ABOUT MILLAR WATCHES
The story so far....
BEFORE
I've been a watch fan for years, my first "Real" watch was an Omega SpeedMaster in the early 2000's. Since then, I've owned dozens of watches of all different makes. Most of which I sold on, that was until, I bought my Seamaster 22545000 with sword hands. I got it at auction for an absolute steal, as soon as I put it on, I just fell for it. Classy and understated, it is just an amazing watch. One of only a couple of watches that I will never sell.
THE START
Millar Watches came about for a couple of reasons.
The first was, I walked into a very well-known AD to buy a particular dive watch and the conversation went.
This is probably very familiar to a lot of you.
Me = I have £9000 I’d like to buy one of these please.
AD = Sorry sir we can’t sell you one of those, if you’d like to go on the wait list we can try and get it for you in two or three years.
Me = Sorry? You don’t want to sell me the watch I want? You don’t want my money?
AD = Well you haven’t bought much from us before.
Having purchased about 12 watches of other makes from these people before, I just walked out, thinking “Sod you then, how hard can it be?” little did I know at the time.
The second reason was, After a couple of conversations with friends, they kept saying well why don’t you do it yourself, so I took the plunge. I eventually found a factory in Switzerland that would make limited numbers of watches to my design and spec. These were the quartz models, a few of which are still available. After we launched these, customers kept asking
“Do you have an automatic?”
This was when idea for the Scuba was born.
THE PRESENT
We have tried to do things differently to most watch companies.
We don’t put a made-up movement number and tell you it’s ours, we are open and honest about the movements we use, the quartz have Ronda and ETA, for the Automatics we use Sellita. The main reason for this is, they can be serviced almost anywhere cheaply, so no massive service bill unlike some movements.
We supply our automatic watches in leather watch rolls. When you buy most watches, they come in big wooden boxes, what do you do with the box? It just sits in the back of the cupboard (closet for our friends across the pond) and is never seen again. Those wooden boxes cost a lot to produce and send to you, why?
We would rather give you a nice leather roll, smaller and easier to ship. This is slightly sneaky on my part, when you go on away, you take the roll with some watches in it. Even if these are other makes, our logo is there every time you get a watch out.
It also gives us a little extra money to put into the watch, so we can give you, what we think is the best watch possible for the money. Swiss movements, stainless steel, Super-LumiNova, ceramic etc.
THE FUTURE
Having got off the ground and launched our Scuba dive watch,
we have plans.
So, we are hoping that the Scuba sells well, this will enable us to bring the plans into reality. Next will be the Scuba Colours, after that we have two ideas on the drawing board.
A GMT in the same case as the Scuba or depending on the reception, a 38mm Scuba with exactly the same specs as the current one, including the SW200 movement.