Choices, choices, everywhere
There’s a whole world of watches out there, so where to begin? David Davies highlights three brands that encapsulate the remarkable diversity of the travel-retail watch category
Moving on up
Until recently, Dreyfuss & Co was simply the luxury-oriented brand at the high end of the Rotary portfolio. At the start of 2008, however, the Dreyfuss name was adopted for the entire Rotary business in a bid to establish a greater profile in the watch category’s upper tier.
“The decision to adopt the company title ‘The Dreyfuss Group’ was a bold move for the Group, but it has been an extremely successful initiative and has allowed us to further develop the brand portfolio,” says Abbi Holland, PR manager of The Dreyfuss Group. “We realised that the launch of Dreyfuss & Co offered us an excellent opportunity to develop the company’s watchmaking credentials by penetrating the market at a slightly higher price point. The success of this launch led us to the decision to further introduce new brands, and it was a united decision to change the Group name to reflect the company’s future plans and brand launches.”
As a result, says Holland, the group is now ideally positioned to introduce new timepieces aimed at a wider range of category price-points. “The Rotary brand remains a market leader within the mid-market sector, but the company also wanted to embrace opportunities to develop other brand ideas at both higher and lower price-points,” she says. “As one of the few remaining family-owned watch manufacturers, our reputation speaks volumes and is a very strong selling point for our customers… By looking at different price levels, we are able to develop new strategies to ensure that our offering has a unique selling point and appeal.”
The Dreyfuss & Co brand (price point: £235-£1350) is not the only Dreyfuss Group brand to occupy the upper tier of the category – English-made precious metal mechanical watch brand J & T Windmills also resides here (prices start at £395). While the former has just been expanded with the launch of a new family of gents and ladies watches, even bigger plans are afoot for the latter.
“The J & T Windmills brand has been considerably modified for 2008, and the gender split will now have a greater male bias,” reveals Holland. “The collection will be predominantly sterling silver and a number of new pieces [were] unveiled at the Basel Fair.”
An emerging player
While Krieger Watch Corporation has long had a presence on some cruise liners (notably Starboard and Harding Brothers) and in a number of Caribbean duty-free outlets, the luxury timepiece company has, in truth, been a rather peripheral force in the travel-retail watch category to this point. Now all that is poised to change with an ambitious new growth strategy and, critically, a considerable inventory of new products to support these plans.
“Ira Krieger, our founder, has a plan to not only extend the brand globally through domestic channels, but also through travel-retail as well,” reveals Vanessa Conde, vice-president of marketing and operations, Krieger Watch Corporation. “The world has become much more accessible to far greater numbers of people, and so travel-retail provides another venue for us to reach customers that have disposable income – they are our demographic and they tend to be on the move!”
Leading Krieger’s charge into the luxury watch segment is a revamped version of the company’s signature timepiece, the Tidal Wave. Created two decades ago and responsible in part for the brand’s considerable reputation as a maker of marine timepieces, the watch has been comprehensively reworked ahead of its 20th anniversary. “It’s been upgraded, updated and has greater appeal to a younger, hipper, savvier audience,” observes Conde.
A new-look Tidal Wave is only one component of Krieger’s plans, however. The company is also in the process of rolling-out a number of new collections intended to satisfy wearers’ requirements for a true life accessory. “They appeal to the nuances happening in watches and fashion accessories in general. Watches are becoming more than accessories – they are really defining people’s lifestyles, how they live and who they are,” says Conde. “The new collections – Gigantium, Chrono, Power Reserve – have really allowed us to be able to align ourselves with some of the more prominent luxury brands that have recognition and respect, not just from industry peers but also from the community we sell to as well.”
It is clear that many hopes are riding on the Gigantium collection, in particular. The unisex range enables easy changeover of watch straps, allowing timepieces to be tailored by the user according to the requirements of a specific event or occasion – or simply how the wearer feels on any given day. “We’ve had a lot of interest in the collection because of that flexibility and the ability within the same collection to be able to target men and women,” notes Conde.
With an overarching rebranding campaign also in progress, these are busy days indeed for Krieger. And while the company has some way to go yet before it begins to challenge the heavyweights of the travel retail watch category, there is no doubting the enthusiasm of Conde and her team. “We hope to have some significant presence by the end of the year to establish a platform and spring off from there,” she concludes.
At the cutting edge
“We always try to think about functionality – what the customer expects from us and how we can solve this,” muses Dr. Jürgen Geßler, chairman of the Porsche Design Group. “In fact, this applies not just to our watches, but to the whole product range: the design must follow the functionality.”
The result of this overarching strategy has been a long sequence of cutting-edge men’s timepieces stretching from the company’s very first watch launch in 1972 to the strong sellers of today, including the Dashboard, Performance and Flat Six line chronographs. These days manufactured under license by Eterna, Porsche Design’s latest timepieces – showcased at last month’s Basel exhibition – include a new addition to the Dashboard series, a new Worldtimer watch and a gold version of the Indicator.
The new launches coincide with a fresh emphasis on the travel-retail channel. “Let’s say that we are almost at the beginning of our expansion in travel-retail,” says Geßler. “We have about 25 points-of-sale across travel-retail and have recently opened two new doors – a 140sqm site on landside at Frankfurt airport, and a 50sqm store in Munich airport Terminal 2. We aim to continuously increase the travel-retail business – watches is one of our major product groups and fits perfectly with all male travellers.”
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