A Watch Journey

Everyone has a watch journey. Here is mine.

Since I first began to appreciate watches, I wanted a Rolex Submariner.

It was the holy grail. The North. Everything I thought I could possibly aspire to own. Every watch I had before finally getting one was, in one way or another, an attempt to find something that felt a little like the real thing.

The great Roger Moore in Live and Let Die wearing his not so standard Submariner ref. 5513

I'm not entirely sure where the obsession began. Perhaps it was my early fascination with the Bond universe. The Bond I actually grew up with was Roger Moore, whose wrist was mostly occupied by a Seiko than a Rolex, but I had seen him wear the hell out of a Submariner in Live and Let Die.

That was enough.

It had to be a Submariner.

On a beautiful spring day in 1999, I finally joined the club.

I was in Hamburg and, much like today, Rolex sports watches were difficult to get hold of. Finding one that could actually be bought at list price felt like an achievement in itself.

And then there was the experience.

Wempe on Jungfernstieg. The jeweller. The white gloves. A glass of champagne while I listened carefully to instructions on how to set the watch and look after it. There was a sense of occasion about the whole thing that I had never experienced when buying anything before.

A mint condition Rolex Submariner 14060M

The watch waiting for me was a 14060M Submariner: the entry-level Sub. No date. No chronometer certification. A wonderfully clean dial.

None of that mattered.

It was a brand-new Rolex Submariner.

And I was now part of an elite group of extremely successful people.

Or so it felt.

One thing I will always remember about that watch was putting it on in the morning. That little ritual somehow kick-started the day, and it never really lost its magic.

From a more pragmatic perspective, however, it wasn't a particularly wonderful watch. It didn't keep especially good time. The crystal always seemed to look greasy. The clasp felt remarkably cheap for something that had cost so much money.

And owning it introduced me to one of the nastier little secrets of luxury watches:

There is always another one you should have bought instead.

I should have bought the date version. It had the better movement. Or perhaps I should have waited until I could afford the ultra-cool Sea-Dweller.

And so I tortured myself.

Among other Rolex owners, I sometimes felt as though I had gained membership of the club on the thinnest possible mandate. It was like arriving in a BMW 114i — technically a BMW, certainly, but the smallest and cheapest one they made.

It felt slightly desperate.

Of course, the truth was that nobody gave a toss.

The entire conflict existed inside my own head and nowhere else.

The years passed and, despite all of this, I wore that 14060M with pride every single day.

Eventually things were going fairly well and I decided the time had come for the upgrade I had spent years thinking about.

At the time I loved steel-and-gold watches, and when the new GMT-Master appeared with its ceramic bezel, I knew I wanted one. I must have visited the local Rolex reseller five times, trying it on again and again, before finally trading in my Submariner and quite a few quid for the GMT.

And something strange and expected happened.

The spell had been broken.

I looked at my wrist and could see the beauty of the thing. I could feel the weight of the gold and appreciate its enormous presence.

But I couldn't recreate the feeling I'd had with that first Submariner.

The polished gold centre links scratched if you so much as looked at them, and before long the watch looked thoroughly used. I eventually sent it away to be refurbished, reasoning that making it look immaculate again would improve its value.

When it returned two months later, I proudly showed it to my new girlfriend.

The look on her face told me everything I needed to know.

Not long afterwards, the GMT was traded for cash and a brand new Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch. There was a sense of occasion about the Omega, but it didn't feel as well built, and if I was honest, it felt like a relegation. So when a colleague spotted it on my wrist and offered to buy it, I accepted immediately. The learning was that I needed a Rolex again and I ended up buying the newly released Explorer II in white and with orange 24-hour hand.

It was big, purposeful and matter-of-fact - perhaps one of the last watches in the Rolex range that hadn't become a little bit bling.

I liked it very much.

But the magic was gone.

Increasingly, I found myself looking at Tudor rather than Rolex. To me, it seemed as though Rolex was becoming more interested in appearance, status and the demands of new luxury markets, while Tudor was being allowed to carry forward some of the utilitarian virtues that had made Rolex fascinating in the first place.

More importantly, though, I was changing too.

As I grew older, I began to understand what I actually wanted from a watch.

I became less interested in loud branding. I didn't need a logo to hide behind and I didn't particularly want membership of a club anymore.

In fact, I began to become obsessed with the opposite: minimal branding, or sometimes no branding at all.

There was only one problem.

Most watches without a recognisable name on the dial looked like railway-station clocks for the wrist.

What I wanted was something else: beautiful, purposeful watches that took inspiration from some of the greatest tool watches ever made, but without asking me to advertise somebody else's status symbol on my wrist.

I couldn't find quite what I was looking for.

So I decided to make it.

The Deep Dive E01/A - our first watch. No less than 1,000m water resistance - and no branding

That was part of the beginning of Enoksen.

But there was another part of that day in Hamburg that stayed with me just as much as the watch itself. The white gloves, the champagne, the time the jeweller took, and the feeling that my purchase genuinely mattered. Years later, when I started Enoksen, I kept coming back to that experience — but also to a simple question: why should you have to spend Rolex money to be treated like that?

From the beginning, I wanted an Enoksen customer buying their first proper watch to feel every bit as important as someone walking into a luxury boutique and spending ten times as much. In many ways, that became more important to me than the watches themselves.

Watches brought people through the door; how we treated them was what I wanted Enoksen to be remembered for.

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Postscript - seven years later

I originally wrote this story in 2019. Reading it again seven years later, I realise that my watch journey wasn't really a journey from one brand to another.

It was a journey from wanting a watch because of what I thought it said about me, to wanting a watch simply because I loved the watch.

That distinction has probably influenced Enoksen more than I understood at the time.

I still admire Rolex. I still think the Submariner is one of the greatest watch designs of all time. And I would never dismiss the peculiar emotional power that a famous name on a dial can have - I experienced it myself that spring day in Hamburg.

But today, I'm much more interested in something quieter.

A watch that doesn't need to explain itself across the room.

A watch whose proportions are right, whose function makes sense, whose details reward looking closer and which becomes your watch through years of wearing it.

A watch worth owning.

And perhaps that is the funny thing about watch journeys.

We spend years looking for the watch that tells other people who we are.

Eventually, if we're lucky, we stop caring whether they notice.

So my question to you is this: what has your watch journey taught you?