Time for growth at Birmingham watch brand

A BIRMINGHAM City University graduate has plans to sell his branded watches from a shop in Birmingham city centre later this year.

Founder of Blenheim London, Dennis Chen – who is originally from China – currently designs the watches from his Birmingham home but has ambitions to open his first small shop in the Bullring before Christmas.

The business – which creates traditional English watches and markets them online – has seen rapid success since starting up in 2014.

He said: “I wanted to do something like men’s jewellery, something interchangeable, designable and that’s what I’m doing, watches. The strap, the hands, and the valves are all interchangeable.”

At present, he has three collections which he has designed and is now working on a hybrid branded smart watch.
 
The 26-year old watch designer said: “This is a future trend, this is the number one criteria of doing the smart watch and the second one is using big data.

“So we want to create watches that know who you are, what your habits are, what you are about, and guess who you are.”

The watches are mainly sold through the website, Amazon and a stockist in Denmark, but Dennis has big plans to take the watch industry by storm, starting with a store in Birmingham’s flagship shopping centre.

Dennis has ambitions to stock Harrods and to be as successful as Christopher Ward and eventually, as big as Swatch.