Nicholas Bowman-Scargill’s route back to Fears

Hodinkee frames the 3,937-second episode as a founder story with a winding path: a “poorly timed banking career,” a period as a Rolex apprentice watchmaker, and the work of restarting a family watch brand. The source identifies Nicholas Bowman-Scargill as Fears Watches’ founder and chief executive officer.

That route is useful because family-brand continuity can be too easily flattened into a single romantic line. Fears’ own Heritage page says Edwin Fear opened a workshop and showroom in Bristol in 1846, that the firm closed in 1976, and that Bowman-Scargill, a descendant of Edwin Fear, re-launched the company on 3 November 2016 with the Redcliff. The Brunswick followed, and the same Fears page says the company returned to Bristol in 2022.

Those dates describe a break as well as a revival. The modern Fears story is not an uninterrupted production ledger. It is a documented restart of a family name, followed by new products under the revived company. That is why the perpetual calendar note feels consequential even without specifications: it suggests the relaunch is being narrated not only through heritage, but through a more ambitious product program.

A perpetual calendar asks a brand to make hierarchy visible. The designer must decide what the wearer reads first: the date, the month, the day, the leap-year cycle, or the time itself. Those choices can make the same complication feel quiet, formal, technical, or crowded.

None of those choices is confirmed for the Fears watch from the supplied source. Still, the category is enough to mark a change in register. The Heritage page’s confirmed sequence begins with the 2016 re-launch and the Redcliff, then names the Brunswick as the follow-up. Hodinkee’s episode description brings the story to a complication whose appeal depends heavily on layout, legibility and mechanical explanation.

For a revived family company, that is a different kind of continuity. The question is no longer only whether the name has been brought back, but how the current maker chooses to extend it in product form.

Hodinkee posted the episode on 21 October 2026 as part of Hodinkee Podcasts’ The Business of Watches series. The supplied listing gives the full episode title as The Business of Watches [045] Fears Watches Founder And Chief Executive Officer Nicholas Bowman-Scargill and the duration as 3,937 seconds.

Readers looking for the episode can start at the supplied Hodinkee source. Before treating the perpetual calendar as a catalogued product, the remaining gaps are clear: the source provided here does not give imagery, a product page, a reference number, a caliber designation, pricing, or availability.