Six years ago Jean-Christophe Babin created Geneva Watch Days during the pandemic. Today it has become a serious counterweight in the watchmaking calendar. Here, he talks about why watch fairs are still important, the threat from experiential luxury and why brands that refuse to change risk being left behind.
Geneva Watch Days should have been a one-off. It was created in 2020 during the pandemic shortly after Baselworld and SIHH were cancelled. This left the watch industry facing two years without a major live event.
“I remember it was a Saturday morning,” says Jean-Christophe Babin, speaking to me via Zoom last week from Geneva. At the time Geneva Watch Days was created he was CEO of Bvlgari. “We had just learnt the day before that both Basel and SIHH had decided to cancel. Not postpone, because when you rent a convention centre the slot has already been reattributed. You cannot postpone. You can only cancel and wait for the year after.”
In retrospect it seems that Babin was not particularly sorry to see the back of the traditional fairs. He thought they had become too transactional. Bvlgari had subsidiaries around the world and could launch new watches whenever it wanted, but watchmaking could not afford to disappear from global view for two years.
His solution was to create a decentralised event in Geneva. Brands could exhibit from a boutique, manufacture, hotel suite or shared pavilion, wherever they wanted in the city. While the organisers provided the press centre, meeting spaces, dining room and the booking platform. It also avoided the problem of allowing large numbers of people into one exhibition hall during Covid.
“I called a couple of friends,” he tells me. “Georges from Breitling, Patrick from Ulysse Nardin and Max from MB&F, and we all agreed it was a good idea.” Within 48 hours, the Geneva authorities were behind it. Babin already knew them because Bvlgari’s perfume division had converted part of its production to make a sanitising gel for Swiss hospitals during the pandemic.
“I told them, look, we plan to do it in May, but maybe June, maybe September. We cannot control the pandemic. You will tell us when we should or should not do it.” Now, six years later, Geneva Watch Days has 71 participating brands and a clear place in the calendar. Babin is very clear that it is a complementary event to Watches and Wonders rather than a competitor. “What matters is not the number of watch fairs. It is the specific role of each one and whether those roles are different and complementary. Watches and Wonders is the platform for the established brands. Geneva Watch Days is mostly an incubator for the younger brands.”
Why that matters is because the big groups are selling more and more through their own boutiques, leaving multi-brand retailers hunting for something new. “Retailers need new brands,” he says. “In five days at Geneva Watch Days, a young brand can meet 50, 60, 70 or 80 retailers. You don’t find new brands at Watches and Wonders. Those brands are more likely to be leaving multi-brand retail than joining it. Geneva Watch Days is the opposite.”
Babin points out that the brands taking part in Geneva Watch Days are incredibly important. These same houses have won around 35 per cent of the awards at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève over the past six years. They are a hotbed of ingenuity and creativity, and their story is important to all watchmaking. Many are independent of big groups and are often still led by the people who both founded and design them. That creativity matters.
With watch events now taking place in Dubai, New York, Tokyo and other major cities, I asked him why Geneva is still important.“The depth of watchmaking is in Switzerland. This is where it comes from, where it is designed and where it is crafted. The moment you move to another country, you go back to transactional.” In Geneva, visitors can meet the watchmaker, designer and chief executive, then visit the manufacture itself.
Babin’s own position is unusual. He created Geneva Watch Days while running Bvlgari and later became chief executive of LVMH Watches, overseeing TAG Heuer, Hublot and Zenith. Did that create a conflict of interest? I wanted to know. “I never forced any brand to join or not to join,” he says. “I explained why Bvlgari was joining both events.”
Babin explained that for Bvlgari it was obvious why they should join as they are the only major house competing seriously across all four areas of watchmaking: precious watches for men, precious watches for women, jewellery watches and high complications. One event was never going to be enough to communicate every part of that message. For smaller brands meanwhile, Geneva Watch Days might be their only real shot at international attention.
The really interesting part of our conversation was not only about watch fairs. It is about what else luxury has to compete with.“The €10,000 you spend on a watch, you could spend to go with your wife to the Maldives,” he says. “One week in a Bvlgari hotel is a memory. The cost has been the same, but it is only a memory. And the magic is that the memory now challenges possession of the gold watch.”
