WT_2006_03: CARL F. BUCHERER

CARL F. BUCHERER:
A SWISS ICON GOES GLOBAL
Carl F. Bucherer’s
Patravi TravelTec
displays three
time zones.
Why does Switzerland’s most famous jeweler want to become an international watch brand
BY JOE THOMPSON
120 WatchTime June 2006

One of the remarkable developments in
Swiss watchmaking since the turn of the
century is the proliferation of new highend
brands. The boom in sales of Swiss luxury
watches in the 1990s has spawned a Swisswatch
baby boom in the 2000s.
New brands, of course, are by definition unknown.
Think of Greubel Forsey, Villemont,
Vogard, de Witt, de Bethune, Jean Dunand,
and a couple of dozen other fresh brands that
have sprung up like edelweiss around Switzerland’s
Jura Mountain watchmaking region.
One new brand, however, that appeared for
the first time at the 2001 Basel Fair was different.
Its name was hardly obscure; indeed, it is
one of the most famous brand names in
Switzerland, recognized not only by the Swiss
but by generations of visitors to Switzerland
from all over the world.
The name is Bucherer. The new brand was
Carl F. Bucherer, named for the founder of
Bucherer, Switzerland’s biggest and bestknown
retail jeweler.
Bucherer is a Swiss icon. Carl Friedrich
Bucherer and his wife Luise opened their first
jewelry shop in Lucerne in 1888. In the past century-plus,
it has enjoyed unparalleled success
among Swiss jewelry retailers. For legions of
people, a trip to Switzerland would not be complete
without a visit to Bucherer’s flagship store
in Lucerne or to one of 12 other Bucherer shops
around Switzerland. Today, the Bucherer Group,
headed by Carl-Friedrich’s grandson, Jörg G.
Bucherer, is one of Switzerland’s most prominent
retail companies, with 33 stores in Switzerland,
Germany and Austria. Privately owned by
the Bucherer family, Bucherer has a workforce
of 1,200 and total estimated annual revenues of
400 million Swiss francs ($320 million).
Why would Switzerland’s biggest and bestknown
jeweler, which sells more than a dozen
top Swiss watch brands ranging from Audemars
Piguet to Swatch, and which also happens
to be the world’s largest seller of Rolex
watches, want to launch a global watch brand
of its own
It’s a good question. To find out, WatchTime
met recently with executives of Bucherer Montres
S.A. in Lucerne, the watchmaking subsidiary
of the Bucherer Group.
The Bucherer flagship store on Schwanenplatz in Lucerne
Bucherer Plus
The answer is pretty simple: know-how.
Bucherer, it turns out, is not exactly a watchmaking
newbie. The firm has been producing
Bucherer-brand watches in Switzerland for sale
in its stores for nearly 90 years. Bucherer has a
surprisingly rich résumé as a watch producer,
as its impressive company archive, on display
at its manufacturing facility in Lengnau, near
Bienne, attests (see sidebar). At its peak,
Bucherer produced 80,000 watches per year, a
full range of men’s and ladies’ watches designed
to appeal to the diverse tastes of its domestic
and foreign clientele. For one nine-year
stretch in the 1960s and ’70s, Bucherer was
Switzerland’s third-largest producer of chronometer
watches, after Rolex and Omega.
When 10 of Switzerland’s top watch guns
joined forces in the 1960s to pool resources
and develop the world’s first quartz watch
movement, Beta 21, Bucherer was among
them.
Inevitably, Bucherer’s in-house watchmakers
dreamed of seeing their creations go beyond
Bucherer’s network of stores as part of an
international brand. Kurt Allemann, executive
vice president for product at Bucherer Montres,
has been with Bucherer’s watch division
since 1977. About going global with the
Bucherer brand, he says, “We always wanted
to do it.”
That notion became more than a fantasy in
the late 1990s, when the luxury watch market
was booming and the industry was rapidly
June 2006 WatchTime 121

