What launching a watch brand taught me about the tech a two-person business actually needs

By Andy Pickett · Chief Technology Director and AI Champion

Published 9 November 2026 · About the author

Alongside my day job here, I have been helping to start a second business that has nothing to do with telecoms: Vannin Watches, an independent watch brand from the Isle of Man, which I co-founded with my friend Peter Jones. A declaration before anything else: it is my company, and Connection Technologies supplies its phone system, so read what follows knowing that. But setting up a two-person brand from nothing, sitting on the other side of the counter from the one I usually occupy, has taught me more about what a small business actually needs from its technology than a great many customer meetings. Here is what I would pass on.

Why a watch brand, and why the Isle of Man

Vannin comes from Ellan Vannin, the Manx name for the Isle of Man, which is home for both of us. The island has a watchmaking story out of all proportion to its size: John Harwood developed an early self-winding wristwatch here in the 1920s, George Daniels worked independently on the island and developed the co-axial escapement, and Roger W. Smith still makes watches in his Isle of Man workshop today. We claim none of that as ours, and the brand’s own page on the island’s watchmaking says so plainly. Vannin is a modern microbrand. Our first collection is a 38 mm automatic field watch built around the Miyota 9039 movement, in four dial colours named for the island: Irish Sea Blue, Mountain Green, Western Sky Orange and Manannán’s Cloak Grey. It is designed on the Isle of Man, and we only say where something is made once we can prove it.

Lesson one: get the phone number before the website

The first thing we set up was not the website or the logo. It was a phone number: 01624 602005, an Isle of Man number that rings Peter and me at the same time, on the mobiles already in our pockets, through a softphone app, wherever either of us happens to be. It needed no hardware because it runs on Hypercloud, the hosted VoIP platform we sell at Connection Technologies, and it was live before we had anything to sell. I would give the same advice to any founder, whether or not they buy it from us. A mobile number on a website says “hobby”. A landline tied to an address you may not keep is a liability. A cloud number that follows you, answers with a proper greeting and emails you the voicemail when you are asleep is the cheapest piece of credibility a new business can buy. And when a third person joins, it is a login, not an engineer’s visit.

Lesson two: build for the customers you actually have

Vannin’s website is in seven languages: English, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Polish and Italian. A brand from a small island does not get to choose a local audience; the people who care about independent watches are everywhere, and they find you. The practical consequence for a two-person company is time zones. Someone in Tokyo reads about the watch while we are asleep, which is why voicemail-to-email mattered more than I expected, and why a reply the next morning in their language is the difference between a customer and a bounce. Build the small business for the customers you actually have, not for the ones nearest to you.

Lesson three: show your working

Vannin keeps a development journal: why the first watch is a field watch, why we chose the Miyota 9039, how we got the colours right. It publishes plain-English guides to the things people ask about, from what a 100 m water-resistance rating really means to what lug width is. And it states, in print, that details of where components are made and assembled will be published when they are confirmed and not before. That discipline, which is the same one we try to apply when we write about telecoms here, has done more for trust than any amount of marketing copy. Small businesses are believed when they show their working.

Lesson four: the boring tools matter more than the exciting ones

Most of the technology a start-up needs is dull: a business number, email on your own domain rather than a free address, a website that loads quickly on a phone, a way to run a waiting list and a prize draw without a spreadsheet, and backups of all of it. None of it is interesting until it fails on the day you launch. We spent the money on the watch and the time on the boring list, in that order, and I would do it the same way again.

What happens next

The first Vannin Field Watch prototypes exist, and we are giving one away: the First Owner draw is free to enter, and the winner chooses one of the first prototypes. A dive watch is on the drawing board after that. If you ring 01624 602005, one of us will answer, which, as it turns out, was the whole point. And if you are starting something of your own and the phone number is still on your list, that part at least we can help with.