Winter 2004 Style & Design
Incredibly, given prohibitive entrance costs and the accent on
century-plus pedigrees, there are even start-ups. Simone Bedat, a
founding partner of the Geneva firm Raymond Weil, and her son Christian
left and set up a new firm, Bedat & Co., in 1996. Gucci Group, looking
for a better position in the watch sector, scooped up Bedat in 2000.
"Could we have kept going independently? Yes, but for how long?"
Christian Bedat says of his decision to sell. "I wanted my retailers to
know that I was not going to go bankrupt in five years. I could not
guarantee that on my own, but I could guarantee that as part of Gucci."
Other ventures have not fared so well. One of the most successful young
companies in recent years, Franck Muller, known around Geneva for adding
to watches' sex appeal with inventive designs and graphics and for
creating one of the fastest-growing high-end businesses, nearly imploded
earlier this year when founding designer Muller left the company after a
noisy feud and a court battle.
Then there's Frenchman François-Paul Journe, the industry whiz kid. He
produces around 1,000 complex watches a year and insists that each be
made from start to finish by one watchmaker. A dedicated mechanical
engineer, he delights in reorganizing the way information is presented
on the dial.
So many of the Swiss watches have a great story. These days, Hayek Jr.
wears an Omega Railmaster, which pairs a new movement with a design
inspired by watches developed a century ago for the Chinese railroads to
resist the magnetic distortion caused by iron locomotives. And the
$35,000 extra-thin Patek that Philippe Stern wears has a perpetual
calendar that takes into account leap years, but it won't keep time as
well as your computer or mobile phone. The finest mechanical watches
still gain up to 10 seconds a day, though Patek insists on accuracy from
-3 to +2 seconds. "A Patek Philippe is not really something to give you
the time. It's more a piece of art, like a painting," says Stern.
That's why the next generation of watchmakers is busy looking to apply
its vast mechanical-problem-solving talents to a different set of
issues. "Up until now, watches have been designed by scientifically
minded people to display information in the same way a cockpit panel
does," says industry veteran Jean-Claude Biver, who revived and sold
Blancpain to Swatch and is now CEO of Hublot. "I imagine a watch dial
that is more interactive, not only using complications to transmit
technical information but to visually express emotion. That's the next
step." •
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His life and death recalled in images
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