Building A Watch Brand Episode 15: Looking Back On The First Two Years Of VPC

A retrospective final episode of the series

January 15, 2025

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Time flies when you’re having fun! It has been a full two years since I set off on an adventure to build my dream watch, the VPC Type 37HW. Fratello offered me the fantastic opportunity to chronicle and share the journey with you all. Today, after having fulfilled all preorders, I would like to finish the series with one final retrospective and some musings on my plans from here on.

Sending the finished watches off to their new owners is a beautiful milestone that marks the end of the first stage of building my humble watch company. As such, it also forms a natural end to the Building A Watch Brand series here on Fratello. I will continue to share regular updates but no longer in my capacity as Fratello writer. Instead, I will do so via the VPC newsletter. So join me for one final Fratello update on the project!

Fulfilling the VPC (pre)orders and teething problems

To my delight, all suppliers kept the promised timelines, working towards the scheduled late-November delivery. In the end, Dutch customs caused the only delay in the entire chain, pushing fulfillment to the first week of December. It goes to show that you can only control so much. Still, it kept me within the originally promised window, which was a key priority for me. After all, you only get one chance to make a first impression.

Unfortunately, the first deliveries weren’t entirely smooth sailing. I won’t bore you with the details, but the bracelet maker made a mistake, which, to my shame, evaded my attention in QC. Long story short, the bracelets could not be sized small enough. It was no issue at all for most customers, but those with smaller wrists required a solution. Luckily, we found one, taking the bracelets back and adding more removable links. Unfortunately, this required a small group of customers to return their bracelets, which are undergoing modification as we speak.

I felt terrible about it because it was far from the experience I envisioned for my early supporters. I decided to attack the issue proactively and with full transparency, ensuring no damage other than a loss of time was caused to my customers. Of course, this comes at a significant financial cost and a dent in my ego, but to my delight, all affected customers were completely understanding and supportive. Seeing such goodwill among early VPC adopters is fantastic, and it turned a stressful moment into something heartwarming. And, of course, it became a big lesson for future releases. This also confirms to me that it makes no sense to be secretive or try to cover up your mistakes when running a business (as in personal life, actually).

Selling from stock

I feel lucky to have made it across this first hurdle with VPC in a declining market. The days of instant sellout success for almost all new initiatives are long gone. Selling 300 watches as an unproven brand in a rather high segment for a microbrand is, mildly put, a challenge. However, now that the remainder of the first batch is available from stock, I’m seeing sales accelerate again. In fact, the Dove Grey model is now almost sold out with the other two following nicely. This gives me confidence for the future.

Looking back at my earliest views on VPC in this series of articles, I see some naivety. I set out to create a personal dream watch without regard for what anybody else thought. The project snowballed into something more substantial along the way. It soon became clear that I would be dealing with huge investments and serious minimum order quantities. Everything scaled up except my willingness to cave to popular opinions. Many of my creative and technical choices went against better commercial judgment. If I had set out to create something commercially successful, I would have made many choices differently.

However, I felt (and still feel) that VPC’s only right to exist is in this specificity. I do everything according to my artistic vision of the best possible watches. The watch came out exactly as I wanted it to. Would life have been easier if I had come up with a catchier name, a bigger case, and an automatic movement? For sure! Would life have been easier if I had cut corners to offer it in a lower price segment? Heck yeah! I am glad that I didn’t, though. I feel blessed that a small group of aficionados is rewarding my stubbornness, and it will be a key ingredient going forward.

Going from a single project to a small watch company

Getting the VPC Type 37HW out there feels like I have scaled a massive first hurdle. There were so many pitfalls along the way that could have easily caused the fledgling company to fail, but I now have a healthy foundation to build on instead. I am particularly happy about the connections I have made with the watch community along the way. Several customers ordered another color upon receiving their first Type 37HW. Furthermore, my newsletter gets a ton of engagement from a very loyal reader base. Several Type 37HW customers have pledged to buy my second model sight unseen. I find all of this extremely encouraging. It seems I am striking a chord with a niche within the watch universe, which is absolutely awesome. The interactions with customers and followers are a ton of fun as well.

So it is probably no surprise that I have decided to push on. I want to continue building VPC into a company for the long term. The ambition, however, is to run VPC from a place of creativity and play. This means the aim is not to grow large but, rather, to find the right scale that allows me to be maximally creative without turning into a big logistics business.

I do need to grow a little bit over the next five years. A slightly larger scale gives me a stronger position with suppliers and allows me to execute customer service the way I envision it. If you are too lean, you simply cannot afford to do everything properly. Luckily, I do not have any outside investors to answer to, so I can do this at the pace I see fit. I strongly believe the way to do it is to stick to my guns and simply continue the way I have over the past two years.

Short-term priorities for VPC

I am currently working on three primary goals to professionalize VPC. First, I am setting up independent service points stocked with years’ worth of spare parts. This should alleviate people’s worries about buying a long-lasting product from a young company. I am proud to count Tempus as the first VPC service partner in the Netherlands. The goal is to set up similar independent service points in the US and Asia over the coming two to three years.

The second short-term priority is to clarify what VPC stands for. The company is built in my image, and I could write a book about how I want to treat my customers, how I want to position VPC within the watch world, and what that means for the watches I create. Unfortunately, such a book does not translate into a clear message all too well. Therefore, I have teamed up with a befriended strategist and a designer to help get my story across clearly and pointedly. Their job is not to change VPC or to commercialize it but merely to distill everything in my mind into something people can grasp more easily. This is an art in and of itself, I found.

Max Resnick at work

The third and greatest priority is to create a second model for VPC. I am teaming up with Max Resnick and Samuel Baker again, which is an absolute joy! This time, we are tackling my other favorite genre besides the GADA watch — the dive watch. I have a ton of ideas about what my dream dive watch should be. As I did on the Type 37HW, I will not be taking outside input or market analysis into account. I feel this would dilute the concept and lead to a lesser watch, even if it might be more popular. VPC remains a playground for me, first and foremost, as well as my partners, creating only watches that we adore, regardless of how niche that might make them.

Looking ahead

We are starting the design stage of the second model quite soon. We have no fixed timeline, but the diver will likely be revealed later this year. The first objective, though, is to provide great customer care and find the right owners for the remaining Type 37HW watches. Depending on how that goes, the diver might drop in 2025 or 2026. I feel strongly about building a solid foundation before I look up into the sky, and Type 37HW is that foundation.

Finding the creative part of the journey most rewarding, I also decided that each batch of VPC watches should be unique to some degree. This means a potential second batch of Type 37HW might, for instance, have slightly different dials. So, without wanting to sound like a sales guy, if you love any one of the current dials, you might want to make sure you get one of the first 300 numbered editions. They may never return in the same configuration. I want to have creative freedom rather than mindlessly churning out watches. There are plenty of those brands around already. Down the line, I do see room for staple versions that will remain in the collection permanently. The great thing about building something from scratch is that you can do it your way, and that is immensely gratifying.

I feel this is a good moment to end the Building A Watch Brand series of articles. This exposure has been hugely important for VPC, and it was great fun sharing the journey with you. There comes a time, however, when you must stand alone. I see a very bright future for VPC, and I am having tons of fun making my vision come alive. A vision, by the way, that is now much clearer than two years ago after so many lessons learned. If you tagged along, thank you! A dream came true for me, and I cannot wait to push on. I will continue to share the journey via my VPC newsletter, but at Fratello, it is back to regular service!

The entire Building A Watch Brand series: