ThomasM
[PuristS]
14331
HOW BOGUS IS BREGUET
Invited by a noted and knowledgeable horological enthusiast to visit this distinguished forum, Watchbore was gratified to learn from the blurb at the top of the page that the modern firm of Breguet were heirs to an uninterrupted legacy.
Anticipating further enlightenment, Watchbore read on, only to have his admittedly narrow powers of literary comprehension baffled by the following phrase. Is he given to understand that the Breguet firm does not adhere to perfection nor innovate remorselessly, and that it is not even committed to do so, but simply perpetuates the ideals of that commitment? Is Breguet unique in perpetuating continuously, while others only perpetuate intermittently? The important questions raised by these statements leave a substantial hole in Watchbore?s philosophical ozone layer.
While marvelling in his garret at how not mere watchmakers but master watchmakers have managed to fall in love with a challenge and how this love inspires, nay, drives them ceaselessly to create timelessly elegant and original timepieces etc., he noticed a small brown envelope sliding anonymously under his door.
It was from a source deep within the Swatch Group hierarchy (whose eldest unmarried daughter Watchbore had rescued from an ingominous defloration at the hands of his Albanian associates), and it was entitled ?The True Story of the Breguet Brand.?
Because of the highly confidential nature of this document, which took him the best part of a magnum of Chateau Pissoir to unravel, Watchbore confines the rest of this eyeglazing post to a highly summarized version of this astonishingly revealing document.
It turns out that the Breguet legacy was indeed uninterrupted until 1990 when the name was no longer associated with the cutting-edge technology with which it had been synonymous since Abraham-Louis Breguet founded the firm in the year before the American revolution.
Following Abraham-Louis death in 1823, his heir Antoine-Louis, promptly retired to the country, having failed to patent and exploit what was perhaps his father?s greatest commercial invention ? a keyless winding and setting system. Ten years later the founder?s grandson, Louis Cl?ment took over the firm which made barely 50 watches a year.
Louis-Cl?ment was a true successor to his grandfather, but not in watchmaking. Watches had by then become ubiquitous and had lost much of their mystery. Electricity and telecommunications had emerged as the wonder technologies of the age. As inventive as Abraham-Louis, Louis-Cl?ment developed the induction coil, the electric safety fuse, the lighting conductor, the electric tuning-fork regulator (precursor of the quartz watch) and introduced the Bell telephone to France. He turned his grandfather?s watchmaking company into one of France?s leading engineering groups of the railway and telegraph age. Breguet nevertheless continued to make a few civilian timepieces in the old style, but rationalised most of their watches into standardised items with movements made in Switzerland.
In 1870, after 95 years in horology, the Breguet family said goodbye to watchmaking, selling the firm?s horological division and the watch brand to their workshop foreman, London-born Edward Brown.
Freed from watchmaking, the Breguet genius took flight in the next technological revolution ? aviation. Louis-Cl?ment?s grandsons, Louis and Jacques Breguet were France?s aircraft pioneers, developing in 1907 the gyroplane, ancestor of the helicopter. From the 1917 Breguet 14 fighter-bomber that helped turn the tide of war on the western front, the Breguet company went on to produce a succession of successful aircraft. Louis Breguet was one of the co-founders of Air France in 1933. In 1967, 16 years after his death, the company was merged with Dassault. In 1990, the Breguet name was dropped from aviation, but the Breguet legacy can be said to survive in the Mirage, Jaguar and Rafale warplanes.
The Brown family owned the Breguet watch brand for 100 years, five years longer than the Breguets. From a low of 100 watches a year, Edward Brown built up sales to more than 300 high-value timepieces. He re-equipped the workshops and introduced several new models to meet the late 19th century demand for complicated horology. The complicated watches, virtually indistinguishable from other Swiss watches, were built by the Joux Valley?s leading watchmakers including the Victorin Piguet workshops in Le Sentier ? also suppliers to Patek Philippe. When wristwatches came, Breguet copied Cartier styles. After World War II, state orders for ?pilot?s? watches, notably the Type XX chronograph, kept the firm alive.
In 1970, George Brown, fourth generation, sold the Breguet premises, along with the brand, to Chaumet, the Paris jewellers. Their manager, Fran?ois Bodet, did much to revive the brand, opening a workshop in Switzerland and concentrating production on the more expensive complications. His major achievement was to express Abraham-Louis Breguet?s styling in wristwatches. But in 1987, the Chaumet brothers, Jacques and Pierre, went ingloriously bankrupt and the Breguet name was sold for USD45 million to Investcorp ? an investment company for Arab sheikhs. When Bodet left in 1992, Breguet went rapidly downhill. After a succession of four managers in as many years, Investcorp appointed Mr J. J. Jacober, Patek Philippe?s business manager, in 1995 to turn around the loss-making brand.
Despite injections of fresh capital and consultants, business went from bad to worse. In the midst of the boom in complicated, high-class horology, and despite a demand for ?the real Breguet,? retailers dumped unsellable Breguet watches at cost price. Communications, stolidly claiming that Abraham-Louis had left nothing new to invent, failed to convince connoisseurs that the company was the true heir to the genius of its founder. Advertising reinforced the notion that the modern Breguet watch was second-rate to the original. Real Breguet experts such as George Daniels or Professor Thomas Engel, who could have contributed their talents to the brand, were sidelined. Abraham-Louis? design, reduced to an obligatory list of ?distinctive signs, lost its simplicity, balance and beauty in a range of clunky ?Marine? models.
