Diving into Luxury, Sustainable Business Magazine speaks to Sean Clements

Sustainable Business Magazine speaks to Sean Clements, founder and CEO of exciting new watch brand SDC Watches. He explains exactly what creativity and hard work it takes to create a watch that is not only stylish but also ecologically sustainable.

SDC Watches is a luxury watch brand created with a vision to make the diving industry more sustainable. Although it first appears to be an unusual pairing, founder and CEO Sean realised that he could upcycle discarded wetsuits into durable, attractive watch straps.

“I wanted to create a dive watch brand and do something a bit different and incorporate the idea of upcycling into the brand and into the mission,” Sean explains. “At first I struggled a little bit with what I wanted to do but took a step back to look at what I enjoy doing in life. I’m both a big watch fan and a scuba diver. As a result, I landed on creating a dive watch brand that incorporated everything that I was interested in – but with a difference.”

Sean set out in 2020 to look at the process of transforming old wetsuits into new watch straps. However, he found it challenging:

“Believe it or not, it was actually one of the most challenging parts of the brand to accomplish. I’ll explain why: it’s never been done before. I think people have tried to do it in the past but I don’t think they’ve been able to create a product that fits the bill. It took us a long time to go through the R&D process, finding the right materials, securing suppliers, then bringing it all together. Now that we’ve done it, though, we’re super happy about it.”

The first designs were publicly available in 2021 but getting there wasn’t an easy job.

THE BIG, HORRIBLE ISSUE SDC Watches’s model is so important for sustainability because wetsuit material is almost always destined for landfill.

“There’s a really big issue with wetsuits,” says Sean. “They are made from neoprene which fundamentally is a really horrible material in the sense you can’t do

SDC WATCHES

much with it once it’s finished with. You can’t really recycle it. Sometimes it will end up back in the ocean and that’s really quite sad considering most scuba divers are passionate about the ocean, keeping our oceans clean, and reducing plastic use. There are a couple of companies out there that are doing great things with neoprene but it’s just a very difficult material to reuse. Effectively what we do is take a rubber mould, cut and stitch the neoprene wetsuit material, then upcycle them into straps.”

Getting the raw material to work with, though, proved a challenge. There was no single repository of discarded wetsuits, so Sean and SDC Watches needed to create a means for sourcing the material.

“Over the last 18 months I’ve built up a network of wetsuit drop-offs,” Sean explains. “My starting point was to pick up the phone to my local dive and surf shops and ask if they had any unusable wetsuits available. Then I started enquiring further afield. The volume of responses was actually staggering. What it meant was me driving around, picking up wetsuits from all over the UK. It was kind of fun but took up a lot of my time.

“Today I’ve become got a little bit smarter and work with a couple of smaller companies that do these things called wetsuit drop-offs. So there’s boxes around the UK where people come in, donate their old wetsuits, then I go pick them up. They’re all from the UK although they’ve probably been dived in and used all over the world. We have a really good network now and to be honest probably an oversupply of wetsuits. They’re taking up a lot of space in my flat and in the warehouse!”

One of the most appealing traits of this model is that the sustainability impact the company has is easily measurable:

“What we’re doing is tangible. We can count the amount of wetsuits we’ve saved from a landfill, we can count the amount of straps the company has created. It’s not huge numbers, I don’t want to say we’re changing the world here, but we’re definitely making a huge impact on the sustainability of the dive community.”

At present, turning the neoprene into watch straps is carried out at two manufacturing facilities – one in China, the other in the UK. Meanwhile, the watches themselves are produced in Japan. Sean recognises the sustainability issues with this global approach but explains that its a result of necessity:

“The challenge we have in the UK when it comes to producing a whole watch here there are only a limited number of watchmakers which means there is a lack of resource in the industry. SDC Watches is part of the British Watch & Clock Makers society and that’s something we talk about a lot. Although we have an established watchmaking industry in the UK finding the labour remains the biggest challenge and one of the things I’m campaigning for is being able to produce all our watches here in the UK, but we’re probably still a while away from that to be honest. However, for me, being able to champion British watch brands and going at it from that approach is a real USP of SDC Watches.”

WATCH FANATICS The challenges didn’t overcome Sean or SDC Watches, though. After taking six months of pre-orders, the company started

SDC WATCHES

“OUR WATCHES ARE PRESENTED IN OUR SLEEK AND STYLISH WATCH BOX WHICH USES 100% BIODEGRADABLE AND SUSTAINABLE FSC SOURCED MATERIALS, INCLUDING A NATURAL WATER-BASED VEGAN FRIENDLY GLUE. THE FOAM INSERTS CAN BE REMOVED IF NOT REQUIRED AND ARE FULLY RECYCLABLE.“

shipping out its first watches in December 2021 to much fanfare.

