INSIDER VIEW: Back to basics
Although the above headline runs the risk of sounding like this letter has come straight from John Major’s 1992 political manifesto — former British Prime Minister, for those who I briefly lost in the opening sentence — the way I apply the phrase to the watch industry has nothing to do with public money for schools and hospitals.
There has been a lot of chit-chat among watch journalists and aficionados alike since Watches and Wonders that the new products on display were, at best, safe and commercially minded; or, at worst, underwhelming.
Maybe they’e right. There are plenty of people with much better eyes for design, especially with historical context, than me, so I’m happy to defer to their better judgement on this front.
But my view is simply that this is no bad thing and is perhaps what the industry needs. A re-set every few years is what enables longevity. Timelessness doesn’t come about because wheels are being reinvented every 12 months.
To draw a crude metaphor, I see it a bit like the Glastonbury music festival in England. It’s one of, if not, the biggest annual musical festivals on the planet, and it makes a truly mind-boggling amount of money, with demand still way outstripping supply, despite enormous ticket price hikes in recent years. And yet, because it’s staged on a farm, the owner insists on a year off every four years to allow the land and grass to recover. In other words, they knowingly turn away tens of millions of pounds to protect the long-term health of the event. Maybe the farmers at the head of the big Swiss watch brands received a similar memo?
The point here isn’t to play into the narrative of doom and gloom that I hear from some quarters. It’s a bit like those who moan about life and the economy at the moment, and seemingly every moment since 2008. Yes, times are hard. Yes, it feels like we’re all working harder for no extra benefit. And yes, European economies especially have been going nowhere for the best part of 20 years. But if you zoom out on the historical graph, we’ve never had it so good. By any metric. Life expectancy, GDP per capita, technological advances, the ability to travel the world, they’re all as good or better than anything we’ve known.
Same with watches. If you remove the Covid bubble from the equation, there is no credible case for claiming that the watch industry is in any type of crisis. Would we all love for China to get back to winning ways? Of course. Would it be welcome if the Middle East wasn’t in the doldrums due to the conflict in Iran? Naturally. But numbers and figures don’t tend to betray emotion. Swiss watch exports last year were their third highest ever, down about 4% from the record year in 2023. For the best watch retailers and watch brands, these are salad days, and their bank balances can vouch for it.
When someone tells me that the 50th anniversary Nautilus was a bit safe, I’ll ask them to show me the sales at the end of the year. People may flag up Swatch Group’s and LVMH’s mediocre recent financial results as two examples that undermine this narrative, but it’s all relative. Swatch Group still makes literally tens of millions of pounds of profit each year, and LVMH is owned by the seventh richest man on the planet. Can someone send me a host of these types of problems please?
So, the point I’m making is actually to just embrace the ‘reset’ and the deep breath before the next plunge, if that even is what we’re in the middle of.
In perceived times of hardship, governments tend to revert ‘back to basics’ — less budget spent on fringe projects, and more ploughed into defence, health systems, and filling potholes etc. There were no new government departments or highway infrastructure projects announced in Geneva, but the roads look better than ever and everything just seems to, well, work. This taxpayer is perfectly happy with that.
This article was first published in the May 2026 edition of Watch Insider magazine.
