The Name Game: Inside the Business of Naming a Watch

Instead of coining a new name, when Tudor brought back the Monarch this April, for its 100th anniversary, it reached back decades to one it had shelved in the 1990s. Read one way, the move is nostalgia. Read another, it is a word most collectors would struggle to place. An old name arrives pre-loaded with legacy, and it sidesteps the single hardest problem in modern watchmaking, which neither designing a watch nor building it. It is naming it.

Get it right, though, and the reward runs wildly out of proportion to a word or two printed on a dial. Say "Submariner" and a diver's watch surfaces in the mind of someone who has never dived. Say "Speedmaster" and you are standing on the moon. Say "Nautilus," which turns 50 this year, and you have stopped talking about Patek Philippe altogether. At that point, said Margaret Wolfson, founder of the naming consultancy River & Wolf, "the watch name stops functioning as nomenclature and begins functioning as cultural shorthand for identity, aspiration, taste, and worldview. People do not simply say they own a Patek Philippe, but a Nautilus. The name begins to carry emotional meaning independent of the company that created it."

Some consider Patek to be the house least interested in names. Much of its catalogue answers to nothing but a reference number.

That trick would be easier to pull off if naming were not, in Wolfson's word, excruciating. Watches and jewelry are treated as related goods under United States trademark law, which means a name registered for one can block a name for the other, and the field is among the most saturated anywhere. Land too close to a name already on the register, in sound or meaning or commercial impression, and the trademark offices bounce it."It wouldn't fly to name a watch Royal Spruce," Wolfson said. "It's just too close to Royal Oak."

"Most of the time it's just a big headache," said Romain Marietta, Zenith's chief product officer. "It needs to be memorable and it has to work everywhere. That's really not easy to do. And sometimes if it comes at all it only comes very close to launch."

Just ask Nodus. When the American microbrand named a clasp extension the Nodex, a company holding a similar mark objected and filed an infringement claim. Nodus ran the numbers on a legal fight and folded. "The experience has pushed Nodus towards the use of more generic names," said co-founder Wesley Kwok, "but we still think they're important. Names can be descriptive, and help people understand what a watch is about, or evocative, a way of paying homage to the history of a watch type." The brand's traveler's watch is the Contrail.

Over time, brands have found two ways out. The first is the one Tudor took: raid the archive. A dormant name has already survived the legal gauntlet once, and it comes wrapped in a patina no fresh coinage can fake. Zenith keeps reaching for Defy, the angular sports watch it first built in 1969, three years before the Royal Oak, and resurrects it whenever the moment calls. "Using a dormant trademark quickly circumvents all this legal uncertainty," Wolfson said.

The second way out is to invent. Coined and archaic words collide with less, and they are multiplying. This spring Audemars Piguet returned to Watches and Wonders after seven years away with a secret watch it calls the Peacock: a sculpted gold case that springs open at a touch to release an enamelled bird, its tail unfurling in blue and green across a hidden dial. 

Even the metals are being christened now. Rolex used this year's headlines not for a new model but for a new gold, a proprietary alloy named Jubilee Gold. 

Some pin a watch to a place or a bloodline: the Hampton borrowing the ease of a coastline, Junghans stamping Meister, German for master, on a dial that reveals both who made it and where. Names like these age slowly. "There's a trendiness to some names," Wolfson said, "but luxury brands typically want theirs to sound timeless and classic." Others make a promise about the wearer rather than the watch, Summit and Avenger and Conquest selling a version of you who climbs the mountain or wins the fight. They thrill, and then they date. Cartier's Tank, named in 1917 for the machines then grinding across the Western Front, is cherished precisely because it took a century to earn its edges; coin it fresh today, Wolfson suggests, and it would never make it out of the room.

And some watches refuse the game outright. Bell & Ross stamps its squarest models BR-03 and BR-05 and stops there. "We deliberately keep the names that appear on the dial extremely simple and universal," said co-founder Carlos Rosillo. "They're short, graphic, and easy to integrate into the design of the watch without disturbing the balance of the dial. And even when we do use a name, Astro or Phantom, for example, that's only in product descriptions and communication materials, not directly on the watch itself." 

On occasion, when the brand keeps quiet, its owners will not. Seiko never named the squat, shroud-cased diver that sits on the wrist like a can of tuna; collectors did, and Tuna stuck. Nor did it name the lopsided diver Martin Sheen wore up the river in Apocalypse Now, the one everyone now calls the Captain Willard. "Just using a reference is easier, but it doesn't say much about the watch," Zenith’s Marietta said. A name, it turns out, is not optional.

"It's not that the name makes a watch iconic," said Jeremy Miller, a brand strategist and author of Brand New Name, adding, "but to attain that status maybe you do have to have something by which to refer to it. The name is the story that can convince someone to buy it." Tudor, reaching back across the decades for a word it had once set aside, is betting he is right.