John McLaughlin

Luxury watch makers, like just about everyone else, are on red alert in the run-up to the royal nuptials, eager for the slightest hint that the royal favour has fallen on them. The transformative magic of royaldom is already beginning to work its charms.

Luxury watch companies do not usually descend to the big football tournaments, or consort with the game’s organisers, when they do their branding.

Bond is back! Or at least he will be at the end of 2012, when the twenty-third film starring the impeccably smooth English spy, sometimes stirred but never shaken, will open to a large and impressively faithful audience.

Mens' watch brands have never been overly fond of cricketers, except perhaps in the subcontinent where flanneled fools have the same status as Bollywood stars, and the same value as brand ambassadors.

Founded by Andy Laats and Chad DiNenna in 1997, Nixon came out of the California surf, snow and skate scene. A landscape now familiar from countless feature films and documentaries, populated by laid-back obsessives relaxed about everything except customising their next board or carving up that next mountain.

David Cameron, it seems, does not wear a watch - as a gushing profile earlier this year in the London Evening Standard duly noted. Quite why is unclear, though there will doubtless be those who see it as evidence of Cameron’s political savvy.

Tissot is one of the grand old Swiss watch brands, with a history going back to 1853, a home in the watchmaking heartland of the Jura Mountains and a string of technological breakthroughs to its name.

Luxury watches are all the rage in Russia and for all the talk of the bling factor associated with new Russian plutocracy, the preference these days seems to be for restrained timepieces with a conservative pedigree. ‘Pimp my wrist’ it ain’t.

Five-year-old Dutch watch brand TW Steel has carved out a position for itself in the sports watch market by defining early on what it wanted to be. ‘Big in Oversized Watches’ is the brand’s strapline and it certainly is true to its claim.