BRAND IDENTITY: Citizen Watch America’s Jeffrey Cohen on being a tech trailblazer
This year Citizen celebrates the 50th anniversary of its pioneering Eco-Drive technology, but this is just one part of the wider Citizen Group’s approach to constantly innovating and staying ahead of the pack when it comes to technology in watches. Citizen Watch America’s President Jeffrey Cohen has been with the business for almost half a century and sounds more energized and enthused about his brands than ever. He spoke with Watch Insider’s Daniel Malins to talk all things tech.
Watch Insider: People always think about Citizen as being a pioneer in technology in the watch industry. How key does technology continue to be for the brand?
Jeffrey Cohen: Citizen’s mission was always to create watches for all Citizens of the world. It’s always been our mantra and we’re not only the market leader, but we are the market maker. We set the standards rather than follow them. Whether it be retail or on the manufacturing side, we’re always setting the standard for how to drive excellence and sustainability.
Unlike a lot of watch companies, we’re vertically integrated, which is our key differentiator. We’re able to control the aesthetic beauty of all the groundbreaking movement technology but also retain attainable price points at the same time.
2026 marks our 50th anniversary of Eco-Drive, which is a very big deal. This milestone reflects half a century of pushing boundaries. We’ve introduced the new E365 movement. With this movement, once it’s charged, you can put it away for a year, take it out after those 12 months, and it’ll be on time. It’s pretty incredible.
We made the thinnest light-powered watch in the world through Eco-Drive One, which I think you saw a few years ago. We have an upcoming anniversary with a lot of product launches that you’re going to see with Eco-Drive, which will really show the depth and breadth of Citizen’s technology leadership.
Eco-Drive is more in demand today than it ever has been before. Consumers consistently know that’s our point of differentiation. It’s the number one reason consumers buy a Citizen watch. They appreciate the innovation of the movement, keeping batteries out of landfills, and doing something good for the environment has enduring relevance. Then there is the convenience and ease of use of no battery replacements.
WI: You said it’s the 50th anniversary, so how protected is the technology, both legally and from a barriers to entry perspective? Could another company come along and use it?
JC: No, people try to, but we’re so far advanced. There are different ways to get light through dials and things like that, but no one has the expertise that we have. We’re light years ahead of everybody else. There are people that have tried in the industry and have failed.
Citizen Watch Group owns [Swiss movement maker] La Joux-Perret and we’re doing solo watches with them using Japanese technology and Swiss craftsmanship. We’re supplying those to the industry too. So, we are experts in this field, and it’s extraordinary what we’ve accomplished in these 50 years.
WI: Do you feel like the progress you’ve made over the years with titanium creates similar barriers to entry as Eco-Drive?
JC: That is a prime example again of how we are a market maker, not a market leader. This past year was our 55th anniversary of working with titanium and it’s our 25th anniversary of the advanced product we make, which is Super Titanium™. That’s a proprietary material to Citizen and it’s all done in-house. In 1970 we launched our first titanium watch, called the X-8 Chronometer. We helped create and develop expertise and processes, so it really is proprietary technology.
Super Titanium™ takes on a whole different character. It’s not just material, it’s innovation through surface-hardening technology. We have this special coating that goes over the material called Duratect, which is again proprietary to the company, and these finishes are able to offer colors and different types of variations that competitors simply can’t replicate.
We offer 7 colors of Super Titanium™, so we’ve got yellow gold and rose gold tones along with all the silvers and grays, which allows us to match any skin tone. All the design components, dial technologies, and material technologies are coming together with Eco-Drive, which makes it an incredibly exciting technology for us and certainly bespoke, because our competitors are unable to match that combination of things. You can make a light-powered movement, but you can’t necessarily make a beautiful watch with a lot of variety, that appeals to a lot of consumers with incredible finishes at a really fantastic price point in the way that we can.
Eco-Drive is a market maker; Super Titanium™ with Duratect is also a market marker. These are exceptional things. With our Super Titanium™, it’s five times harder and 40% lighter than stainless steel.
The great thing is that many ladies appreciate lighter watches, so by adding this to our ladies’ designs, and with watches becoming smaller, we’re able to have watches that she can’t even feel on the wrist. Women are stacking jewelry and watches today, so Super Titanium™ has really played into our hands for ladies’ watches as well.
