Reinvention is the watch word
It may be 100 years since the founding of Concord Watches, but unlike your typical Swiss watch company, there's no barrage of publicity on the brand's glorious past, featuring dusty visuals of ancient craftsmen hard at work over a million tiny components.

"We're not celebrating the anniversary," Concord President Vincent Perriard tells me in a quiet moment at the Emirates Towers Hotel. "Journalists say, 'tell me about the heritage of Concord'. But you know what, there's no tradition. Quite simply, we're completely the opposite of your Vacheron Constantin or Breguet. We want to talk about the future instead, the watches we are building are completely oriented towards the future."

At least he knows what he's battling against with this brand, whose cheapest watch retailed was in the region of $3,000 only a few years ago, when nobody quite knew what it stood for, what with different global markets retailing different product lines, each backed by an independent communications concept.

Today, that access price has been scaled up to $10,000, while the top-end C1 Tourbillon Gravity comes in at a cool $320,000. Concord is now positioned at the very top end of parent company MGI's pyramid of brands, above the luxury brand Ebel, the premium marque Movado and the mass-market fashion labels Juicy Couture, Tommy Hilfiger, Lacoste and Coach.

Swiss-born Perriard, 39, was tasked with helping the brand make that transition when he was appointed to head Concord two years ago, from Brand DNA, a communications firm he founded in New York. "The only thing I was asked was never to lose money. The brand was still profitable at the time – although sales were declining," he says. "That, and not to spend excessively on marketing."

But Concord wasn't exactly a crown jewel when he took it over, which begs the question: why would you want to leave your own successful consultancy firm, with a client roster that included Ermenegildo Zegna, Swatch, Escada and Agnès B, to head a not-so-fantastic brand?

"Because the brand was smelling bad – that's exactly why," he exclaims, talking of how – when he had been international communications director at Audemars Piguet, jetting around the world at 26 – he dreamed of magically reanimating a dormant brand.

"What could I possibly do at a Patek Philippe or a Rolex, which is already doing well? It's better to be visible with something that smelled rotten and turn it into something wow. Concord was one of those sleeping beauties in my mind."

Plus, it was an adventure. "I knew we could fail big time, too. Six months later, people could be laughing at me." Instead, they were marvelling at the audacity of this young marketer, who shook up the fusty watch business with his own style of publicity when he was photographed surrounded by beautiful women for the trade publication Revolution.

To create a brand now seen as avant-garde, he moved the company's New York headquarters back to Switzerland, cherry-picked a new team from leading luxury labels and travelled to key markets in Europe, the US, the Middle East and Asia, where he asked stakeholders to close their eyes and think of Concord. What came to mind, he reports, was always a different set of keywords – or worse, nothing at all. "Ask the same question for Omega, and people answered with definite values: red, James Bond, Cindy Crawford," he says.

The key lay with an older demographic, which remembered when Concord was actually interesting: in 1979, when it unveiled the Delirium, then the thinnest watch in the world at 1.98mm. "At the time, we were known for our engineering and unpredictability. In 2006, we were a little bit of everything all over the place," Perriard analyses. "So we killed everything, almost 90 per cent of our production – except one line here in the Middle East, where we kept the popular Saratoga collection to ensure a smooth transition. And we launched the redesigned C1, which has the most complex watchcase in the world, with 53 components and a carbon appliqué dial in three layers."

But it is the follow-up, the C1 Gravity Tourbillon, created in collaboration with design house BNB, that really got the industry talking at this year's Baselworld, the watch industry's annual parade of new ideas. By taking out the tourbillon – normally placed at the 6 o'clock position – and placing it vertically on the side, the brand got the attention of the entire industry. Considered one of the most challenging of watch mechanisms to make, a tourbillon is a mechanical watch escapement designed to counter the effects of gravity on the accuracy of a timepiece.

Only 100 pieces of the $320,000 watch have been produced, each of which has been pre-sold by its retailers, with deliveries beginning this month. Demand was so fierce, he says, the company was forced to quadruple its initial limited run of 25, by varying the specifications. Why then, I ask, is he even bothering to present it to journalists in Dubai; why talk about a wonderful new watch if no one can buy it?

