Breakfast With An Old Friend

Regular readers will know that I spent about a year and a half working with Auguste Reymond to help promote and market them in North America as well as English speaking countries around the world.  It was a fun and exciting time, and in hindsight, it was one of those experiences that was a little heart-breaking. Lorenz Aebischer was the CEO, and I have to say that in many ways, Auguste Reymond was his baby.  

As with any brand, there were shareholders to satisfy.  What was not clear at the time, but became clear later, was that the shareholders did not fully understand what it might really take to not only run the brand on the day-to-day, but also did not truly understand what made Auguste Reymond unique. Think about it, it was a brand that was right in the middle of a huge glut of brands pricing similarly.  Some with enormous marketing budgets, some that would come and go like so many Kickstarter brands seem to be doing lately.  But for whatever reason, it was a brand that resonated with a lot of watch fans, and the 100,000 plus followers on social media underscored that fact.  

Well, in the age of sleeping beauty watch brands Auguste Reymond is right there in good company.  It has now changed hands twice, and the current owners seem to be even more confused about what they bought than the people they bought it from.  

Despite what some brand owners and a few "colleagues" in the Fourth and Fifth Estate might think about me, I genuinely want to see brands succeed.  Nobody (even me) wants to see anyone fail.  But this is a brand with so much potential that is now like a cleaved block of ice, floating further and further away from where they want to be.

Let's hope that Prince Charming is waiting in the wings.  I realize that a watch brand is just that.  But in some instances, there is something more.  An idea, a feeling, something that stirs our passions.  For many people, Auguste Reymond was one of those brands.  Let's hope that a wake-up call will reach the owner and manager and they will stop treating it like a red-headed stepchild, and start treating it like the princess to be that it really is.