The New Pinchbeck Watches Website: Looking from the Outside In

When you work inside a business every day, it can be surprisingly difficult to see it clearly.

You know where everything is kept. You know who answers the telephone, who designed a particular watch and which drawer contains the parts Rob has been looking for since Tuesday.

You know the stories because you were there when they happened.

And after a while, you stop noticing how much there is to tell.

That was the position we found ourselves in with the Pinchbeck website.

The business had moved on. We had made more watches, met more people and gathered another few years of stories from the workshop.

But the website hadn’t kept up.

So we decided to change it.

Why Pinchbeck Watches Needed a New Website

Building the new Pinchbeck Watches website gave us a reason to look closely at the business we’ve spent twenty years building.

We didn’t want to reinvent the business.

There was no desire to make Pinchbeck louder, bigger or more polished than it really is.

Quite the opposite.

We wanted to show the business more clearly.

A small team working from our watchmaking workshop in Lincoln. Watches designed here and built to order. Twenty years of decisions, experiments, commissions, collaborations and people we’ve met along the way.

The challenge was working out how to bring all of that together.

And that meant letting some new people in.

Working with Number 75 Design

We worked with Number 75 Design to rethink how Pinchbeck should live online.

That process involved much more than choosing colours, moving pages around and deciding where photographs should go.

We talked.

A lot.

About how the business started. The watches we’ve made. The way the workshop works. The things we do differently without necessarily realising we do them differently.

Some of those conversations helped us see parts of Pinchbeck we had started to take for granted.

Twenty years is a lot of history to carry around in your head.

Number 75 helped us give it some structure.

Photographing the Pinchbeck Workshop with Clare Coe

Then Clare Coe came into the workshop with her camera.

We didn’t want photographs of a version of Pinchbeck that only existed for the day of the shoot.

We wanted the workshop.

The benches. The tools. The people. The watches being worked on.

The ordinary things we see every day.

Clare saw things we had stopped noticing.

The result is a record of Pinchbeck as it is now, at this particular point in the life of the business.

That feels important.

A New Home for Made-to-Order Watches and Watchmaker’s Specials

The new website gives us more room.

Room to explain why our watches are built to order.

Room for Watchmaker’s Specials that appear when there’s something worth making.

Room to show what can happen when someone comes to us with an idea of their own.

And room for The Watchmaker’s Journal.

There are twenty years of stories behind Pinchbeck.

Some we know well.

Some we’ve recently rediscovered.

And, we suspect, a few Paul has forgotten to tell us about.

We now have somewhere to put them.

What Comes Next for Pinchbeck Watches

A new website doesn’t change how we make watches.

Rob will still be at the bench.

Jason will still be designing them.

Paul will still be answering the telephone.

And we’ll still build Pinchbeck watches one at a time, for the people who choose them.

What has changed is our ability to show you more of it.

That’s what this new website is for.

A clearer view of the business we’ve spent twenty years building.

And a better place to tell the stories still to come.