The Fourth Wheel, Issue 96

The dying art of the CEO interview, the GPHG's eco-problem and an Easter special of recommended reading

Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that hasn’t seen a luxury watch in the last seven days. Don’t worry! I’m ok! I’ve just been to the Cotswolds, and despite it being an area of - in parts at least - considerable wealth, and despite my pretending like I belonged in such parts, not once did I see anyone wearing an interesting watch. Not even a Bremont. I do think I saw every single model variant of car produced by Land Rover in the last decade, though (and many from decades earlier). If the residents of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire ever discover that other car companies exist, JLR will be in real trouble…

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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:

Roger Smith on British Watchmaking
Is Parmigiani Up For Sale? Who Would Buy It?
Issue 91: AMA Extended Bonus edition
Where Are All The Risk-Takers?
What Was The Greatest Era Of Chronograph Watchmaking?

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This week’s email is a little different from normal. I’ve been away for a week, and while I do have a couple of stories bubbling away on the back burner, neither of them is ready to be sent out into the world.

We are also in the last two weeks before Watches and Wonders, and while – as per Fourth Wheels passim – there are no quiet weeks any more, there is a general sense that the horological world has taken in its breath and just for the time being, the dam is being held back. The clouds are gathering. The air is thick with anticipation. Choose your metaphor; my point is, all eyes are on Geneva and what will issue forth on April 9^th. Once that happens, we will be swamped with stories about the new releases, and anything that happened prior will be forgotten. So today, I’m going to attend to a few smaller stories from the last week that I think deserve a bit of comment and analysis – although as you’ll see, they do rather coalesce into a common thread.

Next week, I’ll try give you something fun and lighthearted, as well as an idea of what to expect from TFW during the fair itself; I’ll be there Monday-Friday, meeting with 50+ brands and trying to make sense of it all.

Before all that, let me say thank you for the feedback to last week’s newsletter, which (if you haven’t read) picked up the Only Watch story, following the release of audited accounts and two carefully staged interviews with friendly press from Luc and Tess Pettavino. It was the most-read issue of The Fourth Wheel to date, and I infer from that that you rather like it when I get stuck into these kind of stories. Which is good, because I don’t intend to stop.

The Fourth Wheel, Issue 95

As a member of the GPHG Academy, I get occasional email updates about the ‘Oscars of the Watch World’¹ and one such popped into my inbox this week. It detailed a few changes to the awards (they can’t stop tinkering, can they, ever). Among them are some price bracket changes to the Challenge (watches up to CHF 3,000, previously under CHF 2,000) and Petite Aiguille (watches from CHF 3,000-10,000; previously CHF 2,000-8,000. That’s inflation for you.), a year off for the ‘Best Clock’ award and a new category for ‘Best Time Only’ watch, which should hopefully help keep the right watches in the right categories, although I won’t hold my breath. Most interesting was the announcement that the award for Innovation is changing to become a prize for ‘Eco-Innovation’. Sounds good doesn’t it – the premier awards finally recognising one of the biggest issues facing the industry? The email reads:

“The Innovation Prize will give way to the Eco-Innovation Prize which will be awarded to one of the 90 competing timepieces featuring watchmaking developments placing particular emphasis on sustainability and traceability.”

There are some problems, however. The award – like the Innovation prize before it – is not its own category with a longlist and a shortlist. It is given to one of the 90 shortlisted watches across all other categories, which means there is no mechanism for manufacturers or Academy members to submit watches on the basis of sustainability or traceability. You just have to hope that one of the other watches, submitted for other reasons, also happens to embody these ideals. More than one, ideally. The other problem is that unlike most GPHG awards, this one can’t be judged by looking at the watch with a loupe; the jury will have to have information submitted by the brand and, ideally, be able to independently verify that information. Of course, that last bit just isn’t going to happen. And look, I’m not saying watch brands would lie about their eco-credentials just to get an award they could crow about for an entire year… but what kind of credible awards body bases its decision-making on ‘because they told us so?’ I would also suggest the jury should contain at least one person with some professional experience in the field.

It's worth noting that sustainability and traceability were already potential criteria for the Innovation prize – the jury had just never been able to give the award to a watch on those grounds, I think almost certainly because none nominated really came close. See the definition from 2023 here:

“2.17.  Innovation Prize

This prize rewards the best competing timepiece offering an innovative vision of time measurement (in terms of technique, design, display, materials, etc.) and/or opening up new development pathways for the watchmaking art (sustainability, traceability, ethics, etc.). This prize is discretionary and the Jury will decide whether there are grounds for awarding it in 2023.”

At the time of writing the rules for this year’s awards have yet to be published. Maybe the award will still be discretionary, although it would be a bit embarrassing to announce it and then not be able to find a single watch that deserves the prize.

Via my Substack compadre ScrewDownCrown², I learnt that Bloomberg’s Andy Hoffman scored an interview with Tudor CEO Eric Pirson recently. Hats off to Andy; Rolex executives do not, as a rule, do press, and although Tudor often does what Rolex won’t this is one rule that had held. I say hats off to Andy, and it is an achievement to penetrate the layers of PR management around Pirson, but it would be an even greater achievement if he could have got him to say anything interesting. I’ve been musing on the subject of the CEO interview for a few weeks now, and Pirson’s quotes confirm the impression that had been forming already: there is really no point to them.

The most recently-announced Tudor: a Black Bay Chrono ‘Pink’.

Is that a bit harsh? Maybe, but there is a strong consensus among my fellow journalists that it is becoming harder and harder to get the top brass to produce anything of note. Or, in many cases, to agree to say anything at all.

To an extent, it was ever thus. Most chief executives at large conglomerates or major mainstream brands, whether they are answerable to corporate higher-ups, shareholders or family owners, have to be quite careful about what they say. Or at least, they choose to be careful, wary of rocking the boat. But it seems to me – and again, I stress, I know I am not alone here – that for all this industry talks of openness, the idea of engaging with outside interrogation of any kind is less and less common.

I’m not necessarily talking about the kind of probing, intense questioning that marks out the best political interviewers. Speaking to the press isn’t a combative experience, although if you are defensive, secretive and dull it makes us much more eager to push and press and harangue for a straight answer. A good CEO interview should also be a chance for the brand’s figurehead to convey, hopefully with energy and verve, his or her vision for the company and even more importantly (for that kind of practised jargon can be handled in a press release) show that he or she has a clue, a personality, a sense of humour or maybe even all three.