There are a lot of benefits, but we’ve been doing this for more than 55 years and the big groups, even on the Swiss side, only just started pushing this a couple of years ago, so we’re way ahead of them.
WI: Focusing on Bulova for a moment, how much of an emphasis is there on constantly innovating on the technology side? And to what extent is Citizen Group tempted to share more of this technology with each other? Or is there a bit of a church and state approach?
JC: Church and state. I took over Citizen Watch America in 2015, right when we launched the Curv, and it was really designed for a different watch wearer. We have guardrails in place – separate marketing, separate product development, separate teams. Carla Wilke as the Chief Marketing Officer, Susan Chandler as the Chief Merchandising Officer, and myself are really the only people in the company that cross over. We innovate movement technology all the time made by the Citizen Group, but we are intentional about matching the right technology with the right brand audience. That is very important because the profiles are different and the profiles have changed a lot in the last few years.
Each brand under our group has distinct strategies that we put in place and the histories and capabilities of the consumers we are serving are important. With Bulova, high precision has always been part of the DNA, going back to the original Accutron. When I started with the company, the management team and I sat in a room and I said “Close your eyes and tell me what you see when you think about Bulova,” and I didn’t get a lot of feedback. So, I decided that the first thing we were going to do was go back to the beginning. With Bulova, whether it be proprietary automatics, proprietary “non-Eco-Drive” movements like Precisionist and Curv, these were all designed as multi-million-dollar investments to develop new innovation in watchmaking modules that are fundamentally different from traditional high-accuracy quartz watches. Precisionist and Curv were breakthroughs. These movements, when paired with distinctive design and heritage, serve a very diverse global audience, whether it be in the UK, or here in the US.
About 60% of our Bulova watches are automatic, but it’s very little with Citizen, less than 20%. Citizen is more about sustainability and Eco-Drive has a very different profile.
So, there are really defined roles, and we make sure that our brand ethos and technologies are very well protected and segmented and communicated differently to the wider marketplace.
You’re going to see a commercial from Citizen that’s going to be breathtaking, which is the new Eco-Drive commercial. I was moved when I saw the commercial because I saw everything we’ve been working on for years finally come together and you couldn’t have that image and emotional connection in any other brand but Citizen. We made sure that these connections and emotions and communications are very brand-specific, and consistent. We see a lot of competitors all over the place, but we’re very clear and very deliberate.
WI: Do you mean that some brands go chasing a fad or a trend, whereas you’re very loyal to your DNA?
JC: We have an audience of watch enthusiasts that we’ve cultivated over the years, and we want to make sure we continue to deliver everything we promised and more. How do we upgrade Eco-Drive? How do we take Super Titanium™ to the next level? How do we top making the thinnest light-powered watch in the world? How do we make Precisionist more accurate than before? With Frederique Constant, how do we continue to make in-house movements at attainable luxury prices that no-one can compete with? Each of the brands has a very special runway, and we stay consistent. We don’t chase, we lead.
We’re seeing that right now in retail. We’re seeing sell-through that is probably double what most brands are getting. The pie hasn’t grown but we’re getting a much bigger piece of the pie and we’re driving market share growth like there’s no tomorrow.
Each brand has a different ladies’ profile too. She is 50% of the market but the Apple Watch came out and everybody forgot about her. We didn’t, and we’re really going after it and being very aggressive. And we haven’t forgotten about young consumers either. We have been consistently talking to, and delivering the right product to, them and they our fastest growing audience.
We’re always going back and making sure that the brands are very different. Even going back in history with Accutron, the new Accutron Spaceview 314’s tuning fork is really reviving the revolutionary tuning fork movement from the 60s. Anything we’re going to do in Accutron is going to be innovation. We did the electrostatic and now we’ve come back to our roots with the 314.
WI: I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for Accutron. I think it was ever since I saw Don Draper in Mad Men talking about it.
JC: Well, it’s very big in the US, and very big in Italy actually. Accutron is something we’re going to continue to evolve and cultivate over the years to come for watch enthusiasts. It’s a fun time with some exciting new releases coming this fall.
WI: With your brands being trailblazers in technology terms, are you mindful of ensuring that the balance remains optimal between technological innovation and simply delivering a beautiful watch that looks great on the wrist?
