Vertex watches

Director / CD : Piggy Lines
Director of Photography : Al Clarke, Outrun Films
Creative: The Milk Crate Club
Client: Vertex

During lockdown Vertex asked The Milk Crate Club to develop, write and direct a series of short training films for their new website.  Vertex is an incredible British watch brand, founded in 1916 and brought back to life by Don Cochrane, the Great Grandson of the founder. For Don bringing Vertex back comes with the added responsibility of doing it in the right way.  As such it’s very rewarding for The Milk Crate Club to be helping to balance Vertex’s history with a place in today’s digital marketing landscape.

Vertex watches were among an elite group of military watches known as the ‘Dirty Dozen’, the watches commissioned during the war to help ensure our forces were in the right place at the right time. Designed against the brief W.W.W. ( Watch Wrist Waterproof ).  Today Vertex’s range of watches celebrates its real history of being one of the few to have seen action in WW2 awarded the famous Broad Arrow mark by the then War Office. Marking the watches as official British Military equipment.

The Milk Crate Club commandeered Churchills war rooms for the shoot, it seemed to make it more of a mission being in lockdown !  The opportunity to shoot in the great man’s private quarters injected a true sense of history. Working amongst the desks, maps and telephones the sense of history was cigar smoked into the walls. Inspired by the Henry Reed poem, ‘The Naming of Parts’. Each film culminates in a new end line for this reborn brand: Accuracy in the face of adversity. It seems to sum up Vertex perfectly — then as much as it does right now. Knowing who you were, helps you focus on who you can be.

We took these stills from the film footage to create a set of images that Vertex could use across the social platforms and on their website.  You can see them on instagram @vertexwatches.

You can see the training films at vertex-watches.com.