6 Women in Watches: Joy and Strain

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/11/fashion/watches-women-piaget.html

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The watch industry is a man’s world. Or is it?

The business’s pantheon ranges from the likes of the 18th-century pioneers Abraham-Louis Breguet and Jean-Marc Vacheron to the contemporary makers François-Paul Journe and Philippe Dufour. And the majority of its products are large-scale timepieces produced for brawny wrists and sold with male-tempting images of Formula One cars, intrepid mountaineers or deep-sea divers.

But untold numbers of women have worked in watchmaking, too.

From its earliest days as a cottage industry to the multinational brands of today, the industry has benefited from female designers, artisans and specialists in movement construction and assembly. “With their smaller hands, women have always done the work that men couldn’t do,” said Anita Porchet, a watch enamel artist.

Yet even now there are no breakdowns of the work force by gender, and little debate about diversity in watch circles.

Still, a few women have won top positions in recent years. Some had family connections, like Nayla Hayek, chairwoman of the Swatch Group and chief executive of Harry Winston, and Caroline Scheufele, co-president of Chopard. Others rose through the ranks, including Richemont’s two female chief executives: Chabi Nouri, who has headed Piaget since 2017, and Catherine Rénier, leading Jaeger-LeCoultre since 2018.

“Each woman has her own story,” the watch specialist Livia Russo said, and “there are many opportunities in the industry open to the women who want to seize them.”

These are six of those tales.

Chairwoman and managing director, Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie, Meyrin, Switzerland

In 1998, Fabienne Lupo wanted to lead the Comité International de la Haute Horlogerie, an industry organization founded seven years earlier by a group of luxury brands including Cartier and Piaget.

“Franco Cologni, who was then in charge of Cartier, told me he was looking for ‘a man with nerves of steel,’” Ms. Lupo said. “I replied, ‘If you want a man, I can’t help you, but I am the woman for the job.’”

As chairwoman and managing director of what now is called the Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie, Ms. Lupo’s duties include organizing the annual Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie, the trade show best known as S.I.H.H., which highlights independent watchmakers.

“The S.I.H.H. will be 30 next year,” Ms. Lupo said. “We have taken what was a B-to-B fair and turned it into a salon with an international aura that is now open to collectors and the public.”

“The glory is not all mine,” she added. “But my responsibilities have grown over years thanks to the founders of the Fondation who have put their trust in me.”

Ms. Lupo, 52, was born in Toulouse, France. With a graduate degree in business, marketing and mathematical modeling, she started her career in advertising before moving into trade-show organization.

When she got the job at the Comité, she moved to Geneva. “At the time, there were few women in visible posts in the watch industry,” she said. “Cartier needed someone with trade show experience who had both entrepreneurial and managerial skills.”

Those skills have been in evidence in recent years, she said, as “the classic trade show model is being challenged — in part because of digital tools and e-commerce, and because some watch brands prefer to control their channels of distribution.”

“As fair organizers, we still play an important role in creating momentum for the brands,” she said. “Also, I believe that together, we are stronger.” That premise will be tested next year as the fair moves from its traditional January dates to April 26 to 29, with the Baselworld fair following April 30 to May 5.

Ms. Lupo said her gender never had an effect on her professional path. “Personally, I have never felt that my career has evolved differently because I am a woman,” she said.

But she does see a shift in women’s roles. “Across this industry, women work in posts less likely to lead to management jobs, but that is changing,” she said. “I am seeing more women in finance, supply chain or production, jobs that can potentially prepare them for management positions.”

Today, Ms. Lupo oversees a team of 35. “My role is to make the team feel both useful and accountable, regardless of gender,” she said. “It’s a job I enjoy as much as I did on Day 1.”

Chief executive, Piaget; Geneva

The luxury giant Richemont owns some of the world’s most famous watch makers, including Vacheron Constantin and IWC Schaffhausen. In 2016 its chairman, Johann Rupert, said he wanted to see “less gray Frenchmen” in top management posts.

The result: The next year, Chabi Nouri became the first female chief executive of a Richemont watchmaker. (The group has had female chief executives at other brands, with Isabelle Guichot at Van Cleef & Arpels from 1999 to 2005 and Marianne Romestain at Lancel since 2014, although Richemont sold the house last year.)

“What has always driven me is the desire to learn and to challenge my own comfort zone,” Ms. Nouri said this summer during a phone interview from Sardinia, where she was host of a brand event. “My experience reflects my personality, skill set and mind-set.”

