Incentive Award: Baselworld's Swiss Movement
July 07, 2008
In April, Baselworld set the watch industry in motion
By Marc Boisclair
It's huge—160,000 square meters. Splashy—watches, jewelry and precious gems. And decidedly international, with some 2,100 exhibitors and 101,700 retailers and wholesalers from around the world attending. More than ever, Baselworld is the show for major watch manufacturers, and this April’s event was no exception, with old trends continuing and new ones emerging.
"It's definitely the biggest show for our company," says Joe Zanone Jr., senior vice president of Movado Group, Inc. "Our top clients are there, and every one of our nine brands exhibits there, and it's the only show that the Movado brand exhibits at, period." Zanone has no problem pegging what's hot for those clients, either. "'Big' is big in men's watches—the trend is towards 44 millimeter and larger, with automatic movements and the continuation of chronographs," he says. "It's a guy thing—most guys want to count down everything from flipping hamburgers to flying time." For women, there's no slowdown on the gold rush. "With gold over $1,000 an ounce, it's very luxurious again," says Zanone, citing the combo of gold plating and stones as raising eyebrows among fashionable Basel attendees.
"For us it's an incredibly busy show—all of our major retail customers from the United States and all of my major and duty-free customers from the Caribbean were there," says Jim Keenan, senior vice president of Citizen, who agrees with Zanone that for makers of mens' watches, size clearly matters. "We continue to see mens' sports and dress watches that are very large-cased, which is probably a lifestyle thing," says Keenan. "A large sport or dress watch can make as much of a statement as the car you drive and the clothes you wear."
To wit, Keenan says even analog watches can make a statement when gussied up with sub-dials, nautical features and racing/timing elements. "Watches with complications—and that's a good term when used with watches—are hot, especially those at the high end," he says. "It's all about the wow factor."
To that end, Citizen's Keenan tells how one executive just happened to pick up a Citizen watch with eco-drive and loved the convenience of needing no batteries. His building industry company, in the process of planning a major program with hundreds of participants, was also looking to move in a more green direction, and ended up purchasing sports/dress watches with eco-drive mechanisms for every attendee.
"It was a one-time program and they thought it would fit in very well with their corporate philosophy," says Keenan.
Sexy in the City
Indeed, the trend in ladies' watches seems to be all about pizzazz. "Bling is in," says Adrienne Forrest, assistant vice president for special markets at Bulova. "The strongest highlights in our collections are our diamond products—we see no stopping the trend for anything that has diamonds and crystals," she says.
Forrest cites Bulova's best sellers, diamond ladies' chronographs, which have been topping its charts lately for a little over $500 a pop. "Diamonds [have] gone mainstream," she says. "Women are wearing diamond chronographs to work and to the gym, and it's really helped our business a lot."
And like a new spring wardrobe, they're adding design and texture. "Ceramics are very big, and we offer the ceramics and mechanical stuff you see in higher-end Swiss products at a real discernable value," Forrest says. "For the incentive market we can offer products for every market in a price point up to $2,000 for our Swiss product, which gives us credibility and a higher perceived value."
Got Color
As in blues, reds, yellows and even that staple of urban chic: terra cotta. "Colors, especially tinted lenses and colored metal, are definitely very cool right now," says Doug Smith, vice president of sales and operations for the special markets group at Fossil. Smith notes that Fossil thinks enough of the Basel attendees in general that it snagged its own three-story building in town, where the manufacturer sets up its own trade show. He points to black ionic plating as another chic trend, especially in combination with colors, material and mechanicals. "High-end colored ceramics, anywhere from $500-$4,000, are very hot right now," he says. "Showing the inner workings of any watch also really makes an impression."
One "color" most major manufacturers were showcasing at Basel was green—as in environmentalism. "We have a major focus here at Bulova launching a new group of self-winding mechanicals, which have no batteries," says Forrest. "I don't know if being green was the original reason for bringing them back, but it does tie into the whole movement."
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