A Watch Industry Issue I Wish New Richemont Group CEO Jérôme Lambert Could Solve

I yearn some fly-on-the-wall sort of insight into the inner workings and mechanisms of "The Group," especially so that I could better understand the roles and responsibilities of those handful, entrusted with an important position not at one of the many brands, but at the Group level Because in every well-ran group, brands are meant to work in harmony, each with its own dedicated path in terms of pricing, product development, brand image, advertising, target audience and so on I for long have been wanting to create a chart of all the Richemont brands' individual collections to illustrate how cleverly they are laid out when it comes to distinct separation in all of the aforementioned categories - it's done almost too well, almost too carefully, at this point.

Pilot watch, costing X amount of money, supplied movement: you're looking at brand #10 Pilot watch, costing 4X amount of money, in-house movement: you're looking at brand #6 And so on.

The moment two products, let alone two collections start to overlap, a smaller brand will not be allowed to create a product that could provide a noticeably better value proposition - or, in the rare instance that such a product did come to existence, said small brand will never be allowed to make it as sexy-looking in its appearance or have use the same sort of advertising budget to make the thing a proper home run The brands are paralyzed when it comes to developing new collections because there isn't a popular segment that hadn't already been assigned to this or that collection Try and do something better or newer and you're bound to piss somebody off I can sympathize with the struggles of arranging the positioning of major and minor brands and collections alike And so if there's one thing I'd like to see Mr.

Lambert do is let the Group's brands on a looser leash and foster creativity - so that brands are allowed to and indeed encouraged to pull their heads out of their archives and get back to creating stuff that is new and is as good as it can be and pushed as much as it can be. . Source