support of its readers: if you think watch journalism could do with a voice that exists outside of the usual media dynamic, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You can start with a free trial!

Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:

Note: What follows is a comprehensive analysis of the report’s findings, covering a lot of the main topics but not presenting every single graph, chart or table of figures. Corporate clients - watch brands, PR agencies, retailers, distributors and so on - can purchase the full report on request. This isn’t about making tonnes of money, but respecting the fact that I’ve put a lot of time and effort into creating something that I believe is highly valuable to anyone working in the watch world. Participating brands will receive the report next week free of charge. If you are interested, contact me at fourthwheelmedialtd@gmail.com.

So the best - and worst - way to describe this is to say: you know the Morgan Stanley LuxeConsult report? It’s like that, except it’s for independent brands instead of the world’s biggest watchmakers, and instead of data that may or may not be accurate but everyone brand-side insists is wrong, all my data was volunteered directly from the brands themselves.

I don’t mean to be rude - or at least, it’s not my primary intention - but the truth is in the watch industry we don’t have a lot of good market intelligence data and it’s the reference point more people will be familiar with than any other. For good or bad, the Morgan Stanley report is an annual conversation-starter and it provides some kind of numerical framework for analysing the industry. But its focus is limited in two ways: it’s only about Swiss watches, and it’s only about the 50 biggest brands.

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I’ve spent a long time covering this industry and it’s been my experience that the most interesting people and stories often come from outside of that world. I’ve done a lot of interviews with independent brand founders and CEOs in the last few years - people like Max Busser, Kari Voutilainen, Ming Thein and so on - and a thought started to form. I spend so much of my time hearing from each of these companies how they’re doing that I’m starting to build up a composite picture of what it’s like being an indie brand, but it’s incomplete. Add to that the clear and passionate interest in indie watchmaking across ‘the community’ and the answer became obvious: someone needs to turn those anecdotal insights into hard data.

This is me completing that picture.

True to form, I sat on the idea for a while but in April I finally put together a Google form and sent it out to as many brands as I could find contact details for. Over the last six weeks or so I’ve been collecting responses and sorting through the data: as I’ve already said, 81 companies were kind enough to trust in a completely new project that was asking them for the most intimate details of how they run their business. Some of them knew me, some of them didn’t, but I’m enormously grateful to them all.

Participation in the survey and report was entirely voluntary and non-commercial, i.e. no-one paid to be involved and people only told me what they wanted to. (That said, nearly everyone answered nearly every question.) I promised brands anonymity at the point of publication, so what follows is an analysis of the independent sector but it’s not a league table or a ranking, and it’s not full of sensational but unverifiable claims about how much money X or Y brand made last year. I can’t name the brands involved, but I can tell you that they are the brands you hoped they were going to be. A lot of them, anyway. There are new brands, old brands, big(ish) brands and tiny brands, brands you’ve definitely heard of and some you might not. They have all been very forthcoming, but treating that data anonymously was the only way this was going to work. Sorry if that’s dashed your expectations - I promise you, there is still plenty of concrete information and detailed insight below.