Breguet failed to modernise its industrial base ? the Nouvelle L?mania watch factory, which produced less than 10% of Breguet?s movements. The rest were bought in from Jaeger-LeCoultre and Fr?d?ric Piguet. Despite some real watchmaking talent, notably Mr Michel Caspar, still working in the remnants of Victorin Piguet workshops, Breguet missed the opportunity of building the custom-made watches for which the Breguet style of watchmaking is uniquely suited. Instead the company went down-market to introduce the brand to a younger client?le, with a replica of the Type XX retailing at less than CHF7000. Quality problems set in, Breguet lost all credibility and sales stuck at a paltry 4500 watches a year.
Nevertheless, Jacober managed to secure a profitable exit for Investcorp. In September 1999 Mr Hayek, president of the Swatch Group bought the brand for CHF 295 million.
Mr Hayek?s declared intention is to topple Patek Philippe as the world?s most expensive brand. He is investing CHF220 million plus the Swatch Group?s considerable technical resources to increase Breguet?s production to 15,000 pieces a year by 2005.
As a hard-headed industrialist, an engineer, a marketing genius and perhaps as a visionary, Dr Hayek probably embodies the Breguet spirit better than any in the watch business. Last September in Paris he promised to restore the much abused brand as watchmaker to the elite, going up-market with watches that would symbolise the heritage of the European enlightenment. He plans to invest CHF220 million and the considerable technical resources of his Swatch Group to turn Breguet into the ?best and most beautiful of brands.? Within five years he aims to increase annual production to 15,000 watches ? three times the number made in Abraham-Louis? lifetime.
Breguet?s competition is not necessarily Patek Philippe or A. Lange & S?hne, but Breguet itself. Original Breguets have been traded as the gilt-edge watch for more than a century and remain the most liquid investment in watches. It is still possible to get a genuine, though simple, Abraham-Louis Breguet for less than USD100,000, or an important piece with provenance for the price of the top-range Breguets that Dr Hayek plans to introduce. With a real Breguet in the same price category as the top modern watches, Abraham-Louis Breguet maintains a formidable competitive stranglehold over Dr Hayek?s new company.
Dr Hayek?s strategy is to remove as many of the historical Breguets from the market as possible by creating a Breguet museum collection. (Around 5000 pieces are estimated to have been made in Abraham-Louis? time). The company archives play an invaluable role. Jealously guarded at the Place Vend?me store by historian, Mr Emmanuel Breguet (6th generation), the records are indispensable for the identification and appraisal of antique Breguets ? as well as their owners. Dr Hayek?s widely advertised offer of 225 wristwatches to the owners of the oldest Breguets is another means of drawing potential museum pieces out of the woodwork. He has also secured the services of the leading Breguet expert, Mr Jean-Claude Sabrier of Antiquorum auctioneers.
Dr Hayek is following exactly in the footsteps of Mr Philippe Stern of Patek Philippe, whose acquisition of more than 1000 important Pateks for his museum over the past decade has created astronomical auction prices and increased consumers? price tolerance for the brand. Patek Philippe also adds value to its archives, has an Antiquorum expert and recently advertised for the identity of Patek Philippe owners.
Breguet?s new advertising puts Abraham-Louis into the background and concentrates on the elite owners of Breguet watches (Bonaparte, Churchill). Association with literary figures (Pushkin, Stendhal), who mentioned Breguet in their books, forges a cultural affinity with different markets. The Breguet watch is being returned to its original role, as a status symbol for those with nothing to prove.
It will take a certain amount of effrontery and a healthy ego to upstage Abraham-Louis, liberate the brand from its founder and to make watches in homage, not to a bygone watchmaker, but to a discerning and well-informed client?le. Dr Hayek evidently has both.
Abraham-Louis founded the company in Paris 1775 when watchmaking had become a cutting-edge science of enormous strategic and economic importance. John Harrison and John Arnold in England had made the greatest leap forward in precision horology since Christiaan Huygens invented the spiral balance spring in 1675, creating instruments that mapped the world. Abraham-Louis Breguet went on to develop the possibilities of horology in ways that captivated Europe?s ruling elite. His practical inventions such as shock-proofing and automatic winding made the prestige of science accessible to the nobility. He transformed the watch from a gaudy showpiece of mechanical jewellery into an object representing the highest technology of the age, creating a functional Neo-classical aesthetic that remains an exemplar of modern design.
Abraham-Louis Breguet?s mastery of the mysterious technology of time made him the darling of society. His sales book was an aristocratic register of the age. He supplied the courts of Louis XVI, Louis XVIII, the Spanish Bourbons, the Tsar, the kings of Westphalia and Bavaria and Georges III and IV of England. Napoleon ? the master of timing on the battlefield ?, his marshals and family were enthusiastic clients.
In marketing and self-promotion, Abraham-Louis Breguet was second to none, turning his coat to every political wind and employing a network of the most influential people of his turbulent age. B?tancourt, the roving consultant engineer, promoted Breguet from Madrid to St Petersburg; Sommariva, the political free-lance, in Italy; Dupont de Nemours in America. The diplomat?s diplomat, Talleyrand, was always there to ease the way for Breguet in every seat of power. As an enemy alien, Breguet was magically introduced to the English court. With the Bourbon restoration, he was showered with honours and sinecures. When he died, a nation mourned.
(posted per the email request of Watchbore; Watchbore was having access problems this morning to ThePuristS.com, as was I. Please note that by my posting this for Mr. Watchbore, I do not imply that I agree or disagree with his comments in part or in full.
I do, however, unequivocably enjoy Mr. Watchbore's writing style and appreciate his special insights into the deepest, darkest corners of the watch industry.
TM)
