Interview: the Convictions of James Lamb

It’s a fair assumption that if you’re the kind of enthusiast that’s interested in independent watchmaking, the allure of something a little different isn’t lost on you. The independent watch space is a wildly diverse one that’s full of outsider artisans, but even in a field of outsiders, English watchmaker James Lamb is something of an anomaly. 

Lamb’s watches genuinely don’t look like anything else on the market. While they’re all time-only affairs, they feature an offset sub-dial layout that frees up the outer portion of the dial to be used as a decorative space. With his Origin Series, Lamb applies strikingly colorful enamel work to the outer dial section. With his latest release, the Linea Edition, Lamb has collaborated with one of the UK’s most respected ornamental engravers, Joanne Ryall, to create a line of watches with beautifully hand-engraved titanium and gold outer dials. 

While the dials are showstopping displays of handcraft, Lamb’s watches also feature completely handmade cases (read: no CNC machines used), which he crafts out of Argentium silver. Lamb’s case designs are robust and understated; they do a fabulous job of grounding the watch’s bold dial designs, but the craftsmanship that goes into them is something serious horology enthusiasts fawn over. For Lamb, a self-proclaimed watch industry isolationist, doing things like crafting his cases entirely by hand is kind of the whole point of making watches. 

Lamb deliberately avoids the industry’s fanfare and claims he isn’t caught up on the current trends in watchmaking in general. As a former prototype engineer, Lamb’s trip in watches is ultimately about the craft itself, the challenge of the work, and satisfying his own desire to hone his skills as a watchmaker and a man addicted to precision. Watchmaking is certainly James Lamb’s calling, but it’s one that’s oddly divorced from the culture of watches for him. 

In the following interview, Lamb brings Worn & Wound into his philosophies as a watchmaker, his origins in the business, and explains how the exciting new Linea Edition watches came to be. 

I know you have an engineering background. How did you end up becoming an independent watchmaker?

I always wanted to do something with watchmaking, but I like creating more than repairing. I found the repair side of watchmaking depressing when I had a repair business to get my certifications. When I first decided I was going to make a watch, I had an idea for this spectacular watch that was going to blow the watchmaking world away with its extraordinary abilities, but I realized I didn’t have the time or money I’d need to do it the right way. This was around 2010, so the independent watchmaking world wasn’t the thing that it is now and there really wasn’t a market for the watches I was dreaming of making. So I put that dream aside for a bit, but I had this nagging thought that I’ve simply got to do it. 

So around 2019, I took out two enormous bank loans and I got my first commission for a wristwatch from a collector friend who I’d worked with on a crown for a J.N. Shapiro watch when I was working on crowns for them. 

He had a budget of around 5,000 pounds, which wasn’t how I thought I was going to start making watches. I knew I couldn’t make my own movement on that budget, but there were a lot of other ideas I had that I could incorporate. I’d started teaching myself silversmithing in the context of case making and I was quite interested in that because it combined a little bit of mechanics with an artistic or sculptural craft. A watch case can be three-dimensional art, but functional. So I thought I’d teach myself how to be a casemaker and because I’d already started with silversmithing, I decided I’d make the case for this watch out of Argentium silver.

The offset dial aesthetic of your watches is very unique. Could you tell me a bit about where that concept came from?

The offset dial idea came about because I want to have a separate canvas to work with away from the timekeeping part. I think legibility is fairly important and a lot of watches have an awful lot of stuff going on behind the hands, where you can’t even easily tell what time it is. I look at watches like that and feel that they’re failing at their primary function as timekeepers. So I thought I’d put the time bit separately and then the dial could be a background idea. So while I was coming up with this first watch for this client, I’d offer him dial options and one was to put the timekeeping portion of the watch offset to the right hand side. That was what we went with and really how the offset dial idea started. 

I’m curious what inspires you as a designer outside of watches? Your designs are unlike anything else on the market that I personally know of.

I’m attracted to precision, accuracy, and fine detail–more in an engineering sense than an ornamental sense. I have always obsessed over the tiniest details, even when I was young and I would draw things. I would draw a lot, but I dropped art as soon as I could in school because I enjoyed physics a lot more. 

It sounds like art was never a matter of self-expression so much as a way to explore precision and control. 

Yeah, that’s right. It was more “Can I do it?” Knowing it was going to be difficult, but having not seen anyone else do it and wanting to try to answer that question. That’s been a recurring theme for me–trying to make life harder for myself. 

