Feminine form
Watch brands are arming themselves to take advantage of a growing demand for watches that flatter the female forearm.
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Go to the official site of the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry FH and you’ll find a curious omission. There’s barely a mention of women’s watches, and none at all in the “Knowledge” section under the heading “The Swiss watch industry today”. While the gents keeping track of the industry can speak ad infinitum about complications such as chronographs and make distinctions between sports, fashion and classical timepieces, they offer nary a word on the place of the female wrist.
Ask the watch brands though and it’s a different story: there’s common agreement that women could well come to the rescue of an industry that’s running out of steam. Sales figures are telling them that women account for about half of watch purchases, a proportion that’s been growing. As overall demand for watches declines, this is taking on added – and welcome – significance. And this is the case even at brands long seen as feeding a predominantly masculine passion.
It was only a few years back that Patek Philippe estimated about 30 per cent of its watches were women’s pieces; indications are the figure is now closer to 40 per cent and on the rise. At Omega it’s an even split, chief executive Raynald Aeschlimann telling Watch on a recent visit to Sydney that about 50 per cent of its sales are to women, adding that the Cindy Crawford-promoted Constellation model was one of the 10 bestselling watches worldwide in its own right.
Omega has gone so far as to establish a dedicated website for women, Time for Her, where spokesfolk such as Nicole Kidman talk up the five-year-young Ladymatic collection.
If further proof were needed, Georges Kern, CEO of that masculine bastion IWC, told journalists at this year’s Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie in Geneva that given “60 per cent of the watch market is today a female one”, the brand was executing what can only be described as an astonishing U-turn on strategy. (See page 12.) This involves IWC relaunching the Da Vinci range as one primarily for ladies, at the same time ditching the brand’s long-term tagline “Engineered for men” in accompanying promotional material.
Kern explained that the word engineering has now taken on a new meaning, as something that’s “attractive to women who don’t want an overdecorated watch”.
But is engineering really what women want? Maybe, maybe not. The picture is somewhat confused by the growing prevalence of unisex sizing that sees watches once deemed big for a man being worn by women. For more than a decade feminine wrists have been embracing Rolex Submariners and Daytonas, along with whopping Omegas and IWCs and even larger Panerais, most of which are mechanically powered and some of which, it has to be said, look better on women than men.
If that’s keeping the Swiss wristocrats in the game, it’s the houses of Cartier, Chanel, Dior and the like, who with Bulgari, Piaget, Van Cleef & Arpels, Chopard and Jaquet Droz, have long seen a female future for the watch as a blend of both mechanical mastery and the kind of breathtaking creativity that dazzles at a glance.
Their forte is watches that no longer merely tell the time, but tell you something else – about the maker, the crafts involved and about you, specifically what kind of art you want (and can afford) to sport on your wrist.
While the savvy of these brands is richly augmented by newcomers to the watch ranks, for example Christophe Claret and Richard Mille, the ongoing efforts of exotic jewellers such as Graff and Harry Winston have also kept the fires of horological desire burning.
A sampling of such timepieces offered in the past months alone provides the most exciting evidence yet that the wristwatch is not only alive, but seems destined to thrive again – in the hands of women.
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Van Cleef & Arpels Charms Extraordinaire Fée Sakura is a petite treat at 32mm in pink gold, pink sapphires, pink enamel dial and diamonds.
A favourite with the ladies, the Chopard Happy Diamonds Joaillerie boasts five spinning diamonds and five ruby hearts under the glass.
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Graff Equinox keeps the fires of desire burning with 252 diamonds, 6.10 carats, cased in white gold, yours for $133,200.
Rolex Datejust Pearlmaster 34 in yellow gold with a black mother of pearl dial, gem-set with a gem of a self-winding movement.
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How times change
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Until recently, the usual recipe for a women’s timepiece was relatively simple: take a men’s watch, reduce its size, add a bit of colour and a maybe a sprinkling of diamonds for the hour markers and bezel, and voila, a watch for the lady.
Oh, and in a final bit of patronising (but profitable) thinking, make do with a less expensive, battery-powered movement because obviously women are no good at anything mechanical – such as remembering to wind something up.
True, some might have manicured nails to consider when adjusting the time or date via a fiddly little crown, but this has hardly disqualified female fingers from other equally painstaking tasks.
So what changed? The entry of street-fashion brands should have been the first wake-up call, alerting the male-driven Swiss watch folk to broader possibilities. The fash-pack – Guess, Michael Kors, Anne Klein, Armani, Diesel, DKNY, Tommy Hilfiger et al – knew precious little about craft and cogwork but it became obvious they knew a lot about trends and connecting with retail consumers. Their advantage was recognising the latter’s longing for something that “popped” on the wrist and fitted a current “look” without an attendant eye-popping price.
