Swiss Watch Guide

The story of Jean-Claude Biver and how he has shaken up one sleepy Swiss watch company after another is a great one, but today I’m only going to focus a small part of it, and that will be how he revolutionized Hublot, a tiny company, with his Big Bang watch. Everyone who has met Mr Biver knows that he is a character who is far larger than life. So after leaving the Swatch Group where he had done various jobs including overhauling the Omega brand,  Mr Biver seemed to have gone to ground. When he emerged it was as a part-owner and manager of Hublot.
Now Hublot was a relatively new Swiss watch producer. It was only formed in 1980. But it was one that had been incredibly creative and had innovated from the very beginning when Carlo Crocco , its founder, introduced rubber straps on expensive gold watches. The idea seemed mad to most people in the industry but it soon picked up a dedicated following. For one thing, people were attracted by the fact that the rubber didn’t cause allergic reactions to some people who struggle with traditional watch straps and materials. It is also not quite clear why, but the Spanish royal family soon took a liking to the early Hublot watches. That started a craze in Spain where the watch has been popular ever since.

In 2004 when Mr Biver took charge of Hublot he thought that its line up had become a bit stale and he wanted to make a huge impression while still keeping with Hublot’s tradition of using innovation. His answer was the Big Bang, which took unusual materials such as gold and ceramic and fused them together with a bang. All sorts of strange materials are used. While titanium watches have become quite popular in recent years,Hublot takes things 10 steps further by combining materials such as Kevlar, red gold, magnesium, titanium and carbon fibre. Mr Biver describes it as a fusion of traditional Swiss Watch making with the Twenty-first century.

These are big and bold watches that are designed to stand out on the arm, not to blend in. Hublot has also crafted a large number of special editions such as the million dollar watch which is covered in diamonds, or a bright red valentines day Big Bang (which would match nicely, I suppose with a pair of red earrings).

Hublot has continued to expand and to innovate on the Big Bang. It recently opened in big new factory and has started making and designing its own mechanical movements, a move which sets it apart from quite a large number of other Swiss Watch companies that simply build the case and buy a movement to go in it.

Some of those who watch the industry closely worry about whether Hublot is too focused on a single watch, even though it comes in many variations, but for now it is doing well. Mr Biver is a consummate marketing expert and keeps finding new ways to innovate and promote his watches. Among his recent moves were to sponsor Manchester United football club and to get involved in the Americas Cup yacht race. The man whom the Economist magazine called a “salesman of the irrational” seems likely to keep coming up with ideas and designs that should keep Hublot a trend-setting Swiss watch producer for years to come.

A bright red watch to match the season

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After a record year in 2008 the Swiss watch industry faced serious headwinds from the global economic crisis in 2009. Yet there are signs of a change in fortune for Swiss watch makers. In November 2009, watch makers reported their best month so far for the year with sales of 1.4 billion Swiss francs. That was, however, still down about 10% on the year before but a huge improvement over some months earlier in the year where sales where down by 40 percent to 50 percent.
The turnaround, though, is happening at the cheaper end of the market. Figures released by the Swiss Watch Federation showed that sales of platinum watches were down by about 26% (by value) and gold watch sales were down by 19%. The biggest gain was in Swiss watches costing between 200 Swiss francs and 500 Swiss francs.  These include many military style watches. Sales of these sorts of watches was up by about 20%. That will help the lower end of the market and the mass producers of quartz watches such as Swatch. A lot of the growth in demand came from China, where sales of Swiss watches increased by 36%. Major developed markets such as Germany, France and America all recorded drops.

The industry and Swiss government aren’t sitting around waiting for things to improve but are being proactive. In November the Swiss Federal Council announced its Swissness project to promote Swiss-made watches and other Swiss products. This introduces stricter rules over how much Swiss content there must be in a product such as a watch for it to call itself Swiss. Under the new rules, 60 percent of the value of a watch must come from Switzerland for it to claim to be a Swiss-made watch, which should help reassure buyers of watches that they really are Swiss made, as opposed to be mostly made in Asia and then just given a last polish in a Swiss assembly shop. The move has been a contentious one, even within the industry, as a number of Swiss watch makers have complained they would not be able to compete and might go out of business if they weren’t allowed to call their watches Swiss, even though much of their content and value comes from elsewhere. Yet the industry as a whole, probably rightly, feels that the rules should be tightened and that firms will create more jobs in Switzerland as a result. The brand value of being able to say a that a particular model is a Swiss-made watch must surely be worth more than the small number of low-skilled jobs Switzerland might be able to hang onto by having loose standards and selling what are in fact, if not in law, replica Swiss watches.

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