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 Swiss appeal

These developments will undoubtedly be followed with interest by one of the Swatch Group’s biggest competitors in what we might call the “colourful” watch segment. Ice-Watch passed the bar of 10 million watches sold last year and once again presented a strong new collection at BaselWorld that will be rolled out to the brands’ 12,000 stores worldwide throughout the year.

ICE-SWISS by Ice-Watch

Ice-Watch signals its entry into Swiss Made territory with the Ice-Swiss, with a Swiss movement, Swiss assembly and its own unique Swarovski crystal with a silhouette of the Swiss flag. The collection is scheduled to arrive on the market at the end of 2013 and, costing between €300-400, will open up a whole new price segment for Ice-Watch. The photo shows a prototype of the new watch.

Although the majority of Ice-Watch timepieces are assembled in China using Miyota quartz movements, the company is setting up its Swiss Made production. The brand’s new Ice-Swiss collection will not only be assembled in Switzerland and fitted with a Swiss movement but the models will also be identifiable thanks to the exclusive “Swiss Cross” cut Swarovski Zirconia embedded into the screw-in case back, which reveals the Swiss cross as a discreet silhouette.

According to a survey of the fashion watch segment by the market research company GfK, Ice-Watch was the market leader in the 50-99 price range in France and Germany last year and second in the United Kingdom. The company’s impressive logistics infrastructure puts it in a strong position to extend this dominance over the coming years. [See our Service, Please! section in this issue for an in-depth look at Ice-Watch’s customer service system.]

Mondaine, a small Swiss company that owns the Mondaine and Luminox brands, provided another example at BaselWorld of its ability to keep pace with the marketing efforts of much bigger brands.

The new Luminox stand was dominated by a life-sized replica of the XCOR Lynx spaceship with which the SXC corporation will be offering 60-minute spaceflights for under 100,000 US dollars as early as next year. The Luminox logo features prominently on the spacecraft, which is surely a fantastic coup for the brand. Special watches are being developed to be worn both by the astronauts and their passengers and will feature a combined analogue and digital display, naturally with the Luminox Light Technology to ensure clear legibility in the pitch-black darkness of space.

Luminox’s sister brand Mondaine is famous for its watches that recall the face of Switzerland’s iconic station clocks, produced under an exclusive licence with the Swiss Federal Railways. At BaselWorld, the brand asked us what two seconds meant to us, since its latest product, the Stop2Go, mimics the unique action of the Swiss railway station clocks, whose seconds hands all complete a revolution of the dial in 58 seconds, rather than a minute, leaving two seconds for a nationwide synchronisation of the time signal, which helps to ensure the famous punctuality of Swiss trains.

 New—and not only Swiss—brands

New US brand Shinola [see Keith Strandberg’s article in Europa Star 02/2013] won plaudits for its impressive stand at BaselWorld, which had a welcoming boutique feel that encouraged people to come in and browse. Those that did discovered that the brand is about much more than watches and the lucky ones might even have been able to sample Shinola’s very own cola drink.

Shinola made its debut BaselWorld with an impressive stand

Newcomer Bomberg announced its arrival loud and clear by plastering its logo and a giant mobile phone number on one of Basel’s tram carriages. A call to this number would alert a very attentive hostess, who would collect visitors discreetly from Hall 1 to escort them to the brand’s Bohemian apartment just a couple of minutes’ walk from the exhibition centre.
As Europa Star arrived, the local residents were merrily eating their lunch at tables assembled among the on-street parking spaces, one of which was occupied by a classic TVR sports car in British racing green. Parked almost directly outside Bomberg’s temporary home, its Neuchâtel registration plate was undoubtedly no coincidence. Bomberg is based in Neuchâtel and the TVR’s outwardly brash image but inwardly classic appeal fit perfectly with the brand, as does the star of their advertising campaign: adorned with numerous tattoos, the young male model is a actually a primary school teacher.

Another new Swiss brand, Picard Cadet, was reborn from the ashes of its predecessor, presenting a collection that has been three years in the making and features ladies’ and gents’ watches with classical designs that are intended to appeal to a global audience.

