NAME GAME

There are some colourful names in watchmaking, and we thought it would be fun to go down that rabbit hole...

- JOSH SIMS & ASHOK SOMAN

Once a watch was a watch was a watch - the brand might be a draw, but invariably one was chosen on function and aesthetics. It was only with the post-World War 2 consumer boom - with it the very notion of mass consumerism and marketing as a commercial discipline - that watches, as with other products, began to get names.

And, much as the few decades of this pre-Quartz era benefitted from an abundance of more boutique independent watchmakers, able to find a market for quirky designs, so the 1960s and 1970s in particular offered some of the most arresting and adventurous names in watchmaking. Just think of the intriguing Golden Horse (Rado), the tongue-twisting Ploprof (Omega), the pop Bivouac (Favre-Leuba), the bold Conquest (Longines) or the exotic Monaco (Heuer)? Or how about Caravelle’s Bullion? Or those watches of tomorrow, and named for such too: Favre’s Moon Raider, Wittnauer’s Futurama, Seiko’s Astron or Amida’s Digitrend? They all had a certain poetry...

“Inevitably the things we have to think about now when naming a watch means many of watch names chosen by the industry over more recent years can sound a little dull in comparison,” as Zenith’s product development and heritage director Romain Marietta concedes. “The watch market was much smaller in the 1960s and perhaps there was not a sense of just how big some of the brands that survived would get. We could come up with much cooler alternatives to the ones used but often they don’t work for some reason.”