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Luxury

Luxury watchmakers wise up and target women’s market with exquisite complications

STORYKim Soo-jin

IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Montblanc, Christophe Claret and Van Cleef & Arpels are offering new watch options for women

For a company that used to proudly promote their watches using the tagline “engineered for men”, IWC Schaffhausen’s booth at this year’s Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie (SIHH) looked rather feminine.

IWC’s newly revived Da Vinci collection highlighted two watches, the Da Vinci Automatic 36 and Da Vinci Automatic Moon Phase 36, both created solely for women.

“The question of ours was never ‘should we go on to [the] female segment?’. The question was always ‘how’,” says outgoing CEO of IWC Schaffhausen, Georges Kern.

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IWC chose to revisit its archives for design inspiration and focused on its campaign’s storytelling to appeal to a female audience while keeping their brand image intact. From the classical circular case shape revived from the 1980s to the new “flower of life” pattern on the casebacks of the women’s only watches, the whole line not just felt more feminine, but it also felt more mature, more put together.
Zhang Zhilin and Karolina Kurkova at IWC booth for the launch for the Da Vinci timepieces at SIHH 2017.
Zhang Zhilin and Karolina Kurkova at IWC booth for the launch for the Da Vinci timepieces at SIHH 2017.

“The storytelling has kind of evolved, but the events are more specific to the female audience, and that’s [us] constantly developing the strategy,” incoming CEO Christoph Grainger-Herr says.

But IWC was hardly the only brand tapping into the women’s market at this year’s SIHH. Brands are increasingly aware of the potential growth in the women’s segment, and are also more sensitive to their women clients’ needs.

“We have a good part of our portfolio now addressed or dedicated to women, and it’s a little bit more than 45 per cent in volume,” says Daniel Riedo, the outgoing CEO of Jaeger-LeCoultre.

While this figure does not include Jaeger-LeCoultre’s haute horlogerie pieces, which are still dominated by men’s watches, the figure is nevertheless still impressive.
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