More than time: watchmaker Nomadic secures top cross-border award

Peter McAuley learned that watches are about more than telling the time when he lost a watch left to him by a much-loved uncle deep beneath the waters of a Fermanagh lake during a day’s kayaking.

On Wednesday, Nomadic Watches, the Belfast watchmaker run by McAuley and his wife, Jane, won the €150,000 gold award in this year’s North-South Business Cooperation Awards run by Greek-Cypriot billionaire, Stelios Haji-Ioannou.

“I was always interested in watches. My dad had always got nice watches, and my uncle. When my uncle died, he left me a nice Tag Heuer, and I would wear it for everything.

“I wore it on a kayaking trip in County Fermanagh. When I got back, the watch had fallen off my wrist in the water, and it was gone forever. That was when I realised that watches are about more than telling the time,” says McAuley.

Beginning with models costing £1,000 and upwards, each Nomadic watch has “a little piece of either Belfast history or Irish history weaved into them”, says McAuley, speaking at the awards ceremony in Castle Leslie in Glaslough, Co. Monaghan.

“A lot of the watches, which have a Swiss-made mechanical movement, have a yellow second hand that represents the Harland & Wolff cranes in the shipyards in Belfast,” he goes on

Founded in 2021, Nomadic next month opens a shop in Dublin city centre in partnership with Weirs: “We met them at an awards ceremony last year, and told them everything about what we were doing.

“They loved it. They put our watches into their store on Grafton Street last Christmas and they performed exceptionally well, and from there, the partnership’s just grown and grown,” McAuley goes on.

In its Belfast store, the public see watchmakers at work behind a glass wall: “Just last weekend, we had a guy from California who flew in specifically just to come and see our watchmaking.”

The award is “a tremendous milestone” for the five-year-old Belfast watchmaker and helping to expand plans to create a brand rooted in storytelling, design and the industrial spirit of Belfast”, McAuley went on

Now in its second year, the cross-Border awards, which offer €500,000 in prizes to budding businesses, attracted “excellent” applications, Haji-Ioannou, who is deeply involved in every element of the competition, told The Irish Times.

Paying tribute to Nomadic, Haji-Ioannou said: “How difficult is that to wake up one morning and say, ‘I’m going to start watchmaking, I’m going to compete with the Swiss who been doing it for 200, 300 years.’ It’s incredible.”

The Greek-Cypriot began to offer cross-border awards in Cyprus: “We haven’t, touch wood, had any objections here which was always my worry at the beginning, that people would say, ‘Why are you doing this? You’re Greek, you shouldn’t be here.’ ”

The best way to ensure good cross-border relationships in Ireland, but also everywhere else, is where people do business with each other every day, learning to understand each other, he went on.

The decision to present the awards in Castle Leslie was deliberate, he said, since “this part of the world, especially in Monaghan, is the best way to understand the peace dividend from the Good Friday Agreement”.

Stephen Dallas, the chief executive of Co-operation Ireland, a partner on the awards, said this year’s winners “are a powerful example of what can be achieved when entrepreneurs see opportunity across the whole island”.

The two silver awards worth €100,000 each went to Marteye, a technology company that enables farmers interact with 120 marts across Ireland and Britain, and Langtry Lane and Dae Ice Cream.

The €25,000 bronze awards went to Trident Project Engineering; ADHD Now and Duality Healthcare, Rep-Tec; X-Lite Beverages, Chimac and StreatSchool, which supports entrepreneurs building mobile food businesses.