This is the problem for luxury now. A watch is no longer competing with just another watch. It’s also competing with multiple luxury goods and experiences – a holiday, a restaurant, a spa and a multitude of events and products that are available to someone with €10,000 burning a hole in their pocket. It is one of the reasons Bvlgari has pushed so heavily into hotels.
Not only has customer behaviour changed but the customer has changed too. Babin points to the growth of lab-grown diamonds in the US, the rise of Chinese jewellery brands and the speed with which domestic electric-car companies have taken market share from established European manufacturers in China. “You still buy the brand as reassurance of quality,” he says, “but you also buy a design which speaks to you.”
Heritage still matters, but it is no longer enough. Being established and expensive does not make something desirable. “Today the cost of daring is lower than the cost of not daring,” he says. “If you don’t dare, for sure you die. If you dare, you have some chance to stand out.”
He uses Ferrari’s four-door Purosangue as an example. It was attacked by the purists when it was first announced, but demand has quickly swallowed the available production. Ferrari took a risk without abandoning the V8 and V12 cars on which its reputation was built.
Babin thinks luxury has become far too protective of the idea of brand DNA. “For my generation, brand DNA is like God. You don’t even touch it. But a brand is like an animal and we know genetics evolve. The DNA is something the founder established, but now we are five generations after the founder. Obviously your genetic code is evolving.”
He includes himself among the “dinosaurs” taught to treat brand codes as fixed and untouchable. TAG Heuer, he says, has been willing to take the necessary risks. Its connected watch was not an obvious move for a Swiss luxury watchmaker, and competitors quickly abandoned similar projects when they saw the cost involved. “It is the only luxury connected watch on the market. TAG Heuer had the courage to jump into it immediately and the courage to pay the cost of staying in that market when most brands stopped after a few months or a few years.”
Hublot is a different problem. After years of rapid growth, the brand is now consolidating under Julien Tornare and working out how to get to the next level. “What brought us to today’s level doesn’t necessarily take us to the next level,” Babin says. He compares it to a teenager who reaches 1.8 metres at 14. Growth pauses for a while. Then something has to change,
Then of course there is the United States. “The US remains the richest country on the planet. It is a market which will continue to drive luxury growth, as it already does today for watches and jewellery.” China is more complicated. It is still working through the effects of overbuilding and overinvestment, while Western luxury brands are now competing with a new generation of Chinese names, particularly in jewellery. Babin believes the market is improving, but the old assumption that growth in China would automatically belong to the established European houses no longer holds true. “It is not one country which will drive luxury,” he says. “It is primarily the luxury brands which will drive desirability.”
In July, Babin formally handed the Bvlgari chief executive role to Laura Burdese. When I ask how retirement is going, he laughs. “I am a prisoner of Bvlgari, a prisoner of Geneva Watch Days and a prisoner of the foundation. Combined, it is not really being retired. I’ll tell you about retirement maybe in September. My first quarter of retirement is not retirement at all.”
He remains involved with Bvlgari and is Chairman of the Board and Geneva Watch Days President. The handover to Laura Burdese had been years in the making. Babin brought Burdese into Bvlgari in 2022 knowing that she could ultimately succeed him, and says many of the projects launched over the past two years already carry her influence. “She was a natural successor, the further you go towards the end of this year and into 2027 there will be less inherited from Jean-Christophe directly and more from Laura. That is logical and exactly why she was hired.”
Before we finish, I asked him about Jean Arnault. In April, Babin told Bloomberg that Arnault would be “the perfect person to take over” LVMH’s watch division. No decision on Babin’s successor has yet been announced. “It was not only my decision, as you can imagine,” he says. “But I’m very happy for Jean. He is extremely clever, respectful of what has been done and, at the same time, a man of his generation.”
And he applies that same thinking to his management style. “You have to dare to put young people into positions of responsibility who see 50 per cent of the business the same way you do and 50 per cent differently. That is where it becomes enriching.”
In luxury today, standing still might yet be the greatest risk of all.
Geneva Watch Days takes place in Geneva this week. www.gva-watch-days.com
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