CHICAGO — Walking into a jewelry store or high-end watch department can be an intimidating experience: The timepieces are under glass. The room is hushed. The security guard is staring at you.
No wonder so many Americans these days are shopping for luxury watches at wholesale clubs or on the Internet, where they can avoid stuffy attitudes, compare brands and maybe even find a lower price.
Watchmakers have come to terms with the fact that the wristwatch is no longer about telling time. Almost every American — 96 percent, to be exact — carries a mobile phone that always shows the time. But watchmakers aren’t ready to let generations of young consumers live without a watch.
Instead, the Swiss, the world’s largest producers of watches, are leading a campaign to revive the watch as a status symbol in the U.S., particularly among men, who make up the bulk of the market. Watch companies are rolling out their own branded stores, reinventing the way watches are sold and stemming the rise of discounting.
“We decided the best way to get into the U.S. market would be to make a strong statement,” said Stephen Urquhart, president of Omega, a division of Bienne, Switzerland-based Swatch Group AG, the world’s largest watchmaker. “To really tap the American market, the only way to do it is to open our own stores.”
Like most Swiss watchmakers, Omega has been selling its watches in the U.S. through jewelers and department stores for more than 100 years. But Omega didn’t operate its own stores, until recently. During the past year, the watchmaker has opened 16 Omega boutiques in the U.S. It opened its first store in New York in 2009 and has an additional nine stores set to open during the next nine months in the U.S.
Rolex and Tag Heuer, both Swiss companies, unveiled their first freestanding stores in the U.S. this year. Privately held Rolex debuted this spring in Chicago, New York and San Francisco, and three more stores are in the pipeline in the U.S.
“The Swiss are really trying to push the idea that in order to be well-dressed, you have to have a nice watch,” said Joseph Partington, owner of Forgotten Times, a watch store in Arlington Heights, Ill. “They realize that watches really aren’t important anymore. There’s no reason to have a watch to tell time. It basically has to tell status.”
The Swiss would like to convince Americans that watches are as cool as an iPhone or iPad.
The Swiss watch brands operate scores of stores in Europe and Asia. In the U.S., they have traditionally relied on jewelry stores and department stores to sell their wares.
The financial crisis changed the equation. Many department stores shut their watch departments. And thousands of jewelry stores, still the most common place to shop for a watch, went out of business.
“Traditional channels have faded,” said Pamela Danziger, president of Unity Marketing, a Stevens, Pa.-based luxury retail research firm. “The watch brands needed to find doors, and the jewelry stores were closing.”
In 2008, the U.S. fell from its perch as the biggest watch market in the world, a position it had held for a decade. Hong Kong now ranks as the largest consumer market for watches, importing $7.4 billion worth in 2010, according to the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry. The U.S. ranked No. 2, with imports totaling $3.7 billion.
The U.S. watch market is rebounding, but not as quickly as in the rest of the world. Global watch production rose 22 percent in 2010 after a 15-month downturn, driven in large part by new wealth in China and Hong Kong, according to the federation. Sales of Swiss watches to Asia rose 35 percent in 2010, and U.S. watch sales gained only 14 percent during the same time frame, the industry group said.
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