"We only did it for the marketing," he says straight up, "not for the business – even though we do a lot of business on it, albeit with lower margins. What it does is change perceptions in one second. You can come with all the charts and presentations, and talk about projections and positioning. Or you can show them this watch and say, any other questions? No!"

So you can't walk into Concord's local dealer, Ahmed Seddiqui and Sons, and demand the C1 Tourbillon – at that level of price, he explains, a retailer will only order the watch if he already has a customer.

"Concord's mission is not to do the numbers," he says, answering my query about where it wants to be in the next 100 years. "At MGI, the turnover comes from Hugo Boss and Tommy Hilfiger, which is great, because it gives us the flexibility to develop ultra-luxury products and continue doing crazy things."

But to stay on that high road, Concord needs to invest in the production side of a business that, like luxury cars, is now more about assembling components sourced from a variety of manufacturers into one luxury product rather than building the entire product inhouse. This new direction in watchmaking is best exemplified by the 'new wave' watch architect Richard Mille, who Perriard says has changed the way the business is run.

"Switzerland is overheating with the watch industry," he admits, with the sector seeing a severe shortage of watch movements and dials. Manufacturers are reluctant to increase production because the memory of an industry wide recession has yet to be banished, so output is both limited and perennially late.

Concord hopes to counteract that, first, by setting up a facility to produce watch movements, and also perhaps by purchasing equity in a company that produces dials. "Dials are the second problem. It's like going to a doctor; you need to book an appointment nine months in advance. If we buy into a firm producing dials we can perhaps guarantee priority of delivery," says Perriard.

Meanwhile, the marketing continues apace. While Concord has so far shied away from celebrity associations, it will now travel down that road virally, he lets on. "When you are in the category of a watch costing $20,000, the buyer wants much more than just, oh Cindy Crawford wears that, so cool. That's a mainstream message we don't want to be related to.

"But now we want to put the watches to trendsetters and influential people who are always out and about and will talk up the watches to their friends and connections." The process started with the owners of Toronto's Raptors basketball team, and this former product placement consultant for Swatch says the company is now talking to several actors and Hollywood insiders, finding people who want the watches rather than paying celebrities to endorse them.

"We will also be communicating by SMS and MMS," he adds. "When you're smaller and have a limited budget, you need to be smarter, and by using viral marketing to get our disruptive products out there, we can afford to do it."

But, I've got to ask, isn't it a cliché to be a Swiss national in watchmaking? After all, when you think Switzerland, watchmaking is right up there with chocolates, cheese and banking in the popular lexicon. "I never thought I would be in watches," he smiles, talking of how he started a radio station in his twenties and was organising rock concerts. "But I applied for the communications job at Audemars Piguet because I wanted a change. I need to move on every five years or so. So maybe, in another three years, I'll have done my job at Concord, and be somewhere else. I will need the fresh air."


The great turnaround

Reinventing a luxury brand isn't easy at all – but recent memory has seen several notable turnarounds.

The best approach, of course, is to team a strong designer with a savvy marketing expert, and you'll likely turn your brand around. A case in point is the designer Tom Ford, who with Domenico De Sole on the business side, revitalised Gucci. Once an ageing jet set brand associated with Italian loafers, despite licensing the name to an eye-popping 22,000 products, the label was recreated by the duo as a fashion trendsetter, a positioning created with flashy couture and provocative commercials.

But sometimes design can be enough. The Spanish label Balenciaga was vaulted to the top of the luxury bracket again by Nicholas Ghesquiere. The Belgian boy genius garnered a cult following when he took over the company's ready-to-wear label in 1997, being given overall stewardship of the brand in 2001. With perfect tailoring and an abstract approach to embellishments, he turned it around by smartly referencing its heritage rather than shamelessly copy-pasting its past.

On the other hand, strong marketing can make the difference almost quite as easily. Consider the former raincoat maker Burberry, which, by aiming for a slice of the designer market, became too ubiquitous and 'chavvy' for comfort. (Remember Daniella Westbrook anyone?) It took American chief executive Angela Ahrendts to plot a change of course, both by doing away with some of the brand's more democratic lines and by expanding business so that UK sales account for only 10 per cent. It is now one of the top five luxury goods brands worldwide, with a 25 per cent jump in profits to £196 million (Dh1.4 billion) on the back of a 17 per cent rise in revenue to £995m for the year ending March.

Keith J Fernandez Emirates Business