All the models are based on a tonneau case, which is available in steel or gold and powered by the ETA 2892 and Valjoux 7753 movements. Like Jules Picard Cadet, who set up his watchmaking workshop on the corner of Place du Molard and Rue de la Croix-d’Or in the centre of Geneva in 1910, the current owners are also jewellers by trade and are intent on expressing their innovative ideas in jewellery watches. The first concrete example of this, presented as a prototype in Basel, is the Metamorphose, a jewellery watch whose case can be transformed to display all white or all black diamonds. With a total of 3,000 diamonds, the piece will retail for in excess of 100,000 Swiss francs.

 Mid-range makeovers

Since the Sowind Group decided to decamp from the SIHH to Basel, it was clear that there would be a new stand to accommodate Girard-Perregaux and JeanRichard in addition to Gucci.
Presenting all the fruits of its comprehensive redesign for the first time, the “renewed” JeanRichard revealed its new Aquascope and Aeroscope models to complete its palette and officialised its relationship with Captain “Sully” Sullenberger (the pilot who landed his passenger airliner in the Hudson river after an engine failure, saving the lives of all passengers on board), who will be the face of ordinary people doing extraordinary things for the brand.

Concord has undergone a major revamp over the past few years, which have seen the launch of the C2 collection (2011) and, as a BaselWorld preview, a new version of the six-year-old C1 chronograph with a much softer design [See our Sports Watch feature in Europa Star 02/2013]. The brand also presented an entirely new POS concept at the show, in which black is the dominant colour. Black was also the inspiration behind the new Saratoga Lady Black presented at the show. More specifically, it is intended to be the timepiece equivalent of a lady’s little black dress, that wardrobe staple that can be donned for so many different occasions.

Geneva-based watch and jewellery brand Charriol celebrated its 30th anniversary with a new identity in Basel.
The idea, as Managing Director Ludovic Lesur explained to Europa Star, was to “make the brand more sexy”, and involved changing every-thing. The collection in particular has been massively restructured, dropping from 4,000 references only two years ago to 300 references now, after it was discovered that a mere 20 per cent of the brand’s collection accounted for 80 per cent of its sales. “It was costing so much more in time and money to produce small series of, for example, five watches, that we were shooting ourselves in the foot,” says Lesur. “Delivery times are now much shorter and there is a genuine improvement.”

The aim is also to attract younger customers. “We had nothing under one thousand Swiss francs so we wanted to do a Swiss Made watch with Charriol values for under a thousand,” says Lesur. The result is the “Ael” ladies’ watch with a stainless-steel case sandwiched between two ceramic rings available in black or white for 910 Swiss francs.
For gentlemen the brand offers a new and competitively priced Gran Celtica chronograph, powered by an ETA Valjoux 7750 calibre and retailing for 3,490 Swiss francs, as well as a 30-piece limited-edition “Columbus” model for the brand’s anniversary. It uses Technotime’s TT750 five-day power reserve movement and has an unusual dial with separate, overlapping hour and minute rings.

Charriol claims to have sold 1.35 million watches to date. Spread across 3,800 points of sale, 485 corners, 185 Charriol stores and an ambitious plan to open 65 new points of sale this year, this equates to roughly one watch sold per point of sale per year over 30 years. A figure that might be worrying without the many items of jewellery, belts, handbags and writing instruments that the brand also sells.

German brand Tutima also presented a new identity in Basel, based around concentric circles of different colours that were displayed prominently on the brand’s new stand.

Black and white will be the main colours of the brand’s identity, while three secondary colours of blue, olive-green and brown will feature in the company’s new advertising campaign. Darker shades of the same colours will be used in the company’s literature.
Three new collections were launched in Basel under this new identity: The Saxon One and M2 chronographs (both featuring Tutima’s in-house calibre 321, which is a modified Valjoux 7750) and the Patria model in red gold, which uses a manually wound calibre 617 movement, which was developed and produced in-house on the basis of the minute-repeater movement fitted in the brand’s Hommage piece.

Next : The new moon at Omega, Stephen Urquhart - “Cautiously optimistic”