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What Makes a Great Watch Brand CEO?

Watch brand CEOs must make identity, innovation, customer experience and long-term investment work together. Interviews reveal several approaches, not one universal formula.
Estimate5–6 min Catalogued SpecialistWatchRanker Team
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A great watch brand CEO makes the brand’s identity clear, turns it into relevant products and a welcoming customer experience, and invests patiently in the people and capabilities needed to deliver. Interviews with leaders at Breitling, A. Lange & Söhne, Audemars Piguet and TAG Heuer show different ways to pursue that goal—not a single proven formula or a basis for ranking CEOs.

What should a watch brand CEO be responsible for?

The job is to connect a brand’s promise to decisions customers can see: what watches it makes, how they evolve, how people encounter the brand, and what skills and manufacturing capacity the company builds. In a field where heritage matters, leadership also means choosing what to preserve and where change is necessary.

The examples below are leaders’ own accounts of their strategies. They offer a useful framework for judging the choices a CEO makes, but do not independently prove that a particular strategy succeeds.

How does a CEO make a brand distinctive?

A strong identity gives a company a filter for product, design, communication and retail decisions. It should be recognizable without reducing the brand to a slogan or a single watch.

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Breitling CEO Georges Kern has described moving the brand toward a more mainstream, relaxed sports-chic identity while retaining its aviation roots and associations with sport and craftsmanship. He points to collections including the Navitimer, Chronomat and Avenger as part of that portfolio. His account illustrates the balancing act: broaden the brand’s appeal without erasing what makes it identifiable. CNA Luxury’s 2024 interview with Kern discusses that repositioning.

Jean-Christophe Babin, in an interview about watchmaking’s future, emphasizes reputation, storytelling, distinctive design and iconic models as ways for brands to stand apart. These are his views on competition, not a settled measure of what makes every brand successful. Wallpaper*’s interview with Babin provides his perspective.

How can tradition and innovation work together?

Heritage is most useful when it informs new work rather than preventing it. The challenge is to preserve recognizable craft and design while making products that remain technically and aesthetically relevant.

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Wilhelm Schmid, CEO of A. Lange & Söhne, rejects a strict choice between the two: “Tradition and innovation, for me, is not an ‘either-or’ situation.” He describes retaining traditional hand finishing while introducing new materials and mechanisms, alongside a deliberate, collector-focused product portfolio. That is one company’s approach, not a universal recipe. See Watchype Magazine’s 2023 interview with Schmid.

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TAG Heuer CEO Antoine Pin frames research and development as a continuation of the company’s history of innovation, and says the brand should drive its own direction rather than be led too heavily by the market. His interview also describes product development on a multi-year horizon. WatchPro USA’s January 2026 interview with Pin gives his account.

Why does customer experience belong in the strategy?

Brand identity is not communicated only through a watch or an advertising campaign. Retail access and the quality of a company’s relationship with clients can either support the intended image or undermine it.

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Kern says Breitling designed its boutiques to feel open rather than intimidating: “Everything is open, and that was a deliberate choice.” He also describes the intended emotional tone this way: “We want customers to feel good because Breitling is a feel-good company.” Those remarks explain the purpose behind the retail choice; they are not independent evidence of customer response. CNA Luxury’s interview covers the boutique concept.

Schmid describes A. Lange & Söhne as moving toward closer knowledge of clients and their expectations. For a CEO, that means treating customer understanding as an ongoing input to product and service decisions rather than assuming that a prestigious name alone guarantees a strong relationship. His account appears in Watchype Magazine’s interview.

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What should a CEO invest in for the long term?

Skilled watchmakers, manufacturing flexibility and research capacity take time to build. A leader who wants the brand to adapt must make room for those investments before a new capability is urgently needed.

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Audemars Piguet CEO Ilaria Resta connects adaptability with developing and training watchmakers, and describes planning toward 2040 while investing in manufacturing flexibility. On the length of the training process, she says: “You can’t train a watchmaker in a span of weeks or months.” That is a practical reminder that a skills pipeline cannot be switched on quickly. Her planning horizon and capability choices are company-specific examples, not benchmarks every CEO should copy. See Hodinkee’s interview with Resta.

Schmid likewise describes apprenticeships and further training before skilled workers join production. Pin’s account of long product-development timelines points to a related requirement: companies need research and development capacity that can sustain projects over years, not just react to the next release. These approaches connect a CEO’s long-term plans to the human and technical capabilities required to execute them.

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How should leaders think about market access?

A brand’s ambitions must meet the realities of what customers can afford and how they enter the category. At a Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie event, Jean-Emmanuel Biondi cited Deloitte’s 2025 Swiss Watch Industry Study as reporting that 58% of customers could not pay more than US$1,500–2,000 for a watch, and that 40% of young buyers entered through the secondary market—almost double the corresponding figure for the boomer generation.

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Those figures are reported through the event coverage, which does not provide the full study methodology. They indicate access and channel considerations, but should not be treated as a complete description of every market or buyer. A CEO can use such signals to ask whether the brand’s positioning, customer relationships and routes into ownership make sense for its intended audience. The Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie event report attributes the figures to Deloitte’s 2025 study.

A practical way to assess a watch brand CEO

Rather than ranking leaders on charisma or a single headline decision, look at how consistently their choices connect across the business:

  • Identity: Can you describe what the brand stands for, and do its collections and design choices reinforce that distinction?
  • Product direction: Does innovation build on the brand’s heritage, or does it seem detached from it?
  • Customer relationship: Are retail and client engagement consistent with the experience the brand promises?
  • Capability building: Is the company developing the skills, manufacturing flexibility and R&D its plans require?
  • Time horizon: Can the CEO commit to long-term work while adapting when customer expectations or market conditions change?

The strongest leadership case is not a well-phrased vision on its own. It is a coherent line from identity to product, customer experience and the capabilities that make the strategy possible.

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