STORYBOOK ROMANCE
Richard Holt on how the companies engineer desire
Everyone who works in the watch industry is locked in an ongoing battle against dullness. In the old days, things were not like this. A watch was an essential piece of kit, so you bought one according to how much money you had and whether you needed it to go with a lounge suit or a boiler suit. Now that the exact time is never further than a glance or tap away, nobody needs a watch. Companies must therefore work hard to make the desire for one so strong that you can no longer distinguish between want and need.
A product launch is often accompanied by an elaborate computer simulation of the watch movement being put together. As an action-movie soundtrack plays, you see wheels and pinions being assembled in such dramatic fashion you would think they were building a machine to explore the next dimension, rather than something that ticks away obediently on your wrist.
The thing that the Swiss men in sober suits don’t like to admit is that in a world of things that explode and fly and have thousands of horsepower, the watch is the quiet one in the corner. That is why watch sales depend to a far greater extent than other industries on telling stories. When watches play a supporting role in the lives of stars and heroes, or have been to the Moon or the bottom of the sea, the brands are compelled to tell you about it. A lot.
Some take a different route to cool-by-association. They look at designs from other sectors and say: why don’t we make a watch that looks like that? So we have watches that are like rev-counters from classic cars, or pressure gauges from submarines. Perhaps the most successful at the not-a-watch watch game is Bell & Ross. They have made all kinds of different designs, but the one they are best known for is based on a cheerful piece of industrial espionage. The founders, a Mr Belamich and Mr Rosillo, looked closely at the dashboard instrument on a fighter jet and decided it would look rather fetching on the wrist. Well, it turns out they were right, and it has certainly excited the punters, who can’t get enough of them.