George Bamford’s company used to customize timepieces without brands’ approvals. Now it collaborates with them.

There was a time, just a few years ago, when George Bamford was widely considered the enfant terrible of the luxury watch industry.

Through his company, Bamford Watch Department, he had made a name for himself customizing watches, particularly Rolexes — but without the blessing of the brands whose watches he was modifying.

Inside the industry, the mark next to his name was as black as the PVD-coated Daytonas he was selling. “Most brands are super conservative,” said Kristian Haagen, author and creative director of the DailyWatch social media agency in Copenhagen. “And George is rebellious.” To his customers, he was a ray of light.

Now, 41 and with contracts from brands such as Bulgari, TAG Heuer and Franck Muller, Mr. Bamford and his customization business have, in his own estimation, “grown up.”

“I never would have got an official relationship with anyone at that time,” he said, recalling his early days as a watch customizer during an interview from his home in the Cotswolds. “I was on the periphery.”

“I never thought we’d be where we are today.”

In 2017, his fortunes changed. He got a call from Jean-Claude Biver, the industry veteran and then-head of the LVMH Watch Division, who had Hublot, TAG Heuer and Zenith in his portfolio. “I thought it was a joke,” Mr. Bamford said. “He’s a god. It was 10 o’clock at night and he asked if he could come and see me. He was in Switzerland, but at 3 o’clock the following afternoon he was in my office in Mayfair.”

Mr. Biver left three hours later, and soon afterward Bamford Watch Department had been signed as the licensed customizing agent for TAG Heuer and Zenith. “I’ve never had to regret how spontaneous I had been with George,” Mr. Biver wrote in a recent message.

Mr. Bamford said, “I felt hugged. I was the kid trying to get an invitation to the party, and then suddenly I was there. And that’s where I feel I am now.”

Bulgari, Girard-Perregaux and Franck Muller have followed the same path, and there have been one-off — and very official — collaborations with brands as diverse as Chopard and G-Shock, and featuring cultural icons as established as Snoopy and as current as TikTok. At least two more brands will join the list this year, Mr. Bamford said.

“George is the guy brands come to when they need something cool, but don’t know what it is,” Mr. Haagen said. “And if it doesn’t work, they can blame him.”

Among watch enthusiasts, Mr. Bamford’s story has become well known. He is the son of Anthony and Carole Bamford, now Lord and Lady Bamford. His father is the billionaire owner of the British construction company JCB; his mother, the entrepreneur behind the Daylesford empire of organic food and women’s clothing.

From a young age, he never slept much — he said he still only manages four or five hours a night — and would wake early to, as he described it, “take things to bits.” One Christmas in the mid-1990s, he recalled, he was given a Breitling Navitimer that by the following day was “in pieces on my bedroom floor.” He reassembled it, although not so well that his father wasn’t obliged to return it to its maker for servicing. (He still has it. “It’s dented and gnarly, but it’s all me,” he said.)

Having spent time in New York where he graduated from Parsons School of Design with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, he returned to Britain to set up Bamford & Sons, specializing in accessories and silver-plating iPods. And then a family friend gave him a TAG Heuer Monaco won at an exhibition of vintage autos. “He didn’t want it and it wasn’t sacred, so I started morphing it,” Mr. Bamford said.

Using JCB contacts, he found a company that could coat the watch’s case in a black polymer. Why black? “At the time, everything was bling,” he said. “I didn’t like that. And the opposite to bling is black.”

He said he was lucky to have been able to incubate his business within his mother’s company, but generally that has been the limit of his parents’ involvement. “My father said to me: ‘You’ve got to learn the value of the pound, so you’re not allowed into the family business’,” he said. “It wasn’t the silver spoon.” (He is a JCB director now, however.)

He incorporated Bamford Watch Department in 2009 and now, he said, it customizes as many as 500 watches a year, a number that does not include the limited-edition series created with brands or the watches of Bamford London, his own dial name. Its models start at 350 pounds ($475) with the quartz powered Mayfair Sport collection and peaks at £2,500 with the B347, a new collection of mono-pusher chronographs with Sellita movements, made in Switzerland, and cases in forged carbon fiber.

Mr. Bamford won’t disclose figures, but said that over the 12 months to the end of January, revenues across his two watch businesses doubled — profits, however, were down because of investment in the B347 collection and other watches in development, he said. (He employs 11 people, including three watchmakers, at what he calls The Hive, the Mayfair townhouse that doubles as his offices and workshops.)

Data from Switzerland would suggest he has positioned his brand in shark-infested waters: Smartwatches have taken a huge bite out of the lower end of the luxury market. Watches with an export price of more than 3,000 Swiss francs ($3,260) are maintaining total industry revenues, according to the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry, while those selling for less than that, likeBamford London, are fighting for sales.

“It’s exciting at that price point,” Mr. Bamford said. “Major watch brands are not pushing out quirky designs. But look at independents and that’s where we’re seeing the new revolution of design. I want to be in that playground.”

He says his clients come from all walks of life, from dignitaries to sneaker-heads, and noted that the 8-year-old son of a watch collector friend wears the Elmo edition of the Mayfair Sport. And his celebrity contacts have ranged from Kylie Minogue — “she just came into the office one day and we designed a watch right there” — to Ed Sheeran, who said in a recent video interview with the online watch site Hodinkee that he had visited The Hive.

Mr. Bamford’s partners speak highly of their collaboration. “The partnership has proved invaluable,” Patrick Pruniaux, chief executive of Ulysse Nardin and Girard-Perregaux, wrote in an email. (In 2020 he had hired Mr. Bamford to create a watch for the 45th anniversary of Girard-Perregaux’s Laureato model.)

“I look forward to discovering where his imagination and vision take us next,” Mr. Pruniaux wrote.

As for Mr. Bamford, he described himself as a “frustrated engineer” and said he has an old engine that he constantly dismantles and rebuilds: “It’s my yoga.” During the pandemic, he started GB Talks, a podcast that now has 60 episodes and, he said, more than 25,000 downloads. Despite being dyslexic and a self-confessed nonreader, he said he has written and self-published two crime novels (with a third finished now), and he personally manages the Bamford Watch Department’s Instagram channel, which has more than 200,000 followers. “The thing that bugs me is when I sit down and do nothing,” he said. “I feel like I’m wasting time.”

Perhaps that’s because of the family motto, coined by his grandfather, the founder of JCB: “Jamais Content.” “It’s one of the worst mottos, but it’s indicative of our family,” he said. “It’s not that we’re never content. It’s just we are always striving to go, go, go.”

Mr. Bamford insists that impulse still won’t propel him into his father’s footsteps. “Bamford Watch Department, Bamford London — they’re my future,” he said. “The family business is great, but I’ve got my own business. I never want to fill those shoes. I can walk my own path.”