Singapore s pre-eminent watch retailer, The Hour Glass, was established in October 1979 by Dr. Henry Tay and Jannie Chan. The two had had the vision of transforming the face of watch retail, presenting to customers a destination that was refined, upscale and focused on fine watchmaking, something until then that had been absent on the Singapore landscape.
Right around the same time more than four decades ago, a man by the name of Carlo Crocco was crafting his own destiny in Italy. His ambition was to create a radically different luxury-sports watch, the very notion of which had only been invented a few years before. It was in April 1980 at the Basel Fair that the world would see the first Hublot ever produced, barely months after The Hour Glass opened its doors.
Hublot-watching can be a dizzying pastime. The brand likes to maintain a high frequency of announcements, not least about new limited-edition timepieces. Typically, these are horological high-wire acts that push the marriage of design and technology to its extreme.
Hublot CEO Ricardo Guadalupe explains that such pieces serve quite a specific purpose. “The strategy is that there is always a bunch of watches that we talk about through partnerships, through innovation, through sapphire [cases] – very high value [products]. This helps to build the brand and helps to sell, let s say, our core range collection,” he says. “The novelties represent more or less 20 percent of our sales – but 80 percent is in our core range.” Hublot’s best seller, he continues, remains the Big Bang Original, launched in 2005.
LVMH watch brands Hublot, Zenith expect sales rebound in 2021
Published 3 months ago
By Silke Koltrowitz
ZURICH (Reuters) – Swiss luxury watchmakers Hublot and Zenith, both part of French group LVMH, expect sales to rebound in 2021, after a difficult 2020 and a challenging start to the new year, their chief executives said on Monday.
Swiss watchmakers’ sales slid last year as stores were affected by pandemic-related closures and as tourism, an important driver of the luxury watch business, collapsed.
Some companies, which have a strong presence in mainland China, have benefited from a rebound in demand, such as Richemont, which returned to growth in the final quarter of 2020.