Our story
It sits on the second shelf of the workshop, and there are still three winders in it. We keep it the way a tailor keeps the first jacket he ruined — not for sentiment, but because it settles arguments.
2019 – 2022
Adam Croucher bought the first one in the spring of 2019, for a watch he had saved eleven months for. It hummed. Not loudly — just enough that he noticed it at two in the morning, and then could not stop noticing it. It moved to the landing, then to the airing cupboard, then into the drawer.
The second lasted a fortnight. The third arrived with a manual that opened on a table of turns per day and assumed you already knew which column was yours. He read a forum thread about it for an hour and went to bed no wiser.
By the summer of 2022 there were three winders in a drawer and one watch on a dresser, stopped, showing the wrong date. Between them they had cost more than the watch they were bought to look after.
Every one of them had been sold on a photograph. Not one of them had printed a number.
2022 – 2023
The change was small, and it was not clever. Instead of choosing a winder from a photograph, we wrote down what it had to do — and then went looking for someone who could build to it.
A Japanese Mabuchi motor, because that is the class of motor that ends up in precision instruments rather than in toys, and because it is quiet at the start and still quiet in year three. Seven hundred and fifty turns a day, the figure the overwhelming majority of Swiss automatics are built around, set before the box is sealed so that nothing has to be worked out by the person who opens it. Clockwise, anti-clockwise, combined. A cushion that takes a steel bracelet without being forced.
Then came the part that took longest: finding a maker who would let us sit and listen to a hundred of them before we agreed to anything.
The specification fits on one side of A4. It has not changed since.
How one leaves here
Every winder we send out has already run for two days in a room at the back of the workshop, with somebody coming in to sit with it. It is the least efficient thing we do, and it is the only reason we are willing to print the sentence on our front page.
Every unit comes out of its carton on the bench. Veneer, hinge, cushion, lid, the lead and the adaptor. Anything marked in transit goes back in the crate before it is ever switched on.
Direction and turns per day are set here, not by you. Seven hundred and fifty as standard, eight hundred and fifty on the models built for it. If you told us what you wear when you ordered, it is set to that instead.
It goes into the room at the back — no window, thick floors, nothing in it but a bench and a chair. It runs for two full days. Somebody sits with it at the start and again at the end, in silence, at a metre.
Anything that hums, ticks, chatters or drifts fails, and a fail needs no second opinion. What passes gets a card with the initials of whoever listened to it. Those are the initials on the card in your box.
About one in fourteen goes back in the crate. That is not a boast — it is most of what we do all week.
The people
We work out of a former printworks on the eastern edge of Lewes, in East Sussex — close enough to the Ouse that you can hear it through the back wall in February. The building came with thick floors and a rear room with no natural light, which turned out to be the two things we needed most.
There are nine of us. Three came from watch servicing, the rest from retail. That is why nobody here reads from a card, and why the answer to a question is sometimes that you do not need the thing you are asking about.
Founder
Owns the drawer. Still opens the post most mornings and still writes the specification for anything new. He is the reason there is a number on every page — he spent four years buying winders that did not have one.
Workshop lead
Eleven years in watch servicing before this. The listening room was her idea, and so was the rule that a fail needs no second opinion. If the card in your box reads RD, she is the one who signed it.
Customer care
Answers the email, usually the same day and always as herself. She has talked more people out of the larger model than into it, which we have decided not to fix.
Why a name
A watch you chose deserves an address, not a drawer — and the piece that keeps it deserves better than a code with a hyphen in the middle. So everything here is named, and the name is given by whoever signed off the first one that passed.
Half of them are places, because we are English and it is the shortest way to say what a thing is for. The rest are borrowed from the movement itself. There is no system, and we have stopped pretending there is one.
The other half of the job
We sell fewer winders this way, and we are entirely at peace with it. If one of the three below is you, say so in an email and you will get the same answer in writing.
If it is on your wrist from Monday to Sunday, it is winding itself. A box will serve you better and costs less. This is the most common email we answer, and the answer is nearly always the box.
A winder does nothing for either. Quartz has a battery, and a hand-wound wants your hand. If your collection is mostly one of those, we will point you at storage and leave it at that.
Count what you actually rotate, not what you own. One exception, and it is the only place we push: if you are between two sizes, take the larger. The regret we hear most is having to replace the whole thing eighteen months later.
How it went
The specification is written on a Sunday, on one side of A4, mostly as a list of things the last three had got wrong.
A hundred units land in a rented lock-up in Lewes. Sixty-eight pass. The rest go back, and the maker takes the point.
A Mayfair cabinet, packed on a kitchen table, sent to a customer in Middlesex. She wrote three words about the lid stopping and the light coming on. That review is still the oldest one on this site.
We take the building for the floors and stay for the back room. It has no window. It becomes the listening room, and forty-eight hours becomes the rule rather than the habit.
Ruth arrives, then two more out of watch servicing. The pass rate falls before it climbs, which is exactly what we had hoped would happen.
Nine people, four ranges, and roughly one unit in fourteen that never leaves the crate. 1,624 owners have written in about the ones that did.
In writing
That is the whole of it
You know how they are made, who sat with yours, and what happens if it ever stops. The only thing left is choosing which one.
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The workshop
Every winder is unboxed in our Sussex workshop, set to the direction and the number of turns your calibre asks for, then left running for forty-eight hours while somebody listens to it. Anything that hums, ticks or drifts goes back in the crate. The card in your box carries the initials of whoever signed yours off.
The people
We are nine, in Lewes, East Sussex. Three came from watch servicing, the rest from retail — which is why nobody here reads from a card. Tell us what you wear and we will tell you what you need, including when that is the smaller model, or nothing at all.
