Jean-Claude Monachon, Vice-President of Omega, Head of Product & Customer Service, was in India recently to launch The Dark Side of the Moon, a black ceramic watch in the Speedmaster collection.

Monachon, who has worked in the watches business since 1979, heads a team of 50 which is in charge of design and new watch movements and is responsible for the development of the entire Omega Collection. cat.a.lyst caught up with him to get a peek into what makes a luxury brand, and how important innovation is to a heritage brand like Omega. Excerpts:

What makes a luxury brand? How important is innovation to a luxury brand?

Luxury brands need to have a story behind them. They can’t come into the watch market without one.

A new brand will invest millions, billions in marketing but you need a story. Brands like Breguet, Blancpain, Patek Philippe – they all have something to say. Of course, at Omega, we have so many things to say.

We have been to the moon, we have been associated with the Olympic Games since 1972, we have many testimonials.

Omega is the cash cow of the Swatch group. We need to have the best of innovation in an industrialised product, this is very, very important.

Omega is not a company that will make one or two watches. We have to make many watches, even if you have craftsmanship that can do a watch we need to think … this is even more difficult, that you can retain the quality in thousands of products, not just in one product.

There’s luxury and luxury. We are luxury with quality, even a better quality than the high luxury. It’s more difficult to do luxury in a high volume.

There was this time in the Seventies when Omega went quartz …

Ah! You know about this. Yes, it was a tough time. The Japanese came to Switzerland with electronic watches. It was in 1979, I had just started in the watch business. There was a meeting with all the big bosses of the Swiss watch-making industry, there was a consultant who said there will no more be mechanical watches, it’s over. And what do you see today? It may be the only product that is still mechanical, not electronic … to have a mechanical watch will mean that in 100 years, your watch will run. You will find a guy who can build again a little component to make the watch run.

Take your iPhone. In two years, you will throw it away. You will have no more after-sales components because the electronic revolution is very quick.

Take the Apple watch … it’s a fantastic product, I am sure I’m going to buy one, but will throw it away because there’s a new one. It is useful, of course, but with no emotion. I don’t say I am going to kiss my watch (laughs) but I am attached to it … maybe I will give it to my son, grandson, and it will work.

So you’re saying an important aspect of luxury is that goods are made to last?

Yes … look, if you have a Louis Vuitton bag, are you going to throw it away?

No, certainly not, I will even build a showcase for it.

Yes, even if it’s a little broken, you will keep it, you will give it to your daughter … it will have value, in 20 years.

So how does technology evolve in a brand like Omega?

There are five important things.

The DNA of the brand. If I do a new product, I need to have elements of the past in the watch. I, or the manager, or the designer, will first go to the Omega museum to see what we can use. Second, the watch has to be beautiful. Who’s going to buy if it’s not beautiful?

The product has to have quality. If the product has even a little problem, the quality manager says no, you cannot deliver. Our president would not go and say, ‘I don’t agree, we have to go and deliver the watch’.

Then, team spirit. When we begin the project, I take people from customer service, designer, sales … We think, would it be a problem later if we do the watch like this?

Certainly, the most important is innovation. If you don’t innovate in watches, even if you are Omega, you will die.

What trends have you noticed in India, in luxury watches?

I think they are more and more interested in nice watches. Now with the Internet, people know watches much better than before.

Most of them, when they come to the shop and want to buy Seamaster with coaxial escapement, they know what it is. Earlier they would go and say ‘I want a Rolex’ because they knew the name, now they go on the Internet, think twice before buying something. That’s why they buy Omega (chuckles).

Do you do any specific designs for India?

No. I don’t do a watch for China, India, Italy. We do a watch for our customers.

And they’re all the same?

Maybe not. In India I know you love yellow gold, and if you go to Europe, the more trendy people like senna gold, but do I say in India I will not sell these watches? An Indian will travel. If he goes to London, to an Omega boutique, he will see the red gold watch … so we cannot do a specific product for one country.

Or maybe it could happen that we could do a limited edition, like we do for the Olympics – like we did for Sochi in Russia, or for Beijing. We already have the limited edition for Rio 2016 – we tried to play with the colour of the country’s flag.

What are you doing about fakes?

It’s not a big problem. Of course, it’s a world problem. Counterfeited products are the third illegal market after drugs and arms. You can measure the success of a watch by the counterfeit. The Swiss watch federation works with companies in Hong Kong, Thailand and China to arrest people and destroy the watches, flatten them with a road-roller, but you catch one guy, another is doing the same later on. You cannot kill this poison, you can try to lower it but there will always be a bad guy who will make money, do bad things, that’s life, we’re born like this.

Where is India in the Omega universe?

No 13. We hope it will be No. 11 next year. China is No 1 and we are No. 1 in China. Our top five markets are China, Hong Kong, the US, Japan, Switzerland.

How do you hold your own against the other Swatch brands?

All have their own strategy. If suddenly I want to do something that is really, really high, then they will say, listen, I think Blancpain is doing something like that. So we have our own strategy, we have the strengths of the group but every brand decides where to go … it would be stupid to do the same thing Breguet is doing, that’s why Omega does not do so many high complication watches, it’s not our cup of tea.

Luxury Class tracks the evolution of the world’s leading luxury brands.

PH Narayanan, Brand Manager in India, was also present at the interview. Indians have been buying the brand long before it started operations here, he says.

What have you observed about Indian customers who buy your watches?

Narayanan: Our customers were exposed to luxury brands much before we started operations in India. Quite a number of families were buying the watches outside. We have one set of customers who are traditional buyers of the brand. The other set is aspirational, educated, they want something subtle, like Omega, it is never a loud brand.

What is the most popular price band?

₹2-6 lakh. We have four collections. Constellation is liked by the ladies, it has diamonds. Men prefer the Seamaster and the Speedmaster. In DeVille, Ladymatic is a sub-collection for the women, an automatic watch.

We popularise it through Nicole Kidman, it has found traction here and a gold-and-diamonds one is very popular. We have eight boutiques in India, and we sell on average eight watches every month, priced at ₹17-18 lakh.

I see customers as young as 18 looking at Seamaster, and girls as young as 15 asking their parents to buy an Omega for them.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW