Industry News – Bucherer Acquires Another US-Based Retailer: Baron & Leeds
In January this year, Europe’s largest watch retailer announced the acquisition of US-based group Tourneau from Green Equity Investors IV LP, an investor group that owned Tourneau for decades. While this represented a first (and major) step in the American strategy of the Swiss retailer, the group didn’t stop there and yesterday, Tourneau’s parent company Bucherer USA announced it has purchased Baron & Leeds, another US retailer.
Editor’s Note: Recently we learned that there are people in the world who buy and wear broken watches. In between all the head shaking, tut-tutting and ‘what’s the watch world coming to’ etc amongst the team, we reached a surprising point. We learned that while none of us falls into this desperate and strange new category, we are, in fact, all very different watch wearers. The daily ritual for us of choosing, preparing and maintaining our watches is — if you’ll pardon the hubris — wildly dissimilar. So different that Dan took it upon himself to classify us, Indiana Jones style. These are the results of his field notes. Perhaps naively, I’ve recently been enlightened that not everyone has the same obsession with watch wearing as I do. Until posing the question around the office, I took it as a given that setting the accurate day/date and time was just something every watch wearer did first thing in the morning. Oh, how wrong I could be! A morning ritual that I once thought was normal, after further investigation, seems to be borderline OCD. Delving further into the weird and wonderful ways other watch wearers choose to wear their timepieces, it seems we have uncovered that there are in fact three archetypal…
It’s a question many of us in the industry get on a regular basis: ‘What makes one watch worth $1000 and another worth more than $100,000?’ To be fair, it’s a legitimate question from those less well versed in the world of watchmaking. At a surface level, and to the untrained eye, a traditional two or three-hand watch delivers the same indication of time, and the same aesthetic proportions regardless of price point, and a simple change from steel to white gold (for example) isn’t nearly enough to justify a jump of more than roughly $20k. The old adage of ‘the devil is in the detail’ couldn’t be more appropriate. Aside from choice of materials — as can be seen with things like the NTPT carbon and sapphire cases from Richard Mille, for example — where much of that retail price gets burned is in man hours, primarily in the delicate and painstaking process of handcrafting and hand-finishing components. If you follow the trials and tribulations of Time+Tide, you have likely heard of Geneva stripes, perlage, anglage, and other finishing techniques, and if you’re the right shade of geeky, you may well have deciphered which technique looks like what, but…