And her counsel to others? “My advice to women today is to be confident and not apologetic,” she said.

Born in Fribourg, Switzerland, Ms. Nouri, 46, grew up in a family where watches were appreciated but were not a professional concern. “My father had a few watches, and my mother owned a Piaget watch,” she said. “Perhaps that was a sign of things to come.”

She studied law and economics before earning a master’s degree in economics from the University of Stuttgart in Germany. In 1998, she joined Cartier, where she stayed for 11 years, and during that time, completed the graduate gemologist program at the Gemological Institute of America in New York.

“At Cartier, I worked in merchandising, then as head of international retail operations, then as jewelry group manager in charge of developing jewelry collections,” she said. “I moved laterally within the company so I could learn every aspect of the business.”

In 2009, she took a job with British American Tobacco in London as global head of Vogue Cigarettes, to broaden her experience. The “lure of craftsmanship” brought her back to Switzerland where, in 2014, she took a job in marketing and communication at Piaget.

“It was neither a step up or down, but more about me ‘exploring,’” she said. “I was never strictly focused on a ‘vertical’ climb.”

During her time at Piaget, she has focused on emphasizing the house’s craftsmanship heritage and expanding its jewelry segment, with the relaunch of its Possession collection and the creation of such haute jewelry pieces as the Green Aurora cuff, by the marquetry specialist Rose Saneuil, presented early this year as part of the Sunlight Escape collection. Among her other duties, Ms. Nouri said, she has been developing ways to make employee work hours more flexible and to attract millennials who do not want standard 9-to-5 jobs.

Ms. Nouri is not the first woman to have a significant role at Piaget. “In 1874, when Georges-Édouard Piaget founded the company, he did it with his wife, Emma, who was a watchmaker,” Ms. Nouri said. “The same culture continues today at Piaget.”

“Fifty percent of our executive committee and 60 percent of our employees globally are women,” she said. “Also, given that our clients are mostly female, it makes sense for the company’s chief executive to be aligned with its clientele.”

Partner, Bacs & Russo; Geneva

Livia Russo describes herself as an “intensely private” person — which seems like an odd admission from someone who is half of one of the watch industry’s most powerful auction teams.

“Passion has driven me for the past 20 years,” Ms. Russo said during a phone interview from her office in Geneva. “And the thrill of the auction, unearthing fresh-to-the-market property and meeting exceptional people.”

Ms. Russo and her husband, the star auctioneer Aurel Bacs, founded Bacs & Russo in 2013, just before joining forces with the Phillips auction house to run its watch department. Her personal connection with a seller helped secure a rare Patek Philippe single-button chronograph, one of only three made, for the team’s inaugural sale in May 2015. It sold for $4.9 million.

But, to date, the team’s greatest achievement has to be the 2017 sale of the Paul Newman Daytona, a $17.8 million record that still is the highest price paid for a wristwatch.

Ms. Russo, 48, was born in Varese, Italy, near Milan, the only child of an antiques dealer and decorator and a homemaker. “As a teenager, I was fascinated by watches even though watches were not a subject of conversation at home,” she said. “I didn’t find watches, they found me.”

“When I was 14, my father gave me an enameled gold bracelet as a present,” she said. “Could I have a watch instead, I asked. I really wanted a Rolex with a black lacquered dial.”

After high school, Ms. Russo studied law, then languages, before her father suggested that she enroll in an art connoisseurship program at Sotheby’s. In 1998, she was working at Sotheby’s in Milan, where she met Mr. Bacs, then a watch specialist at the house’s Geneva office. In 2000, they joined a private watch sale business that was sold to Phillips within six months. They married in 2000, and the next year they both moved to Christie’s, where Mr. Bacs became global head of watches and Ms. Russo continued working as a specialist until they left to begin their own business.

At Phillips and Christie’s, “I specialized in vintage Patek Philippe and Rolex watches, some early 20th-century pocket watches and modern timepieces,” she said. “My job never really changed.”

But, “I have never seen myself in the shadow of Aurel,” Ms. Russo said. “I have my talents and he has his. He is creative and outgoing. I am more disciplined, structured and analytical.

“Clients come to me for my specific strengths,” she said. “To collectors, what matters is not whether they are dealing with a man or woman, it is the interaction with a professional who has the knowledge and whom they can trust.”

As a partner in the family business, she said, what she enjoys most is her independence. “We can be more proactive and dynamic, and develop multiple projects,” she said. “Also, our daughter’s well-being is hugely important and if she needs me, I drop everything.”

Ms. Russo also has enjoyed doing what she loves — even though the male-dominated world of watch collecting has been a challenge. “For years, as the only woman at collectors’ dinners, I felt like a special guest,” she said. “If the conversation didn’t drift to cars or soccer, I was at ease.

“I have been fortunate to do exactly what I liked and what I was good at,” she said.

Former designer at Rolex and Audemars Piguet; Geneva

In 2016, Jacqueline Dimier briefly stepped out of retirement to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak for women, a model she had imagined in 1976.

“I was probably the only female watch designer in Geneva in those days,” Ms. Dimier said in an interview this summer from her home there. “It is amusing for me now to look back at those days and see myself as a pioneer in watchmaking.”

Ms. Dimier, 81, came to the industry by chance. After high school in Geneva, she studied decorative arts but gave that up to design jewelry for a local retailer — a role, she said, that was “unsufficiently challenging.” She moved on to watches and, with some experience, began proposing designs to Rolex, Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin.

In 1968, she accepted a full-time job as a designer at Rolex. “I developed the Cellini and worked on some spectacular jewelry watches,” she said. “It was also at Rolex that I learned all about technique.”

Seven years later, she joined Audemars Piguet as head of design. At the time, the brand was trying to develop a feminine version of its highly successful men’s Royal Oak, the groundbreaking design by Gerald Genta first presented in 1972. (“Everyone realized that Genta’s design had broken all the rules,” Ms. Dimier said. “Its modernity had turned everything upside down and left us all gasping for air at Baselworld.”)

For Ms. Dimier, the task went beyond just reducing the Royal Oak’s size. Technical modifications had to be made so the model, with its signature octagonal bezel and eight exposed screws, would sit well on a woman’s wrist.

“At first, we produced automatic models for women, but the watch was too thick,” she said. “Then we switched to a quartz movement in a thinner case, and the model became a big success in the 1980s.”

In her 24 years at Audemars Piguet, Ms. Dimier developed two collections a year. “I was always respected at work and given the freedom I needed to design,” she said.

Much of her time, though, was spent at the company factory in Le Brassus, about an hour’s drive north of her family home in Geneva. “I spent more time at work than at home, even when my two kids were young,” she said. “It was a sensitive subject in the family for a long time, and my kids blamed me for not being there.

“In the 1970s,” she said, “it was difficult for women to succeed at everything.”

After retiring from Audemars Piguet in 1999, she continued to work as an independent consultant in the watch industry.

“Looking back, I see that I fell into this magnificent métier by chance,” Ms. Dimier said. “Or maybe I happened to be in the right place at the right time, but I am very proud to have found my place in the watch industry.

“Some women discover things in science,” she said. “Compared to them, my success was modest.”

Enamel artist; Corcelles-le-Jorat, Switzerland

Anita Porchet made a rare public appearance in 2017 to receive a special prize at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, the watch world’s Oscars.

The award, which she shared with Suzanne Rohr, her teacher, was presented by the event’s jury for the women’s exceptional craftsmanship and contributions to the art of enameling. “It was an acknowledgment I never expected,” Ms. Porchet said in a phone interview in June. “I have always tried to do my best in a métier that I love.”

Ms. Porchet, 58, works from home, in the Swiss town of Corcelles-le-Jorat, about an hour’s drive northeast of Geneva. She lives with her husband, a retired doctor.

“Years of working at home have allowed me to be there for my kids,” she said. “Thanks to my husband, who supported the family, I could afford to remain independent and to take risks creatively, which helped me to advance in my work.”

The art of enameling is undergoing a revival today, and Ms. Porchet is widely considered the best in her field. She is known for her particular mastery of the champlevé technique — filling an engraved area with enamel that then is fired and polished — but her expertise extends across the field, including cloisonné, grisaille and miniature painting. “There are no limits to creativity with enamel, only possibilities, just like a painter and a blank canvas,” she said.

Ms. Porchet attended art school in La Chaux-de-Fonds, considered one of the cradles of Swiss watchmaking, and taught painting before coming to enameling. It was a craft she first learned from her godfather; later, she trained with some of the best-known names in enameling, including Elisabeth Juillerat and Ms. Rohr.

