Neighbourhood watch

Leveraging a lean business model to deliver high-quality timepieces, the Makoto Watch Company embraces the microbrand movement

A FEW YEARS ago, Ryan LeClair’s wife was diagnosed with stage four cancer. For 13 years, he had run a furniture retail business, but now, facing one of the scariest health issues a family can, he sold it. “Now’s the time,” he recalls himself saying. “I’ve got to spend more time at home.”

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His wife’s treatment went remarkably well, and as might be the case for anyone in that position, his thoughts turned to things he had always wanted to do. “As soon as she started feeling a little bit better, we started saying, ‘Let’s travel the world.’ So, we kind of just started travelling, all over the world.”

In January 2024, they found themselves in Japan, but bad news followed. “The day we landed is when I got news that my dad passed away,” LeClair recalls. Maybe he hadn’t realized it at the time, but on the other side of the world, with life tearing him open a bit, new inspirations and perspectives started to find their way in. “I found the people were incredible, the culture was incredible,” LeClair says. “It was just like stepping into a whole different world for me.”

LeClair’s wife’s health kept improving, and having sold his furniture business, “I needed something to do,” he says. A long-time collector of timepieces, he didn’t have to look far for inspiration. “I thought, ‘Let’s give the watch world a go.’ So that was the start of the brand.” Makoto, he says, is a Japanese word meaning “genuine honesty, authenticity and integrity.”

With the notion firmly planted in his head, LeClair started to work on the specifics: running the numbers, figuring out logistics, suppliers and costs. Here, LeClair freely admits to something many an entrepreneur has discovered: conceiving of a brand is the easy part — at least when compared to execution.

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And the watch industry isn’t throwing you any favours, either. “To be honest, I was pretty naive,” he laughs. “I thought I knew everything about watches. I thought I had enough business sense to be able to start a business like that, and I thought I had a pretty good grasp of what it would cost.”

But he forged on. He established a relationship with a manufacturer located outside of Hong Kong — the same supplier he is working with today — and started to develop prototypes. “One prototype sample, for example, might cost $4,000 to $5,000 to get made,” he says. “And I’m trying to develop not just one watch — I’m trying to design five or six or seven different watches so I can turn it into a brand. It gets quite expensive, pretty quickly.”

The Makoto Watch Company offers five different models, with several colour and materials variants within those models. The latest model is the Kodawari collection, which features dials made with semi-precious stones like malachite, meteorite, turquoise and red agate. The watches use a premium Miyota movement mechanism, which he sources from Japan.

 

Makoto falls firmly into what is called the watch microbrand category, an increasingly competitive slice of the watch market, but one where watch collectors and enthusiasts are increasingly looking to find quality pieces at reasonable price points. At around $1,000, Makoto is targeting that consumer.

“We’re trying to hit that person that is knowledgeable about what watches are,” LeClair says. Big, established watch brands often come in at five to ten times that price — great if what you’re after is the name brand, but often the quality isn’t noticeably higher than the microbrands, which must be more competitive and price-conscious.

Keeping LeClair honest in this regard is the watch microbrand community, which LeClair says is full of tough, well-informed customers. “Quality for value is really important in the microbrand world because they’re really knowledgeable people.

Usually, when they come to your booth, they know as much about your watch as you do. They’re fantastic people, but they’ll call you out on it if you’re charging too much money.”

Six months after launching the brand, LeClair says Makoto has sold around 150 watches, a figure that may sound like a small number to some, but one he’s happy with. Even an ­established microbrand might only sell 200 to 300 pieces in a year, he notes, and his goal over the next few years to target sales of 1,000 pieces annually.

“In the grand scheme of things, somebody has to be pretty committed to spend $1,000 on a watch with a company they’ve never heard of,” he says. “It takes a little while to get that brand name established, to the point where people start saying ‘Oh, we know this guy, we know this brand, we know the quality.’ So, I’m pretty happy with that number.”

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It is, at very least, good momentum for Makoto. What it has done for LeClair is to keep him engaged and hungry to keep the growth ticking. By the end of the year, he expects to have 19 different designs available, a deliberately fast design pace aimed at establishing brand identity early. “I’m going to slow down that pace in the next year or two, but I’m going to ­probably produce two different watches a year,” he says.

For now, LeClair is selling his watches online and through watch tradeshows, but securing space on retail shelves is on the radar. “We’re doing a watch show in Prague in November, and the gentleman that runs that show has offered to put some of our watches in his retail store,” he says. “There’s a retailer in Toronto that I’m probably going to be in next spring, and if I can get some local retailers working with me, that would be fantastic.”

In talking to LeClair, you get the sense that the reward for all of this isn’t wrapped up in sales, revenues or brand growth. Those things matter, of course, but when asked where he sees himself and the Makoto Watch Company in three, five, seven years, he doesn’t rattle off unit numbers or net sales revenues — he talks about what he wants to see on people’s wrists.

“I love what I’m doing. I love designing; designing the watches is the fun part for me,” he says. “I’m over the moon when I see somebody put on a watch that I’ve designed and they’re willing to put up the money and wear it. It’s the greatest feeling.” Kieran Delamont