Outside its native America and beyond watch aficionados, Ball Watch Company is a relative unknown. But with a new collection for BMW, some novel innovations and a healthy dose of ambition, that should be about to change.
I remember writing about Ball Watch Company for the first time five, maybe six years ago, and feeling like I’d stumbled across one of the watch industry’s best-kept secrets. Here was a brand with a wide but measured collection of good-looking, well equipped, affordably priced mechanical watches that nobody seemed to be talking about – at least, not in the UK where I’m based.
Six years on, not much has changed. Ask your average watch buyer to name a few watch brands in the affordable luxury category (which, for my money, is around £750-£3,000), and I’d be amazed if any of them mentioned Ball. TAG Heuer, Omega and Breitling, sure (albeit increasingly wrongly as prices soar). Longines, and Bell & Ross, perhaps. But Ball? Unlikely.
I still find this odd. Ok, it can take years of heavy investment to give a brand momentum. But Ball’s got a lot going for it, without the need to bellow from the rooftops.
Starting with a good backstory. Ball was born on the American railroads at the end of the 19th century, good hunting ground for romantic tales. Although in this case, romantic isn’t quite the word. Watch aficionados will know that Ball Watch Company only came into this world because of the fatal Kipton railroad disaster in Ohio, USA, in 1891.
It was because of this tragedy that Webster Clay Ball, a Cleveland watchmaker, was appointed chief inspector of the Lake Shore Lines. Ball was fastidious about timekeeping and insisted on all manner of strict codes to make sure the railroads ran safely and on-time. His system was a success and it was incorporated across the country and into Mexico and Canada, eventually covering 75 per cent of the American network and 175,000 miles of railroad.
It was because of this tragedy that Webster Clay Ball, a Cleveland watchmaker, was appointed chief inspector of the Lake Shore Lines. Ball was fastidious about timekeeping and insisted on all manner of strict codes to make sure the railroads ran safely and on-time. His system was a success and it was incorporated across the country and into Mexico and Canada, eventually covering 75 per cent of the American network and 175,000 miles of railroad.
From this came his brand, Ball Watch Company, which enjoyed many fruitful years Stateside, becoming the country’s largest wholesale distributor of standard railroad watches. But after the Second World War, the American railroads declined and Ball went with it. At some point between 1960 and 1980, the brand went bust – 1962, according to one Cleveland historian, closer to 1980 according to Ball HQ.
Details of what happened between then and its 1990s rebirth are equally sketchy, but at some point the Ball name was bought from the founder’s descendants by private investors and became Swiss. The company moved to La Chaux de Fonds and launched its first watch, the Engineer, in 2001. Its home market is still the USA, but growth has taken it into traditional markets including Switzerland, Hong Kong and the UK, and into less familiar territories for luxury watch brands such as Pakistan.
Backstories and functioning distribution networks only get you so far, mind. But Ball backs these up with good product. Despite the inevitable price hikes during those years since I first interacted with the brand, you can still pick up a Ball watch for under £1,000 in the UK. The Fireman Racer automatic is £920 and a super watch for anyone looking for a quality mechanical on a modest budget.
Backstories and functioning distribution networks only get you so far, mind. But Ball backs these up with good product. Despite the inevitable price hikes during those years since I first interacted with the brand, you can still pick up a Ball watch for under £1,000 in the UK. The Fireman Racer automatic is £920 and a super watch for anyone looking for a quality mechanical on a modest budget.
Further up the ladder, Ball does some nifty complications, again without going anywhere near the ceiling price for mechanicals with equivalent spec. Take its latest Trainmaster Worldtime, launched during Basel 2013. It has day and date indications and can tell the time in 24 time zones simultaneously. It’s chronometer certified, shock-resistant to 5,000Gs and has a good smattering of Ball’s self-powered micro gas lights, which, the brand says, glow 100 times more brightly than SuperLuminova and for 25 years. And it costs just £1,960/€2,340. Competition for that kind of get-up at that sort of price is next to non-existent.
Slightly pricier, but only by virtue of the innovative tech inside it, is Ball’s new Hydrocarbon Black – an intimidating name for a watch – which features its in-house developed SpringLOCK anti-shock system. This, claims the brand, can reduce the impact of shocks by as much as 66 per cent (what, no decimal point?), particularly useful it you’re American freeclimber Alex Honnold, for whom the watch was designed. Yours for £2,900/€3,470.
Innovations like these are very much the brand’s own doing. Jeffrey Hess, who runs Ball in America, stated recently that the brand’s chief technical officer Philippe Antille has registered 35 patents exclusively for Ball since he joined the company in 2008.
Hess, for the record, was at the centre of rumours earlier this year that Ball would launch its first in-house movement at Basel 2014, but latest reports from inside the company indicate that while development continues, it’s unlikely there’ll be a launch any time soon. Costs incurred to date mean price points for watches powered by such a movement would be prohibitively high, given the brand’s current positioning.
Hess, for the record, was at the centre of rumours earlier this year that Ball would launch its first in-house movement at Basel 2014, but latest reports from inside the company indicate that while development continues, it’s unlikely there’ll be a launch any time soon. Costs incurred to date mean price points for watches powered by such a movement would be prohibitively high, given the brand’s current positioning.
For now therefore, Ball will continue to be supplied by ETA, a relationship it knows – as do many other independent brands – won’t last forever. Any base calibre Ball produces would, you’d expect, be designed to carry all manner of modules because the brand’s approach to complications is unconventional to say the least. The Ball for BMW TMT, due in retailers now, has a mechanical thermometer. That’s a little pricier, coming in at £4,350/€5,200.
There’s much to like about Ball, and much to anticipate. If it can stay ‘on the ball’, so to speak, there’s no reason it couldn’t take up a healthy position in the market. In fact, it would be only right and proper if it did – the legend has it that the expression ‘on the ball’ was coined in response to Webster C. Ball’s revolutionary timekeeping system. Now there’s a thing.