JC: The number one thing is that we must be authentic. Every single thing that we do, whether it’s the Bulova collaboration with Sinatra, where Bulova was on The Frank Sinatra Show, or the watch we’ve just launched with Shelby, where we had a relationship with Shelby previously, all goes back to where it was born from. Think of the Bulova Lunar Pilot watches with the space missions and how we were involved with NASA and the military over the years. Everything goes back to something real; it’s not just made up or coming from left field and we’re calling it a collaboration. This is real.
WI: Unlike Bulova and Citizen, who sit at a lower price point in the market, Frederique Constant is swimming with a lot of sharks iat its price point. There must be constant pressure for the brand to prove itself horologically, while also offering a difference in technological terms.
JC: FC [Frederique Constant] has a lot of room for growth, and we see this as a very big opportunity for the company. As far as I’m concerned, with all these calibers that are done in-house, we are going to take this market by storm. Right now, everybody went over $5,000 and we’re coming in at $1,000–$5,000. We’re going to take market share from all the brands that moved up in price. You’re going to see more movement development and more horological innovation from FC. It’s a young brand, but we’ve developed 34 in-house calibers so far and assembled them in-house with our Manufacture capabilities. This is really just showing watchmaking strength and expertise.
Overall, it’s a younger consumer we’re going after now. They’re watch connoisseurs who are getting into brands, and we’re going to develop them over time in a very big way. We’re patient people, we want to make sure we do things right, and we have short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals. The ultimate goal is to make this the largest mid-price, accessible Swiss brand in North America and all of the other regions that we manage, and we’ll do it.
WI: So when you say you will target the younger audience, what will this look like?
JC: These are the people that are entering the market for the first time. We do a lot of polling and we’re seeing who’s coming in, who are core customers, and we’re going to be going after them and talking to them in their language. We’re going to be positioned where they are, whether they’re ready to buy or just thinking about the whole purchase journey, and we’re going to develop them at an affordable, attainable luxury price point, where we can continue to excite them and bring new innovation over time. We’re just getting started. This will be a big one for the company.
WI: And do you think connected technology will be a part of that?
JC: No, there will be no connected. This is watchmaking excellence, bringing the best in class at every price within that range we talked about. We’re introducing some things that you’ll see at Watches & Wonders, which are going to be wonderful. We’re very excited.
Frederique Constant was a small company started by ambitious entrepreneurs and now it’s owned by a big group. There are a lot of great people behind it and a lot of innovation that’s being worked on right now to take this thing to a whole different level. So just watch what we’re going to be doing in the next few years. It really is going to be amazing.
WI: We’ve been focusing on technology at brand level, but technology must play a significant role in the running of the company as well. Certain technology presumably can be incorporated into processes and methods, which make for a more automated, slicker operation. What role does technology play at corporate level for you?
JC: That’s a great point because we’re very advanced there. Our foundational belief is leveraging technology, driving innovation, but also creating efficiency. If you have efficiency, then you can really master the other things. Behind the scenes, our teams are capturing and leveraging data insights used throughout the whole organization.
Business value is important to our retail partners and that’s what Citizen Group does. We bring a lot of value to our retail partners, and we’re doing that through efficiencies. We take our core infrastructure of data, people, and business practice, and we try to best position and serve the consumer wherever they are, where they purchase their products, whatever brand they want, and try to deliver a seamless premium experience. That could be Citizen or Frederique Constant, whether you’re a consumer that engages online or whether you’re in-store, or you’re one of our retail partners. Our retailers are our number one objective and I want to make that clear. Retail is our number one channel and that will always continue.
So, we want to make sure we leverage all the data insights from over the years and continue to have this updated all the time across our channels. It’s the integration – the back of house, the data, the consumer facing communications – that really validates all the marketing and brand target demographics, which drives conversation and awareness and, ultimately, the purchase.
WI: How do you work with your retail partners to make sure that you’re both benefiting from the data that’s acquired when a transaction happens?
JC: We strive to provide the best possible experience and partnership we can to our retail partners. We share best practices, guide them on consumer preferences (what’s selling, to whom, where, when) and where they are leaving money on the table based on total sales. We’re not giving any protected personal information to our retail partners, but we’re helping them with trends, and we plan with them every year.
