Dear Breitling - Shop Your Closet!

There are a GAZILLION "Sleeping Beauty" brands out there. And seeing as Breitling just "whipped it out" to buy an (let's be honest) essentially dormant brand, let's take a moment and consider what US $69 million could have been directed towards given the presence of an  already existing red-headed step-child living somewhat ignominiously under Breitling's roof. I speak, gentle reader. of Kelek. 

Formerly located just around the corner from Eberhard in La Chaux-de-Fonds, it merged / was purchased by Breitling in 1997. Prior to this time there had been a few iterations, but the short-form is that Kelek focused on mechanical movements and had worked with Dubois-Dépraz. It is also worth noting that in the 90s, Kelek was one of the largest manufacturers of automatic, mechanical chronographs. It is also curious to note that Kelek developed a working relationship with one Seiko (Hattori at the time), thus perhaps foreshadowing the great Tag Heuer 1887 movement fiasco of 2009 ; )

In short? For the price of, well, ZERO, the brain trust in Grenchen could have directed time, effort and a much smaller amount of cash towards rebuilding and relaunching something that would only be on life-support for a short period of time, and out of the "recovery room" even faster. But is also, admittedly, not the stuff of nocturnal emissions (that's wet dream to you) from watch nerds swearing up and down that they would buy a Universal Geneve if it were ever revived. These folks are, by and large, the horological equivalent of the now infamous (and largely fictitious) 400 pound guy "hacking a political party" from his bed. Hypothetically they exist, but it begs the question as to why the supply of vintage Universal Geneve watches are not exactly thin on the ground. 

Okay, that's not fair. I am sure that there are some folks out there, but the majority of watch buyers with ready cash listening to Beyonce name drop AP and SPENDING said cash are not borderline or current AARP members with purchasing decision-making impulses driven by nostalgic erections.

Just saying.

So back to the earlier question - when you have a viable brand already in your house, why go out shopping for something that costs you a WHOLE LOT more money than you really need (or likely should want) to spend? A lot of it is sex appeal - be it real or (I suspect in this case) presumed. But a lot of it comes back to what that other great commentator on the watch business opined in Moneyball, fear of looking bad and an inability to objectively and rationally asses value (both perceived and real) -

“There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- or under valued, who couldn't?”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

What is known is that Kelek would have likely made for a fantastic Oakland A. It was, and continues to be a potentially wildly successful brand if the owner / operator would spend one one-hundredth of the time, energy, and money that Mr. Kerns and Breitling are ready to hurl at UG. But then again, when you consider floating an idea like Kelek, you are flying in the face of the marketing logic of a brand that has been worshiping at the altar of stardom (and its reflective glow) for many years. So we'll let Moneyball summarize why activating Kelek would have made a HELL of a lot more sense than spending the kind of money that usually isn't exchanged without the aid of a getaway car.

“The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

And yes, it is a metaphor. The "certain kind of person" is a certain kind of brand - in this instance Kelek ; )