“Enameling is a secret métier that one learns by trial and error,” Ms. Porchet said. “Traditionally, only men worked in enameling, but when a craft brings neither prestige nor income, the men disappear and it is the women who preserve it.”

The watch industry generally abandoned enameling 30 years ago, but Ms. Porchet was able to find work producing dials for Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin (including, in 2013, its Métiers d’Art Florilège collection, which included enamel dials of white lily and bird of paradise). Later, she collaborated with other houses, including Jaquet Droz, Hermès, Chanel and Chaumet. (For example, she created a series of dials for Chanel inspired by the Coromandel screens in Coco Chanel’s private apartment in Paris.)

“I have always worked as an outside consultant,” she said. “I am from a generation for whom freedom and creativity are vital.”

That independence, she said, “has allowed me to go further than others in the field, to diversify, take time for research, take risks and develop new paths of creativity.”

Yet, “I have always been pressured to go in-house by brands who wanted to control my work,” she said. “It has been a fight all these years.”

For a decade, Ms. Porchet has attended work-related meetings only when accompanied by a former watch executive, a male friend who helps her to negotiate with brands but whom she declined to name. “A watch executive once told me, ‘You cost me more than my car mechanic,’” she said. “With my friend there, I don’t hear that anymore.”

When it comes to women’s roles, “I believe that there is much work to be done in the watch industry,” she said. “Still, I feel very lucky to be doing a métier that was largely forgotten, and I will continue to do it for the rest of my life.”

Watch designer; L’Isle, Switzerland

With 20 years of experience designing sports watches and complicated timepieces, Magali Métrailler is something of an industry veteran at 42.

She spent the first decade of her professional career at Jaeger-LeCoultre and has spent the next 10 working as an independent designer from her home in L’Isle, a 30-minute drive northwest of Lausanne, Switzerland. Married and with two young children, she starts her workday early and ends by midafternoon.

“I still work full time, but I take 10 weeks off per year,” Ms. Métrailler said in an interview. “As a consultant, I have less contact with others, but more time to be creative.” Her focus is the overall look and functionality of a timepiece; she leaves the design of movements or complications to specialists.

Ms. Métrailler was born in Sion, a small town in southwestern Switzerland. At school, she studied architecture but soon veered toward interior design, then industrial design, specializing in furniture, at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan.

“Furniture design was not technically challenging,” she said. “I realized I preferred watchmaking because of the interaction of talents between the engineer, the movement developer and the designer.”

Her first contact with watches came from her stepfather, a self-employed maker who also sold watches. “Watches are part of my country’s culture,” she said. “But I liked them because they combined aesthetics with technique. So I tried my hand at watchmaking and immediately liked it.”

At Jaeger-LeCoultre, Ms. Métrailler started in jewelry watches but lasted only three months because, as she said, she was “shaking things up” and not working on the tasks she was given. “I am not an anarchist,” she said. “But I knew then that I wanted to do what the watch constructors were doing, and understand the mechanics of why we could or could not do certain things.”

In a decade, Ms. Métrailler worked on nearly every complicated and sport model at Jaeger-LeCoultre, including the Master Compressor, the Amvox and the timepieces that the brand produced in partnership with the English carmaker Aston Martin.

“As a woman facing an engineer, you must first prove that you know how to use a screwdriver,” she said. “For me, ‘no’ has never been an answer. That is why I was transferred from ladies’ jewelry to men’s complications.

“In the design department at Jaeger, we were considered a dream team of three women and one man, because we were young and we brought a mostly feminine touch to the product,” she said.

She also became something of a spokeswoman for Jaeger-LeCoultre because, she said, she “was a passionate communicator and lent a feminine face to the brand.”

In 2010, Ms. Métrailler said, she left her job to have more freedom and “to make family life a priority.”

“I wanted to reinvent myself,” she said. “I have been lucky because work has always come to me.”

Since then, she has worked as an independent consultant for a number of watch brands, including Ball, an American brand now based in La Chaux-de-Fonds. She was behind the design of a limited-edition line that Ball produced with the German carmaker BMW, including the BMW Trekker, introduced at Baselworld in 2015. Since then, she has designed a number of sports models for Ball, including a pilot GMT, a chronograph and divers’ watches.

“Today, I am totally fulfilled professionally because my own talent has served me well,” she said.