Nomadic

Peter McAuley founded Nomadic in Belfast in 2021. A mechanical engineer and watch collector by background, McAuley set out to build a brand that could rival the design and finishing standards of the established Swiss tier at a fraction of the price, while telling a recognisably Northern Irish story. The brand is named after the SS Nomadic, the White Star Line tender steamer built at Belfast's Harland & Wolff shipyard in 1911 to ferry passengers to large ocean liners moored offshore. The vessel survives today as a museum ship beside Titanic Belfast, a few hundred metres from where Nomadic is run.

The launch reference was the Maraí 401, named with the Irish word for 'seafarer' and serial-numbered 401 after the Titanic's original Harland & Wolff design number. It established the house design language: cushion-style steel case, applied indices, sword hands, Swiss automatic movement, and a dial with restrained typography that nods to early-twentieth-century maritime instruments rather than chasing vintage-diver pastiche. Successive references continued the explorer-and-shipyard storytelling, each named after a different chapter of Belfast or Irish maritime history.

The Turas 914 took its inspiration from Tom Crean, the Kerry-born explorer who served on three Antarctic expeditions including Shackleton's Endurance voyage. The Fior 555 GMT introduced Nomadic's first dual-time-zone movement, adding a true GMT hand for travellers and Atlantic-route nostalgia. The Cíor 928 shrank the case for smaller wrists and was developed as a tribute to McAuley's mother. The Brú is the most ambitious release: a 750-metre titanium diver in marine and aerospace-grade titanium with a screw-down crown and a solid case back, the deepest-rated watch the brand has produced.

Growth has been steep. From £52,000 revenue in the first twelve months of trading, Nomadic crossed £1 million in 2024 while remaining profitable, with the team scaling from solo-entrepreneur to eight employees and weekly internal production rising from roughly 10 to 100 watches. The brand operates direct-to-consumer through nomadicwatches.com plus a Belfast atelier-style retail experience, with strong collector interest across the UK, Ireland, the United States, and Australia. The stated ambition: to make Belfast a recognised name on the global watchmaking map again, a century after the city's industrial heyday.