WatchTime - August 2012

PROFILE
TAG Heuer’s Jean-Christophe Babin
76 WatchTime August 2012
t Jean-Christophe Babin’s first real job, at
Procter & Gamble, one of the rituals was
a pre-dawn trip to a supermarket in suburban
Paris. Outside the store’s warehouse,
he and a battalion of his competitors
stood ready to rush inside as soon as
the warehouse door was unlocked, pick
up boxes of packaged soap, run into the
store and, crouching in the home-products
aisle, frantically place price stickers on as
many packages as possible and place them
on the shelves. The competition, he recalls,
was fierce. “Next to me the guy from Colgate
was trying to sticker his soaps quicker
to fill in the shelf to gain shelf space,” he
says with a laugh.
It was good training for what lay
ahead. Some 15 years later, in 2000, Babin
became CEO of TAG Heuer following the
brand’s acquisition by LVMH, the world’s
largest luxury-goods company. Since then,
he’s been slugging it out with the likes of
Rolex, Omega, Breitling, and an army of
others. In the meantime, he has transformed
TAG Heuer, the fourth biggest
Swiss watch brand, by sharpening its identity
as an innovator in chronographs, integrating
the company vertically, and putting
a new focus on mechanical models.
In April, WatchTime met with Babin at
TAG Heuer’s headquarters in La Chauxde-Fonds.
We found him tanned, rested −
from a two-week vacation trekking in
Nepal with his family – and ready to talk
about his life before, and since, he entered
the watch business.
BABIN, IT’S CLEAR, has always been a
type-A type. He grew up in the town of
Versailles, near Paris, and early on realized
that the way to achieve his number-one
goal – a brilliant career – was to attend a
school known for producing them: the
École des Hautes Études Commerciales
(HEC) in Paris, then as now regarded by
many as the best business school in France
and perhaps in all of Europe.
He wasted no time there. At age 21, in
1980, he graduated with the equivalent of
an MBA (the actual MBA degree did not
yet exist in France).
In those days, military service was
mandatory for men in France. Because
Babin (pronounced “ba BAN”) had attended
one of France’s so-called “grandes
écoles,” elite schools that accept just a
small percentage of applicants (as opposed
to the country’s open-admissions public
universities), he was automatically entitled
to become an officer.
Graduates took an exam to determine
what officer post they would hold: the top
scorers got first dibs on the available jobs.
Babin took the test with 79 others and got
the second-highest grade. Fascinated by
the Navy and by sailing (there were several
naval officers in his family), he chose to
become the aide-de-camp to the inspector
general of the French Navy. The inspector
general happened to be Admiral Philippe
de Gaulle, son of Charles de Gaulle.
De Gaulle’s job was to serve as a kind
of check on the head of the Navy, with
whom he shared equal rank. (France employs
a system of checks and balances
throughout its military in order to ensure
that the heads of all the branches carry out
their orders properly.) Both men reported
directly to France’s defense minister.