There’s a real human touch to your watches, but they’re very precise. What defines a James Lamb watch’s personality in your eyes?

Even if I defined that now, it probably wouldn’t stand in five years. It’s hard for me to do that because I’m always working so far ahead of myself–so the watches I’m releasing now are kind of already the past in my mind because I’ve made them. The Linea Edition watches have been done, so what’s next is what occupies an awful lot of my brain time. They’re quite different projects compared to what I’m doing right now and are going to take years to develop, but what I’m going to have at the end of is something that I don’t think has been done before. And something that people won’t necessarily associate with me and the watches I’m doing now. I’d also have to think really hard about what I’ve produced up until now to really define what a James Lamb watch is. 

You don’t strike me as someone that looks back much.

Never. 

So in an abstract and more philosophical sense, what do you want people to take away from the watches you make? 

Definitely an individual approach to watchmaking. I have kind of an isolationist approach to watchmaking. I don’t really do anything for the industry like watch fairs or meetups, and that’s deliberate. I’m never going to follow the trends and I don’t even know about them to tell you the truth. I want people to understand that whatever I do is very much the product of the inside of my head. I spend my time strategizing what I’m going to do, rather than trying to understand what the market wants. 

My takeaway is that you’re a process guy, not a product guy. It’s about solving a problem and coming up with something unique, but you’re not really that interested in the thing itself once it’s created.

Yeah, it’s about the craft. I love the process of turning a thought into a physical item that you can touch. That process is borderline magical. For me, I never get bored of that. The process, for me, is everything and I love honing skills, often by doing it wrong until I can do it right. I’ll design things that I don’t know how to make, and my wife always asks why I agree to do something that I don’t know how to do, and I say “because I will know how to do it.” 

If eventually I’m considered a good watchmaker, that’s great. I’d like to be considered a good casemaker, as well. I think being able to do everything yourself is good and that’s the intention here. It’s the end goal–but it has to be worth it. There’s no point in you spending two years making your own caliber if it’s gonna cost a gazillion pounds and no one’s going to buy it. You have to lead up to those things and the watches have to command a certain price to justify that work. That’s the process that I’m working through right now, but I’m doing it by enhancing and refining what I do endlessly, and introducing things like gold and more enameling. This next year I’ll be releasing a couple of things and probably be near 30,000 pounds and that will perhaps ease the way for me to sell watches where I make everything myself at about 50,000 pounds. 

 

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You’re deeply dedicated to handwork and using traditional techniques to make something very precise. Isn’t that at odds with your engineering background? I find most engineers are attracted to the most efficient, modern way of doing something as long as the quality level is there.

I definitely consider myself a prototype engineer in that I like solving problems and doing things that I don’t know how to do initially. That kind of engineer doesn’t have to look at scaling or mass production. To that point, the Origin Series is very much a bit of a development test bed of sorts. Each watch has helped me refine the things that I will do, whether it’s the process that I use or the design itself or simply finding a neater way of doing something. Everything I do is an improvement on the way that I’ve done it previously. That’s not to say the first couple of watches weren’t excellent, but they’re not as good as the ones that I’m making now. 

The other nice thing about the Origin Series is I don’t feel compelled to make something absolutely identical to the watch next to it on the bench. I think that would make this work terribly dull. There’s an element of handwork here, especially with silver, that I enjoy doing. Some parts fitting together properly often comes down to microns of difference in finishing, and that fit can only be really identified by putting the parts together and pressing them in. It’s a friction feel  thing that you have to hone until you get a nice, clean, sharp snap. Perhaps plugging some numbers into a CNC machine and pressing the green button and watching identical parts get spit out would be more efficient, but that isn’t watchmaking to me–that’s mass production. Anyone can do that. 

I’m aware I make watch cases in the wrong way for a business model, but luckily there are people that appreciate that approach and buy these things. 

A lot of watch enthusiasts value quality as much as they value an interesting narrative. Beyond their unique aesthetic, your watches carry the narrative of being truly handmade.

For me, value is something that can only be added by human hands. Let’s be honest, the watch world is 95% bullshit. I get frustrated with it because the herd will be very interested in whatever’s hot and suddenly that’ll be the best thing until the next thing comes along, which is then considered the best. You mentioned some collectors are driven by quality, but I think quite a few are driven by the name of the brand or FOMO. If it sounds as if I’m bitter, I’m not–I just wish that collectors would be more interested in quality and trying to understand a watchmaker’s craft than what’s popular at the moment.