“We’re still very new, very fresh into the market, but really enjoying it,” says Mr. Clements. “We’re selling watches, getting a lot of good press, and perhaps most importantly we’re getting some great shout-outs from the dive community.”

SDC Watches’s brand has spread not only through word of mouth but through the hard graft of working trade events and public conventions, although the company hasn’t only targeted the dive community.

“We’re a dive watch brand but we’re also a luxury watch brand,” the CEO explains. “That means we’re attending events such as the Go Diving Show in March 2023, which is the biggest scuba convention in the UK, but also fairs dedicated to the craftsmanship and retailing of watches. Ultimately, though, we’re an e-commerce company and dedicated to sales through the internet. We have been approached by dive centres and other companies in the UK that want to partner with us to sell in their shops, but to be completely honest the model we’re trying to create here is pure e-commerce.

“Most of our sales have actually come from the US – not entirely sure why that is but clearly there is a market there. It’s probably about 60/40 for our sales to the US and UK. We’ve sold a few into Europe and into the Middle East but the bulk of orders are coming from the US. That might be by virtue of the fact they have more scuba diving there, perhaps they also have more watch fanatics. I don’t know if that’ll continue but for us it’s fine, we ship around the world.”

OCEAN CLEANUP One of SDC Watches’ most notable sustainable initiatives is its partnership with the Marine Conservation Society (MCS), via Work for Good. Donating to charity is common practice within corporate CSR, but the relationship SDC Watches has with the marine charity is different.

“When I set up this company, a big part of it was to give back,” Sean explains. “This isn’t just about me generating profits from this business. It’s about being able to generate profits and give back to good causes. I spent a long time thinking about which causes to donate to and knew I wanted to focus on something a bit smaller, a charity that I could actually build a relationship with, something that shared a close outlook with SDC Watches. That’s why I chose MCS.

“It focuses about 90% of its efforts on the UK although the group also works with other organisations internationally. Where it really fits for us is in the mission: for MCS, it’s all about creating cleaner oceans that everyone can enjoy. it does beach clean-ups for example, about three or four beach clean-ups a month. It also carries out underwater surveys. That means divers can report different measures and metrics back to them from their dives. MCS really engage with their members and other people that are interested in marine life and the ocean. It also focuses a lot on not just the ocean but, for example, aquatic life. It’s big on protecting endangered species around the world, especially those species close to the UK coast.

“For me, that cleaning up of the seas was a simple point I had an affinity with. As a scuba diver, I’ve dived in places where I’ve seen some great stuff, but I’ve seen places where there’s not so great stuff. And when I say that I’m not just talking about poor visibility. I mean plastics littering the sea and corals that have been eroded. I wanted something with common values and a personal approach and found it in MCS.

“I started building a relationship with the charity in late 2021 and then in December of that year SDC Watches announced we were going to donate 5% of each sale to the MCS. That’s 5% of each strap or

SDC WATCHES

watch we sell. That is an agreement we have in place with MCS, managed through the donations platform Work for Good. I also speak to the charity regularly to let it know how we’re doing and how we might get further involved with its work.”

NEW HORIZONS SDC Watches is new and upcoming, so its future is a wide and blank canvas ready to be filled. However, Sean is keen that the company sticks tight to its raison d’etre and USP: upcycling for a more sustainable industry. “At the moment we have our first collection, the Ocean Rider collection,” explains the CEO. “We’ve also designed our first strap, which uses black wetsuits. We are in the process of bringing out three new straps and they will be different colours that make use of blue, red and green wetsuits. We have the materials and our suppliers are all set up and ready, so we’ll have our blue straps out over the next few months. We want to have a full selection of straps available by spring 2023, after which we’ll then look at bringing out a couple of different collections.”

It’s not just new end products that SDC Watches is excited about though, as Sean highlights:

“The exciting part of the future for us is what other materials we can upcycle. There’s all sorts of things. I’m looking at the moment at fins, we’re also looking at using the rubber in silicone in dive masks and upcycling that into either a strap or into the watch. Another project that’s going on in the background, which is probably going to take a bit of time, is upcycling scuba diving cylinders. The cylinders are made of steel but when they’re empty they’re not reused. I’m speaking to someone about melting the steel down to use in watches and watch cases.

“There’s lots to do, a million things we can look at. For us it’s about how can we use materials that are destined for landfill and build our product around that.” c

View our range of fine watches at sdcwatches.com

“ACROSS OUR FULFILMENT PROCESS WE GO THE EXTRA MILE BY MAKING SURE WE USE RECYCLED PACKAGING, BIODEGRADABLE BUBBLE WRAP AND RECYCLED SHIP- PING TAP, SO EVERY ELEMENT IS FULLY RECYCLABLE”