HAUTE TO TROT
Charmaine Ho chats with two powerhouses from Audemars Piguet and IWC Schaffhausen on how their brands have set their sights on women who love luxury watches
CHADIC GRUBER You have a background in business strategy for High Jewellery. How does this skill set translate to the world of watches?
I believe that at Audemars Piguet (AP), they are not mutually exclusive. In a mechanical watch you have innovation, engineering, technicalities and hundreds of years of know-how that go into watchmaking.With High Jewellery watches, you also have this artisanship. For example, in the Diamond Outrage,utrage, we use the snow-setting technique, where the diamonds are held so close together that the he white gold frame housing each stone e disappears. And we’ve also included three baguette diamond set spikes using the invisible setting that didn’t exist [at this level of expertise] before. It takes 25 years of artisanship to make. So it’s really the knowhow, the artisanship that we want to communicate to our clients.
Speaking of the Diamond Outrage, how do you feel about completing the Diamond Trilogy this year?
As you know, the brand identity of AP is “to break the rules, you must first master them,” and we always do things differently. So I feel great because with the Diamond Punk, Diamond Fury then Diamond Outrage, we really did break the rules. Our product portfolio strategy is [to have] a balance of 30 percent timepieces for women and 70 percent for men. So from an outside perception of the brand, when people look at us, they think that we are a very male-oriented brand; but not anymore. I believe that the Trilogy changed that perception. Now, it’s AP does [Royal Oak Concept] Supersonneries, but, at the same time, they do watches like the Diamond Trilogy.And we are showing that we not only have hundreds of years of know-how in mechanical watches but we also have within our Manufacture master jewellers.
The level of technicalities seemed to escalate with each new installation of the Diamond Trilogy.
Yes, because if it remains at the same level, then the excitement is not the same; people get bored, and us, too. Each piece takes us a year and a half to complete and there’s a whole team of people working on them. I made a strong statement that the watches need to be adjustable—many High Jewellery pieces come only in one size.Well, the complexity quadruples when you have to integrate size adjustments.With our Outrage, it was even more important because the highest spike is 4cm and if it’s not super well-adjusted, then you run the risk of it moving about, hitting [something] and breaking.break So now, you can adjust [the length of the
Outrage]Ou every 5mm.
Is there a particular type of woman that AP designs for?
We don’t have a specific woman at AP and you see that through our ambassadors: Serena Williams is one type of woman and Frieda Pinto is another type of woman.We really offer a whole portfolio for women:We have the Millenary, which is more classic; sporty, which is the Offshore; and we have the super classy but at the same time super rock Diamond Trilogy. So we don’t have a woman in mind because, for us, it’s about all women.