If you had to define the archetypal James Lamb client, what kind of collector are they? Where do they come from in the watch world, not necessarily geographically, but philosophically? 

That’s a good question, but I am actually going to use geography to answer it because it plays a role. I sell pretty much exclusively to American collectors. A couple here and there in Australia, Singapore, maybe Europe–but it’s almost invariably American collectors. I think geography is important here because American collectors are probably the leading market for independent watchmaking. They’re really passionate collectors and the ones I’ve chatted with will always want to chat more and build a relationship–which is nice. I find others tend to want to buy a watch and you never hear from them ever again. 

I don’t really know what drives collectors, and I suppose they’ve all got their own unique journeys. The collectors that buy my watches tend to not have a very fixed approach to how they collect watches. I couldn’t say there’s any strong identifying thing to the collectors that buy my watches.

I would imagine it’s people that are looking for something very different from the independents that make watches in a specific tradition, but also people interested in legitimately handcrafted things. Maybe those that know the difference between “handcrafted” as an approach vs. “handcrafted” as a marketing term. 

I would hope so. I always say to them “Look, if you want to know anything about these watches, I can talk to excruciating lengths about any detail you want to know about. You just need to ask.” 

Very few take me up on that offer directly. I think they’re maybe frightened that I will go into too much detail. But the details in my watches are only really useful if you’ve got context and if you don’t know anything about manufacturing. When I’m making a watch, I send videos and photos and notes to the client talking them through what I’m working on. I like to give that access to my clients and I like bringing them into the process because I do think it helps people to better appreciate what these watches are.

I’m sure being brought into the process in that way adds a different level of appreciation for the watch once they receive it.

Yeah, I like to imagine the client sort of sitting on my shoulder while I’m making the watch. I try to keep my prices sensible, but the other part of including the client in the process is that I would never want somebody to think that I was overcharging them for any reason. I want to show them where I’m putting the value into the watch and show them every process, so they understand the time and the effort that goes into these things. Maybe also so they can evaluate and justify the purchase in their brains properly?

The Linea Edition watches are your latest release and are a departure from your previous releases. What’s the backstory on them and their design?

For the last few years I’ve been making watches with enamel dials, and they’re great. They look good, they’re bright, they have a vivid sort of reflective quality, and they’ve been good for a lot of collectors. I happen to be quite conservative in my own tastes and I asked myself if I would wear one of my own enamel dial watches, and I realized I probably wouldn’t. I’m always amazed that people really like bright colored watches and things and that people are able to pull those off because I would feel too self-conscious–but that’s my own thing.

So I’m friends with Joanne Ryall, who is one of the UK’s leading ornamental engravers, and I’ve wanted her to make some dials for me for years because I love her stuff. I think honestly she’s one of the best out there working right now, but she’s been very busy with other projects for the last few years. Everything finally came together for a collaboration this year.

I knew I wanted to have the type of engraving Joanne does in my watches for many years and I knew I wanted to have three very distinct designs. Not all scroll work, because you see other watches with scroll work, but we included some of it because that’s one of the things Joanne is known for and these watches needed to include as much of her artistic identity as my watches have my own identity in them. So these watches have dials that Joanne engraved and they offer a contrast visually that’s more understated from the watches that I’ve done before.

The case design is also very different. It’s got a broader stance to it and it’s quite austere and produced in a different way than my past cases. The Argentium silver alloy that we used in these cases was only available in casting grain at the time we were designing them, so it took over a year to develop the case because my cases aren’t made with a simple casting process. Argentium silver has some unique properties in that it can be hardened in a way that sterling can’t, and it’s tarnish resistant. It will patinate slowly and in a way that’s really unique. You are not going to go scuba diving in this thing and it’s not really meant for swimming, so please don’t. 

That said, I want my customers to wear their watches and not be too precious about them and enjoy them. Silver is going to pick up marks, it’s going to get a patina, so you can’t be worrying about that, but the cases I make will not tarnish and they’re much more robust than you might expect of something like sterling silver. 

Is there anything you feel like people miss about your brand when just looking at the watches without knowing your background?

Someone once called me an underground independent. I don’t do very much active promotion. I work on the principle that people will appreciate my watches more if they discover them themselves, kind of like how you may feel more of a connection to an album or an artist you discovered that wasn’t hyper popular when you found them. I don’t advertise or really play the game–probably to my detriment to an extent. But this self-imposed obscurity means the people that do find me feel a different attachment to the watches that I make. James Lamb

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