Angelo Bonati, who helped build Panerai from a single watch brand to the luxury watchmaker it is today, bids a fond farewell
Bonati made Panerai – through marketing, strategy, distribution and technical expertise – a luxury watchmaker with more than 150 novelties in its armoury
There’s a bit of a mystery surrounding the departure of CEO Angelo Bonati from Officine Panerai, a watch brand that he has become virtually synonymous with. Compagnie Financière Richemont SA, which owns Panerai, has been strangely coy on making an official public announcement on Bonati’s official retirement date, although it seems that the new CEO, Jean-Marc Pontroué, has been in office since last month.
Unlike the other Richemont brands whose CEOs have come and gone, Bonati has been the only CEO that Panerai has known. As such, his name has always been intricately bound to the brand that he helped build from a single watch to the luxury watchmaker it is today with more than 150 novelties in its armoury.
The irony is that Bonati never really started off as a watch man. When he was first approached by Johann Rupert, owner of the Vendome Luxury Group, now known as the Richemont Group, in 1997 to be the sales director of the obscure Italian watchmaker, Bonati had been dealing with sales for lighters and jewellery – and even porcelain for a short stint.
“Those were the main categories of luxury items. Watches were still just instruments used to tell the time. It wasn’t a status symbol at the time,” he says, recalling his first walk down Florence Piazza San Giovanni where the original Panerai boutique stood. “There was just one watch shop, and they showed these enormous watches, and I was asking myself: what is this?”
Inexplicably, however, Bonati took one look at the now-familiar solid shape of the Luminor Marina with its distinctive crown guard and promptly fell in love, and it isn’t a love affair likely to end when he officially steps out of his office for the last time, whenever that may be.
“Everybody said I was crazy: ‘Angelo, what are you doing, you are wearing a clock on your wrist?’,” he says with a laugh. “But we changed the world. After that other brands began making big watches, some even bigger than the Luminor, after they saw how well we were doing.”
When he first took on as sales director and then as CEO two years later, Panerai was little more than a small watchmaking unit producing watches and precision instruments for the Italian navy. There was essentially one watch, and not much of a brand to speak of.
