Issue 212: Are Watch Brand Names Getting Worse?
A linguistic, cultural and occasionally statistical, analysis of new watch brand names, from Niton to N3W5
Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that never knew Walt Odets personally, but like many of us, I imagine, could not help but know his reputation. Odets passed away this week at the age of 79 and leaves behind a wealth of detailed - some might say forensic - and extremely useful writing on the Timezone forum. I arrived in this industry too late for forum life to hold much appeal, but it just so happens I have been doing some research lately which, without the combined store of knowledge held on watch forums, would have been a lot harder and I have come to consider them in a new light. From my limited reading, Odets represented the best of forum culture, i.e. he was unconcerned with petty squabbles and generous with his insight. I don’t consider what I do to be very similar at all - Odets clearly had forgotten more about watchmaking than I may yet have learned, for one thing, and for another I am stupid enough to try and make money writing about watches, while he did it out of pure passion1 - but the tagline for The Fourth Wheel is ‘honest about watches’, and it occurred to me that if you’re going to claim to be honest about watches on the internet, you owe something to the man who did it first and I suspect many would say, best.
In this week’s issue, as hinted at last week, I have decided to look closely at the names brands choose. I have no idea if it’s the kind of thing Walt Odets would have concerned himself with, but I had a lot of fun writing it and as always, if you have as much fun reading it I will consider that a good day’s work.
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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:
Say my name, say my name
The recent boom in independent watchmaking and staggering influx of new brands has been analysed from practically every perspective by now, but I think I am the first to ask if it has been accompanied by a deterioration in the standards of brand names themselves. We can probably all think of a recent brand launch that left us thinking ‘really? You’re calling it that?’
Now, a great deal of time in this newsletter is going to be spent talking about ‘good names’ and ‘bad names’ so I may as well get my caveats in early. Strictly speaking, the appeal of a name is as subjective as any other non-technical part of a watch; for some people, words like Fleux, Detrash, Bōken and ArtyA slip into your ear like purest honey while for others, they might have an effect similar to Vogon poetry2. I speak British English and have a passing familiarity with a few European languages, so certain names will land more comfortably than others - that’s my cultural bias, if you like - and I accept that if you come from France, or Thailand, or Saudi Arabia or wherever else on the planet, you will have a very different barometer for what sounds cool, aspirational or sophisticated. Nevertheless I do have the good fortune to speak the primary lingua franca3 of the world right now, so judging brands’ names from an English-speaking perspective does feel moderately acceptable4.
You might reasonably question whether there is such a thing as a ‘good name’ at all; a common attitude is that if a product or service is good enough, the name becomes irrelevant. Equally, names that can be abbreviated to acronyms or initialisms take on an almost symbolic nature; when was the last time you perused the pages of ‘Gentleman’s Quarterly’ magazine, for example?5 But there is definitely such a thing as a bad name, and even if we would have to take a pretty extreme example to find one we all agreed was terrible, logically the existence of bad names requires the existence of good names.
It’s a complicated business, though, because the name is rarely analysed in isolation. It will come as little surprise that the impetus for this week’s newsletter was the launch of N3W5 by Francois-Henry Bennahmias’ The Honorable Merchant’s Group; one benefit of a new brand launch (to my purposes today, at least) is that the name is more or less all we have to go on. That and the typography, the social media content, and the founder’s statements, all of which do add context - but you understand my point. Once the name is represented by a product, and combined with a story - an undervalued element of any naming strategy, as we will see - it becomes something different. Now it is halfway to becoming a brand which is something much more than a name - even if the name is the vessel that carries the brand within it, if you like.
It might be considered unfair to judge N3W5 by its name alone. I’m sure Francois-Henry Bennahmias would think so. But I disagree. Firstly I am quite obviously not judging the entire company, its products, ethos, narrative and so on - because half of that is still a mystery. However, the name of any company will have such a profound subliminal effect on its potential customer base that I think it is fair to ask whether it helps or hinders, and what it has done in terms of setting expectations for the forthcoming watches. Lastly on a purely linguistic level I just enjoy talking about words, even words with numbers in, and how they make us feel.
