Right place right time

A lawyer by training, Aletta Stas-Bax oversees the Geneva-based watchmaker’s daily operations. She also leads the development of watch designs and has played a role in introducing the much-loved Double Heart Beat collection. She tells Fortune India what it’s like for a young luxury brand to grow in an emerging market. Edited excerpts:

There was a market opportunity in the mid-segment that led you to start this business in 1988.
My husband and I were just out of college and we were browsing in a watch retail boutique, Bucherer, when we realised that there were either watches you couldn’t afford or ones that were a distance away in quality and finish. We wished there were more products in the middle. That was the start.

In a world of hundreds of luxury watch brands, how does a new watchmaker differentiate itself?
We call ourselves the passionate, young watchmaker from Geneva. ‘Young’ because our neighbours are dinosaurs, like Patek Philippe and Piaget, which have been around for centuries.

You started out with movements made by the Swatch Group. That’s something you’ve moved away from now.
Yes, of the 128,000 watches we made last year, we outfitted 20% with our in-house movements; 35% were quartz. It’s a drive to become as self-reliant as possible.

How many watches do you sell in India and who are your customers?
We’re doing about 2,000 watches a year across 32 sales centres in India. Our customers are mostly young corporate executives. What’s done well is a watch with Hindi [Devnagari] numerals on the dial instead of Roman numerals.

What’s the advantage for a young Swiss watch company in a market like India?
One is that we are family-owned and family-run. With a large company, every two years the CEO goes elsewhere, slowing down decisions. We’re not a company that says to a retailer, ‘If you don’t sell watch ‘A’ for us, we won’t give you ‘B watch’, which happens a lot. We offer better margins too.

What’s your take on the rampant discounting that dealers engage in?
It does not benefit the industry. Instead of buying a Rolex in Geneva, you can go to Hong Kong, buy it and enjoy a short holiday for the same price. That’s because a dealer in bad times in Hong Kong will give you a 20% or even a 30% discount. Consumers feel cheated if discounting happens too much since the world is getting smaller. I don’t think it’s a good idea to go below 10%.

Your one big challenge...?
The same as when we started in 1998: to make the brand better known. It’s moved forward, but we want to go further.

In most mature markets, the vintage and used watch markets build popularity for famous brands. That’s missing here.
To an extent, that depends on how auction houses drive things forward. One has to compare China and India because they are large, emerging markets. China is more developed because buyers go through Hong Kong, which has always been a centre for collectors.