The tea arrives before the watches do. Bristol Breakfast, a blend created exclusively for Fears by a tea merchant ten minutes from head office, chosen by managing director Nicholas Bowman-Scargill after a tasting he calls “the most caffeinated experience you can ever do”. It’s brewed for the team, poured for clients in the company’s Clifton boutique and shipped to retailers worldwide, so that trying on a Fears anywhere in the world comes with a proper cup of British tea. As an avid tea drinker, I can get on board with that.
It’s not just the tea. Telephone the Paintworks office and a person answers. Ask about the latest release and a printed catalogue, produced a mile down the road, arrives in the post. Nicholas refuses to use AI, sets a staff dress code, and gives every development a codename, with a faint air of the secret service about it. The watch you see here spent four years as Project Snow. Plenty of brands talk about ritual, ceremony and tradition, the very things a modern world has largely misplaced.
The original watchmaker was founded by Edwin Fear on Redcliff Street, Bristol, in 1846, when Edwin was just 21. It ran for 130 years before closing in 1976, and for four decades the name lay dormant. Its resurrection began, improbably, with a pension meeting. In 2014 Nicholas was two-and-a-half years into a watchmaking apprenticeship at Rolex, the dream job after detours through economics, Deutsche Bank, and PR. It ended with the advisor glancing at his date of birth and joking, “only 39 more years to go”. Back at his bench, the joke curdled into an epiphany: the same job, the same seat, for the rest of his working life.
That weekend he told his parents he wanted to build something of his own. His mother, mid-way through serving the roast potatoes, suggested he restart the family watch company. He had no idea there was one. The ancestors he had vaguely imagined as jobbing clock repairers turned out to have run the largest watch manufacturer in the west of England, with 100 watchmakers in Bristol at its height. “I don’t think a light bulb has ever shone so brightly above my head”, says Nicholas of the realisation. “I now knew what I was going to dedicate the rest of my life to.” Two years of evenings and lunch breaks later, in 2016, Fears reopened with Edwin’s great-great-great-grandson as its fourth managing director.
The Fears of 2026 is a different animal entirely. The company came home to Bristol in 2022; Nicholas himself lives in York (“inconvenient for me, very convenient for the company”), and six months ago moved into a larger headquarters within the Paintworks on the Bath Road, four departments under one roof and a newly built in-house assembly workshop below. That last one is less about oversight than accountability: “If you’ve got a watchmaker assembling a watch downstairs, the person selling that watch is the same person they sat next to having lunch.” Add the Clifton boutique, opened in April 2024 in a lovely old arcade, profitable within two months and a destination for collectors worldwide, and you have a business growing quickly but never giddily. “We’re not doing a hockey stick, just going to the moon. We’ve just been growing every single year, consistently.”
What elevates all this beyond good business is the philosophy behind it. “The soul of the brand is more than the logo and the heritage section on our website,” he says. “It’s what we do here today. You can’t just go, well, that’s a resource to plunder. You have to feed it.” So, the meeting rooms are named after the company’s former addresses, including Filigree, after the London street where it all restarted: “It’s nice to remind the people working here today that it started as one person working from a borrowed desk on my landing.” He keeps one of everything, lanyards, business cards, logo iterations: the archive of tomorrow. And each summer the whole company decamps to Weston-super-Mare for arcade games and fish and chips, reviving a day out first recorded in 1877 when Amos Fear became the second managing director – though top hats and frock coats have given way to flip flops (the Fears dress code is dropped for the day). “It may seem completely irrelevant to what we do, but we’re not producing units. We’re building watches with passion.”
Nothing feeds the archive quite like the watch on his wrist. In 2021, senior design manager Lee Yuen-Rapati messaged his boss a simple question: what would be your dream Fears watch? The answer was instant: the perpetual calendar, an obsession since his teens. “You explain it to someone who doesn’t know what it is and they look at you dumbfounded, like, where’s the WiFi connection? How does it update itself?” Lee’s first pen-and-paper sketches followed in early 2022, and four-and-a-half years later, “not an easy watch to source components for, to design, to engineer”, the Brunswick 39 Perpetual Calendar arrives as the first high complication in the company’s 180-year history.
Remarkably, as we saw on our visit, much of that first sheet of paper survived. “We knew we were going to use a conventional layout for the calendar and a modular construction for the movement, and that started to inform things beyond the dial, into the case,” says Lee. “Adding bevels to the case rather than rounded flanks came through in some of the first drawings back in ’22.” Those wide, polished bevels now define a reworked Brunswick case with flat sides and a concave bezel where the standard model is curvaceous and convex, partly to let the corrector pushers sit dead centre in the brushed case band.
Other ideas were tried and dismissed. Skeletonised hands went first: “As it turns out, they actually add more detail, which takes away from the legibility.” And because a perpetual calendar needs letters as well as numerals, Lee drew Fears a bespoke typeface, Bristol, developed from the logo redesign, its characters curved to follow the arc of the sub-dials. As the designer explains, “Our watches are very elegant, but there’s always a very robust feel to them.” Even the sub-dials are an exercise in restraint: “We probably could have made them a little bit larger, but that would have thrown off the overall balance of the watch, which is the foundational thing to get right.”
The moonphase carries no stars at all. “I’ve grown up in cities. If you’re in Bristol city centre at night looking up, you’re not seeing any stars,” says Nicholas. “I love the idea of just deep black sky.” So, a black lacquer disc carries nothing but two silver moons, hand-finished with charbonnage, on a dial called Silver Mink: frosted, coated in pure silver, white in sunlight and warmer in duller environments, with quad-bevelled black gold indices and tri-bevelled pipette hands. Beneath sits a modified Dubois Depraz perpetual module on a hand-finished Sellita SW300, carrying its own calibre reference, 55113, exclusive to Fears, with frosted bridges, bevelling and a solid 18ct gold rotor bearing the Bristol Flower motif. “If you’re doing a watch like this, it’s got to be done properly.”
On the wrist, it is the whole argument made flesh. At 39mm across and 9.4mm thick including the domed sapphire, it is the slimmest Brunswick yet, and the cushion case keeps it low and close, as Nicholas demonstrates on his own wrist. With 50m of water resistance and a SwissKubik winder included, this is that rarest of things, a perpetual calendar you would happily wear every day, which is precisely the point. He has worn the prototype daily since April: “To look at my wrist in between meetings and see a perpetual calendar that’s been made by my company, the sense of pride is off the scale.”
The bravest decision, though, is not horological but commercial. “I didn’t want this to be a one-off halo product,” he says. “It has to show the essence of what Fears does.” So, the suppliers behind the core collection made components for this watch, and at £26,950 it enters that core collection unlimited, founding a new Eminence Collection tier alongside the Fears Garrick, with bespoke platinum versions available through the Custom Division. “We didn’t stretch to do this. The company has grown up so that we’re able to bring out a perpetual calendar as a regular core watch.”
On the office wall hang portraits of the four managing directors of Fears, and beside them a fifth frame, deliberately empty. “We gear everything up in the company so there will be a fifth. There will be a sixth.” The last 18 months have seen the brand confident enough to show a sportier side with the Redcliff ES field watch and Filton pilot; the next chapter is scale. “At its peak, Fears was making hundreds of thousands of watches. We can do that again. Not next year, not in the next ten years. But we can work towards it.” Ask which figure from history he’d share a beer – sorry, two halves – with and he picks Edwin: “I really think he would enjoy seeing what his great-great-great-grandson has done with what he started as a 21-year-old.”
A perpetual calendar will track the date faithfully until the year 2100 without a single correction, but only if you keep it wound. Nicholas would tell you heritage works exactly the same way. Hence the tea, the printed catalogues, the day at the seaside and the one-of-everything archive: a company winding itself a little every day, so that it never needs setting again.
Price and Specs:
More details at Fears.