With the jump in affluence and demand in China in recent years, brands such as Cartier, Piaget, Chanel and Dior began unleashing spectacular wonders to satisfy a newly watch-savvy group. For retailers of these and myriad other brands, the Chinese calendar, with its nominated gift-giving days, remains a critical go-to document.
Any other reservations about potential began fading with the realisation that while half the world’s population is female, it’s a sector that’s timepiece-light. This is not because most women don’t already have a watch, but because they haven’t yet taken to them with the passion of the opposite sex.
What drove the industry to its recent heights was the desire of many men to own not just a watch but several of them, many now boasting mini or major collections, or at least a selection.
Conclusion? The female wrist could be the prized real estate of the immediate future. It’s in this light that the potential of enthusing women is proving irresistible to brands that have previously concentrated on the masculine and mechanical.
IWC’s timely about-turn
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IWC took to reinforcing its muscular credentials a decade and a half back with the not-too-subtle line “Engineered for men”. While the macho message resonated with the lads imbibing at the bar or barbecue, the associated advertising was later dubbed “grown-up sexism” by the New Statesman cultural and advertising commentator Anna Lezard, who noted: “IWC know their market. You’re male? Good, you’ll be shooting guns through the sky and wrestling wild animals, you’ll need to tell time on something engineered. You’re female? Honey, you don’t need engineering. Here, have something decorated or fashioned.”
The brand held firm, only to soften the matey stance two years back with the introduction of a Portofino range safely christened “mid-size” rather than “female”. One imagines that paramount in its thinking was the wish to capture a bit of the emerging market without upsetting its client base of bolshie blokes.
Now, though, all pretence has been dropped with the reincarnation of the brand’s 1960s Da Vinci range, its first to carry a quartz movement, as one now “dedicated to women”.
No longer hexagon-shaped but round, no longer battery-powered but with clever mechanical variants, the new range is accompanied by the line “The Code of Beauty”.
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What brought this about? According to IWC CEO Georges Kern – who’s just been appointed head of Richemont’s entire stable of luxury watch marques – the brand felt ready to move into women’s watches five or six years back.
“Our starting point was talking to wives and partners of existing IWC customers,” Kern explains. “Engineering to them is a design statement … our portfolio is evolving not because we wanted to but because we’re responding to a natural evolution. With the Da Vinci the point was to have a different offer, a strong female brand with the same persona but different clothes.”
In another change, promotion of the new Da Vincis will be 99 per cent online, and don’t think it won’t reach out to women via celebrities, like Omega does.
Kern again: “For 15 years we’ve been using celebrities [yes, mostly men] who have 7 or 8 million followers. We will be creating content and stories 24 hours a day. Many brands are introverted and that’s not good enough any more.”
View from the shop floor
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Vanessa Shum learned about watches while doing homework after school in the jewellery and watch shop her parents opened in Sydney’s Chinatown in 1978, the first in the area.
“You can study a book for many hours but the knowledge they imparted saved me reading for years,” she says with a chuckle, adding that her parents at no stage pressed her into joining the business, something she did in 2013.
Rather, she’d been helping in the boutique and it just felt right, coming after she completed her bachelor of accounting and finance at the University of NSW, and a stint as a chartered accountant at PwC.
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Fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin and “conversational” Japanese (“I’m not ready to sell a watch in it yet,” she says), Shum has seen the ebb and flow of demand from Chinese customers, tourists and locals, who’ve had such an impact on the watch business.
She notes that while most of the tourist groups actually avoid Chinatown and don’t in any case purchase luxury goods, women have become more interested and educated about watches.
“They want to know what the mechanics mean – an example would be IWC,” Shum says. “There are some even purchasing a men’s watch by preference, but they still mostly prefer a watch [sized] 29 to 36 millimetres.”
The difference from men, she suggests, is that women like to accessorise, and a key trend remains a piece with diamonds and pearls, while coloured straps are in demand.
Here she cites Chopard and the brand’s Happy Diamonds model as “a great example”, adding “I’ve only met one customer who didn’t like diamonds. She wanted something plain with a white dial, explaining that she was a designer and ‘when I look at my wrist I want something simple and elegant that tells the time’.” Her choice? An Omega Ladymatic.
Such a client would be in a small minority, according to Shum. “The other 95 per cent like a touch of diamonds at least – they want to be an Audrey Hepburn.”
As for brand preference, she finds that this varies with which generation the customer belongs to. “Rolex is appreciated for the name as much as the history; for the first purchase of a high-value piece clients will look to them, to Patek Philippe or to Audemars Piguet.”
On the other hand a favourite with men, according to Shum, remains the Omega Moonwatch (Speedmaster), thanks to its history. “People love the background of the watch, and the packaging. It comes with a metal plaque, a loupe, an additional Velcro-style strap and a strap-changing toolkit. You’re buying a beautiful story.”
Such a comment would be music to the ears of Richemont watch head Georges Kern, who, launching IWC’s new female-oriented Da Vinci range in Geneva, described the future role of the watch company as being “a storyteller”.