I think I might owe you an apology.
No, nothing to do with December’s column, nor with the robust rebuttal of the points I made in it published by WatchPro not long afterwards by a fellow columnist.
The online comments below that piece said all that needed to be said about that: the Great United State of Watchmaking remains a horological promised land.
Instead, I feel the need to apologise for the crime of being unstintingly miserable.
Last year, I wrote a dozen columns for this title that, looking back, may have wallowed a little too long in a puddle of gloom.
Sure, there was an attempt at the odd bon mot or amusing aside, but looking back, the overall tenor of these columns was that things in watchland are a bit rubbish just now.
This isn’t to say they’re not. Already this year I’ve spoken to several chief executives who are making no plans for an all-in staff retreat to Turks and Caicos come Christmas, but instead are offering sacrifices to the watch gods as they plead for growth of two or three per cent. It’s not much to ask, is it?
It shouldn’t be. In that manifesto I wrote at the end of last year, I laid out a vision of what might be done to flatten out the lumps and bumps that shape the road ahead, and I’ve no plans to go over them again, much less change them.
Although I do think I missed one. And it was a big one: do more joy.
Joy? Yes. Bring it, make it, sell it, dish it out wherever possible and as often as possible.
It’s a simplistic thing, I know. Easily derided as a target, too, not least because it’s unquantifiable, unmeasurable and doesn’t go in the microwave.
And yet as last year came to a close and the new one began, I found joy coming up in conversation again and again. Or rather, the lack of it in what we now have to call our “lived experience”.
As a contemporary commodity, joy is in even shorter supply than 5711s during the pandemic, it seems (if you ended up here because you Googled “column pontificating on joy” and wonder what’s going on, a 5711 is a fancy, expensive, super rare watch).
Actually, there’s no ‘seems’ about it. Last year’s World Happiness Report concluded that “negative emotions are more frequent now than in 2006-2010 everywhere except in East Asia and in Europe.”
And being from one of Western Europe’s crumbling nations, I can only assume the Romanians are having a great time of it at the moment.
What I should have said in that manifesto was that brands would be well advised to make joy a central tenet of their product and marketing strategies. Some already have.
I began this year by spending some time with Oris and their latest creation, a collaboration with Miss Piggy – a daft, ludicrous figure by all accounts, and yet somehow one it’s hard to be upset by, even as a devout cynic.
Up in the mountains, the event was good humoured and dare I say it joyful, until, that is, I fell over in the snow and smashed up my shoulder.
Even then, the mood created by a hot pink women’s watch was so determinedly cheery I couldn’t help but feel upbeat, no matter I had one arm in a sling and the prospect of making my way home alone across Europe with part of my scapular floating loose in my shoulder socket to contend with.
To stick with Oris, a few years ago I was talking to the company’s chief executive Rolf Studer about the Oris Bear. He’d found this bear in the company’s archives and had decided to revive it. Did I, he generously asked me, think this was a good idea?
I did not. I reasoned it seemed childish and lacking in sophistication, and that it would represent a misstep for a brand that under his headship was trying to get people to take it seriously with new in-house movements and such. “But you can’t be angry with a bear,” he told me at the time. “A bear is a canvas for positive emotions.”
He was right. And I was wrong. Go to an Oris event now and the Oris Bear will be there, typically surrounded by smiling people taking selfies. That may still lack the sort of sophistication some luxury watch brands are looking for, but frankly, who cares? Studer is convinced his job is to spread a little sparkle in a world darkened by relentless bad news and mood-slayers in the media who peddle it (guilty as charged). All power to his elbow.
But is that do-able?
Also at that Oris event, Studer stood up in front of a group of journalists and gave a simple review of 2024: “It was shit,” he said, his candour warming the room. But he also said that in November and December he’d seen an uptick in sales. Why?
He was humble enough not to put too fine a point on it, but if it wasn’t at least in part because his “make people smile” message is getting through, then I’d be surprised.
It’s not a mantra we’ll see emblazoned across any stands at this spring’s watch fairs, but this year, the industry could do a lot worse than: “Everything’s a bit shit. So buy a watch.” Over-simplistic? Of course. But it’s the complexities of modern life and our inability to do much about any of them that make the opposite so compelling.
And serendipitously, the watch gods appear to be answering those prayers. The organisers of Watches and Wonders Geneva, starting April 1, have put an embargo in place on new watches created by independents of 20 March. Which just so happens to be the UN’s International Day of Happiness.
Such a thing is an cloying confection, and of course in any other year I’d scoff with you at such a forced attempt at manufacturing that warm and fuzzy feeling.
But this year, I don’t know. Maybe there’s something in it. Maybe the tide can turn. Maybe watches really can bring joy.
Let’s all buy one and find out.