Episode Details

Season 2: Episode 5

Contact: RistePodcast@gmail.com

Title:

The Crown Jewels in the Castle — How the Great Houses Were Saved, and What They Paid For It

Description:

The conglomerate episode. In the early 1980s, quartz nearly killed Swisswatchmaking and the giants were the ones dying. This is how Nicolas Hayek refused the funeral and funded the rescue of the most precious mechanical watches on earth with the cheapest plastic one, and what that rescue cost. A tour of the three great houses, Swatch Group, Richemont, and LVMH, and a close look at two jewels locked inside them: Breguet, the source code of the art, and A. Lange & Söhne, bombed, expropriated, erased, and carried back from the dead. The bargain at the center of the modern watch world is simple and a little sad. A brand inside a group buys immortality and pays for it with a little of its wildness. The independents we love are refugees from that same trade.

Keywords:

quartz crisis, swatch group, nicolas hayek, the hayek study, asuag, ssih, omega, longines, tissot, swatch, richemont, johann rupert, cartier, vacheron constantin, jaeger-lecoultre, piaget, iwc, panerai, lvmh, bernard arnault, tag heuer, hublot, zenith, bulgari, breguet, abraham-louis breguet, tourbillon, a. lange & söhne, walter lange, ferdinand adolph lange, glashütte, günter blümlein, lange 1, blancpain, glashütte original, watch conglomerates, luxury watch industry, independent watchmaking, philippe dufour, roger smith, habring, what's on your riste, watchovski, watch podcast, watch collecting, whatsonyourriste

Riste Simnjanovski