We do have some retail partners that are technologically advanced, so the kind of support they’re wanting from us is more strategic. And then we have others who are asking very specific things, like “What are you seeing sell on your e-commerce? How can I better merchandise online? What are the kinds of things that I need to be thinking about? How can we re-target a customer?” Ultimately our goal as a company is to enable our retail partners, based on their customers and their channels, to sell more of our product.
WI: How important do you consider it to make sure that the experience someone has in-store is reflected in the e-commerce experience? I know they’re two different beasts, but it’s always been disappointing to me when the standards of one experience are very different to the other.
JC: We’re truly omni-channel at this point, so everything is treated equally, whether it be customer service, customer care, availability of product, or anything like that. Our digital flagship, the website, is really used as a point of reference for all your information, sizing, how to use the watches, and things like that. Our flagship stores do the same thing. Again, our primary distribution is wholesale, and everything’s linked now so everybody’s on the same platform as far as content, information, and things that are being pushed out are concerned. It’s available online to all our retailers, so everything is equalized. It took years to get to that point, but now everything is really in an ecosystem that works for everybody. We’re very inclusive and we provide all of these services to everybody that wants to sell our product that’s an authorized distributor.
WI: Where do you think the future of the sub $1,000 market lies? Do you think that those who went in early on smart technology will row back? Are you in the right space, technology-wise?
JC: I’m glad you brought that up, because we want to make smarter watches with smarter technology than is available out there in the marketplace. We’re not looking to be in the electronics business or the gadget business. We’re developing innovation to make watches smarter.
Eco-Drive is a perfect example: the ease of wear; Super Titanium™: lightweight. It’s just being a better, smarter watchmaker that can bring smarter things to the market for timepieces. “Smart” is going to come through modifications of movements and things like that. That’s where we’re focused and we will continue to focus. We’re not going to compete with Google and Apple – that’s not our business. I think there are companies that have done that in the past, doubled down their whole company on smartwatches, and it didn’t work too well.
WI: In the time you’ve worked at Citizen, would you say there’s a single technological innovation that stands out in your mind?
JC: The foundational belief of leveraging technology and driving innovation really gives us a distinct identity of who we are with each of our brands. We’re able to align ourselves with the consumer better than anybody with the proprietary materials and movements and structure we have in place. That really sets us apart. What we do is easy, you know. We bring the product to the market, but the innovation that goes on, and the engineering and the technology, is unbelievable. I’ve been in this business for 45 years, and no one can deliver what this company can deliver. It’s amazing. You take the best-in-class in engineering, and you put that together with making the best product for all the Citizens of the world.
WI: The USA must represent the biggest market for all of your brands. As the President of the US operation, do you feel like you are listened to at HQ level in Japan, in terms of the feedback you can give from your market data? It feels like you and your team could provide some invaluable insights to them.
JC: We’re very transparent here in this market, whether it be on the marketing side, the product development side, or the communication side. We have a fantastic relationship with the head office in every area of our business, and that’s one of the reasons we’re able to bring what we do to the marketplace the way we do and be so successful in our markets. We have dynamic, collaborative conversation with our headquarters and those have continued to evolve over the last decade as our business has grown.
You see a lot of companies run everything from their parent area, like Switzerland or France, but you’re not going to win like that. You need to put people on the ground that are best-in-class, that have the relationships with the customers, that understand the culture of the organization and other organizations of customers and vendors that we deal with, and you put that together with a great relationship with the head office and it works beautifully.
WI: Do you give consideration to what other watch brands may or may not be doing?
JC: We give consideration to what the consumers like and the communities that we build, and things like that. We don’t look at other watch companies, but we do look at general data. We don’t have our head in the sand by any stretch of the imagination, but we’re not looking over our shoulder at any competitors. We’re looking straight ahead and seeing how we develop the best of the best for the next few years. We do a lot of polling, talking to the consumer and what’s getting them excited today.
We’re very much in tune with what’s going on in the market, but if we were to keep looking over our shoulder, we’d never have got to the level of success that we have had in the last few years. We look at white space, we look to see where there’s opportunity, but that’s it. Our business is very strong and our relationships with retailers are very strong, and we have the best team in the industry.
We already have everything lined up for this year and pretty much outlined for the next three years, so we know exactly where we want to go.
