CEOs in the watch business have similar job security to NFL coaches.
With 40 out of 50 watchmakers tracked by the Morgan Stanley /LuxeConsult annual report on the Swiss industry thought to have seen sales fall last year, the Hayeks, Arnaults and Ruperts deemed it time to shuffle the pack.
Shuffle may be the right word, because many brand CEOs found themselves moved to other brands within the industrialized luxury groups.
Take LVMH, for example, and try to keep-up.
In January last year, Frédéric Arnault, who had become CEO of TAG Heuer in 2020, was appointed as chief executive of a newly created LVMH Watches operation in charge of Hublot, TAG Heuer and Zenith.
That division reported to Stephane Bianchi, CEO of LVMH Watches & Jewelry, which also houses the mighty Bulgari.
Julien Tornare, CEO of Zenith since 2017, was appointed CEO of TAG Heuer.
Benoit de Clerck, who had spent two decades at rival Richemont with global roles at IWC and Panerai — after a brief spell as regional managing director for TAG Heuer Middle East — took over in the top job at Zenith.
Ricardo Guadalupe kept his seat as CEO of Hublot, for a few more months, at least.
Mr Arnault was quick to make changes after taking control of all three LVMH specialist watchmakers.
In July, Mr Guadalupe was eased into an honourary president role at Hublot, and replaced by Mr Tornare, who had only been at TAG Heuer for six months.
Antoine Pin, head of watches for Bulgari, returned to TAG Heuer as CEO.
Eight months on from these executive changes, and just 14 months after Mr Arnault took over running LVMH Watches, he has moved to run one of the group’s Italian luxury brands, Loro Piana.
The organisation might have returned to its structure until the end of 2023 with watch brands reporting to LVMH Watch & Jewelry managing director Stéphane Bianchi, but he is otherwise engaged having been promoted to become LVMH’s group managing director in March last year (although he did not appear to relinquish his responsibilities running watches and jewellery.
Watches and jewellery have more of a separation within LVMH than you see, for example, at Richemont, where Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels and Piaget operate across both.
But Bulgari does have dogs in both fights, which has always given its CEO Jean-Christoph Babin a valuable perspective over how the group’s brands could benefit each other.
LVMH Watch & Jewelry, as a business unit that also houses Tiffany and Chaumet, is now better balanced.
Mr Babin’s promotion to run LVMH Watches while continuing to run Bulgari gives him a fiefdom that should increase the clout he has at meetings where the mighty Tiffany and Chaumet might otherwise hold sway.
Mr Babin has always described his leadership style as a master delegator, which allows him the time and space to make far-reaching strategic decisions.
This should mean running Bulgari and LVMH’s three specialist watchmakers is both achievable and, to my mind, an exciting opportunity.
Over quarter of a century, Mr Babin has shown a masterful eye for identifying a brand’s core mission, tightening its focus on that mission and then selling that story to the public.
At TAG Heuer, he was parachuted into the CEO’s position in 2020 after LVMH bought the brand a year earlier.
He arrived with valuable sales and marketing experience at global organisations including Proctor & Gamble and chemicals giant Henkel, but correctly identified that it was TAG Heuer’s products that were the problem, having lost their reputation for the sort of peak precision that made Heuer so valuable to the motor racing community.
“Six months after I joined, we decided to launch an all-out programme and when I say all-out, I mean without any sacred cows from quartz to digital to mechanical, whatever it would be, to bring TAG Heuer back into movements, but especially movements which would get the company back to its roots, which is mastering the tiniest fractions of time,” he said in an interview at the time.
That set TAG Heuer back on a path to the portfolio we see today with split-second in house movements used for racy chronographs in the Carrera, Autavia and Monaco collections.
Moving to Bulgari could not have been more of a cultural shift.
A largely male client base with a passion for high-octane sports was replaced with an ostensibly female customer for Bulgari’s fine jewellery.
Although the brand, steeped in the history of Italian jewellery, had its name on watches as far back as the 1920s, its mid-to-late 20th century watchmaking was mostly about adding tiny timekeepers to fine jewellery pieces — beginning with the now-iconic Serpenti in the 1940s and Turbogas watches in the 1960s.
Despite developing watch lines for men including the Octo Roma, Aluminium and ultra-slim Octo Finissimo, Mr Babin realised that jewellery and bejewelled watches were the geese laying the golden eggs at Bulgari, and relentlessly pursued a strategy of elevating these treasures to fine art status.
He developed the Bulgari retail estate to match: creating some of the most opulent boutiques on the planet in Rome, Paris, London and New York.
Mr Babin has also drawn on his marketing background by green-lighting fashion week catwalk shows and ambassadorships for some of the world’s most admired women including Anne Hathaway and Zendaya.
In 2020, Mr Babin was frustrated by the shut down of the Swiss watch industry during the first wave of the pandemic, so in the summer he helped to pull together Geneva Watch Days at impossibly short notice.
I attended that first show and, despite the face masks and awkward social distancing, it was easily good enough to show that life would return to the industry if people had a little faith.
In the musical chairs of watch business CEOs, Mr Babin will have to move fast to make an impact on TAG Heuer, Zenith and Hublot, but his first mission is surely to identify what, in each case, makes the brands great.
TAG Heuer is in good shape with its new association with Formula 1 restoring its link to mechanical timekeeping precision in the motor racing world.
Hublot is in a different spot, and should double-down on its edginess and association with the art world over its alignment with world football where multi-millionaire players may like its watches, but most fans are turned off by both the brand’s prices and many of its more extreme styles.
Hublot and TAG Heuer are both five-to-six times bigger than stablemate Zenith, which enjoyed a revival under former CEO Julien Tornare, particularly with the launch of the Chronograph Sport, but needs to find a path back to the peak of influence it earned in the 1960s.
It has taken a period of turmoil amid the upper ranks of LVMH’s watch businesses over the past 18 months to settle on the current leadership team, but the group now appears to have pieces in place to stimulate an upturn that leads the brands out of the current downturn and into an even brighter future.