Designing timepieces with history and the stories worth preserving
WHO WE ARE
Zero West is a very personal business. Its watches grew from founder Graham Collins’ lifelong fascination with engineering, aircraft, cars, motorcycles, history, cartography, espionage and extraordinary human endeavour — subjects he has spent much of his life not simply reading about, but working with.
Graham began his career at nineteen as a mechanical design engineer, initially designing classified equipment of the kind more readily associated with a James Bond film. Decades of patented high-end mechanical design followed, spanning military projects, aerospace and precision engineering. Today that experience is focused entirely on horology.
The first Zero West watches began as Graham’s own designs, engineered from first principles around proven Swiss mechanical movements. That philosophy remains today. Cases, crystals, anti-shock and sealing systems, bracelets, straps and buckles are developed specifically for our watches, made in very small numbers and with an attention to detail that simply wouldn’t be practical in mass production. It’s precision engineering with an artist’s eye for proportion, material, light and detail.
But the watches came before the brand.
Graham showed those early designs to his friend Andrew Brabyn, whose background was in advertising, graphic design and branding. Andrew immediately saw the common thread running through Graham’s apparently diverse interests. He began developing the ideas visually, creating a book of dial concepts drawn from aviation, motorsport, navigation, engineering, history and the remarkable machines and people behind them.
That dial book became an important part of Zero West’s beginnings. It demonstrated that these weren’t simply isolated watch designs. There was an entire visual language and an almost limitless source of stories from which watches could be created. Andrew developed those ideas graphically; Graham worked out how to turn them into real, mechanically resolved watches.
The name Zero West came from Graham’s interest in cartography and the Greenwich Meridian — zero degrees longitude, the point from which east and west are measured. Andrew began exploring that world graphically while Graham developed the engineering behind the watches. Two very different disciplines began feeding one another, and that collaboration gradually developed into the Zero West philosophy:
THERE’S A TIME AND PLACE.
Every watch connects to a real time, place, person, machine or event. Sometimes that means spending years securing a piece of historically significant material and then finding a way to engineer it into a watch. Sometimes the connection is expressed through a dial, caseback or seemingly insignificant detail. The story is never simply applied to the watch; it influences why the watch looks and works the way it does.
Today Graham and Andrew still work much as they did at the beginning: two very different skill sets, constantly overlapping. Graham leads the watch design, engineering, horology and historical projects; Andrew brings the graphic and brand perspective and looks after the relationship with the people who buy them.
The result is Zero West: serious mechanical watches, built in very small numbers, with a story worth telling.
