Past, present and future in harmony
Omega CEO and president Raynald Aeschlimann talks to Tracey Llewellyn about its Chronoscope, Paris 2024 and Daniel Craig’s eye for watch design
Abrand that has enduring relationships with Nasa, the Olympic Games and James Bond, Omega has long been among the most recognisable names on the planet. While company president and CEO Raynald Aeschlimann is justifiably proud of all of these partnerships, and the technical developments they have initiated, his aim now is to bring the main focus for the brand back to the timepieces it produces and the impressive history of its watchmaking.
“Over my 25 years at Omega I have learnt
that we are a company that always looks to the future and we adapt accordingly. With that said, it is essential to know where you come from, in order to really move forwards. Every strong brand has pillars that support it and that can be built on. Over the past decade we have shared the back stories behind these pillars – from the creation and development of each of our product lines to the adoption of the Co-axial movement and Master Chronometer certification.
The vision we have had for the past few years
is to work closely with our distributors, to have our own stores, and to be as close to the end customer as possible. In addition to opening boutiques across the globe, we have embraced the digital world – and it has embraced us back. I am particularly proud of our Speedy Tuesday collaboration with online magazine Fratello that saw Speedmasters being launched and sold in record times on Instagram, because it was at that moment that we took Omega to the next level and to a new generation.
By the time the 2020 pandemic hit,
we were already on the other side of the e-commerce set-up: we started with the US more than three years ago and it is one of our biggest sources of sales there today. This meant that it was maybe a bit easier on the operations side for Omega because of what we had in place. Our new building and the fact that many of our suppliers are owned by our parent company [Swatch] meant that our production was affected less than for some others.
Being client-centric helped us a lot. Only by being close to your customers can you overcome something like a global retail shutdown. Some countries were still open for business, and we trusted our network to continue doing a good job. In the ones that were closed we were still engaging with customers through white-glove deliveries and e-commerce. People had more time to engage and our online resources sharing our story and history appealed to them.
There was disruption to some of our biggest partnership deals
with the postponement of No Time to Die and the Olympics. Of course, this was a blow in terms of visibility, but at Omega the product is more important than the marketing, and this gave us the opportunity to regroup. We talked more about the watches themselves and continued to launch products throughout the pandemic, from the new Seamaster 300 and men’s Constellation range to the latest Silver Snoopy Speedmaster.
Omega has been involved with the Olympics since 1932, and the science of sports timekeeping is an integral part of the company. For our team, Tokyo 2020 went off almost as normal. We had 600 timekeepers and support staff there and we invested heavily in new technology, gathering more than 1 million pieces of data and recording record-breaking moments. We will build on this for Paris 2024.
We started with Bond in 1995. While previous watches have been dedicated to the character, the watch in No Time to Die is not really about 007: it’s more of a tribute to Daniel Craig, and was developed in collaboration with him. It was introduced in 2019 and has become one of our best-sellers, not because 007 wears it on screen – we only
saw that recently – but because it is a fabulous watch with superb styling and an incredible movement.
Today, a huge proportion of our watches are Master Chronometers,
certified by METAS – an external and stringent process we helped to develop and launch in 2015. It was a milestone in guaranteeing accuracy and we are very proud of being the first brand to use it and, most importantly, to do so on an industrial basis. I would like to see more companies join forces with METAS because the testing is so strict, and I was personally delighted when Tudor introduced a Master Chronometer movement this year – it shows that there is a lot of respect for what we’ve been doing over the years.
We launched our latest watch, the Chronoscope, in Milan in September.
It’s an important piece and a completely new design for the Speedmaster family. It’s a world away from the Moonwatch, but it summarises the work we have been doing in the past three years to streamline our main lines. Just as the Seamaster is our dive collection with models ranging from dressy to professional, the Speedmaster is our chronograph family and we wanted to enlarge it. The Chronoscope, which is based on some of our early 20th-century watches, features a new movement, case and dial with Arabic numerals and tachymeter, telemeter and pulsometer scales. It’s a reminder that technology can be part of a chronograph, as much as a fabulous backstory.”
‘The Chronoscope is a reminder that technology can be part of a chronograph, as much as a fabulous backstory’