CARL F. BUCHERER
Chairman Jörg G. Bucherer
Founder Carl F. Bucherer
consolidating. Many jewelers watched with
alarm as previously independent brands like
Jaeger-LeCoultre, IWC Schaffhausen, Breguet,
TAG Heuer, Panerai and Zenith, among
others, wound up in the arms of the industry’s
Big Three giant groups (Swatch Group,
Richemont, and LVMH). Some in Bucherer
reckoned the time was right to capitalize on
Bucherer’s expertise as a watch and jewelry
manufacturer and turn the house brand into
a new, independent watch company. Marcel
Hossli, a Bucherer marketing executive, became
a forceful proponent of what came to
be called the Bucherer Plus project. Hossli’s
SWOT analysis indicated that the strengths
and opportunities of a global Bucherer watch
brand far outnumbered the weaknesses and
threats. He argued that Bucherer’s existing
know-how and wide brand recognition
would enable it to build a second strategic
pillar to complement retailing. In 2000,
Bucherer chairman Jörg Bucherer gave the
idea his enthusiastic blessing and the project
was a go.
They selected the Carl F. Bucherer name to
honor the founder and give the watch brand
an identity separate from the Bucherer shops.
To launch it, Bucherer tapped watch expertise
from inside and outside the firm. It restructured
its watch division and set up Bucherer
Montres as a separate subsidiary. As CEO they
brought in Thomas Morf from Maurice Lacroix.
Allemann and Hossli moved from
Bucherer to the new subsidiary as executive
vice president of product and marketing, respectively.
For executive vice president of
sales, Morf hired Jürg Monstein, a colleague
at Maurice Lacroix.
In 2001, the launch year, Bucherer acquired
the watch factory in Lengnau, and showed up
at Basel with its first model, the Patravi Chro-
DATA
CARL F. BUCHERER PATRAVI TRAVELTEC GMT
Manufacturer: Bucherer Montres S.A.,
Lucerne, Switzerland
Reference number: 00.10620.08.63.01(strap),
21(bracelet)
Functions: Hours, minutes, seconds; chronograph
with 12 hour, 30-minute and 1/5-second
indicators; date; GMT with three time zone
indications
Movement: CFB 1901 automatic caliber with an
ETA 2894 base; COSC-certified chronometer; 39
jewels; 42-hour power reserve
Case and band: stainless steel case or rose
gold case with exhibition window on side,
screw-in crown, double-sided non-reflective
sapphire crystal, diameter = 46.6 mm, waterresistance
= 50 meters, calf leather strap with
folding clasp; stainless steel bracelet
Price: $10,400 stainless steel on strap; $10,900
stainless steel on bracelet; $39,500 rose gold on
strap
CEO Thomas Morf
nograph GMT with an unusual movement,
CFB 1901, developed in-house. Patravi is the
firm’s leader line. The name is meant to define
the target audience: high achievers with an independent
streak. Patravi is a Latin word that
translates literally as “I have succeeded.”
Five years on, Morf says, “We are still in the
launch phase.” Nevertheless, he and his team
can already declare “Patravi!” about their first
goal. They have succeeded in transforming
Bucherer’s house brand into a bona fide watch
company. Bucherer Montres has created three
core collections, Patravi for men, Alacria for
women, and a new men’s line Manero, which
debuted at Baselworld 2006 in late March.
The firm expects to produce 12,000 Carl F.
Bucherer watches this year. It is active in a
dozen major global markets, including the
United States of America, with watches priced
from $2,000 to $12,000; limited-edition
pieces cost substantially more. Its strategy is to
carve a niche for itself in the high end of the
Swiss watch market, somewhere below Patek
Philippe and above Omega, Morf says.
In addition, Bucherer Montres produces
30,000 to 40,000 B-Swiss brand watches
each year for the Bucherer stores. B-Swiss is
122 WatchTime June 2006

Assembling watches at the Carl F. Bucherer factory in Lengnau, Switzerland
The new Manero Retrograde marks the debut
of a new Carl F. Bucherer collection.
the successor to the Bucherer brand, which is
being phased out to eliminate any confusion
with the more upscale Carl F. Bucherer line. B-
Swiss is positioned below Carl F. Bucherer;
prices range from SF200 to SF1,000.
Useful complications
The Patravi collection best conveys what Carl
F. Bucherer is about. Patravi consists of men’s
mechanical watches combining so-called
“useful” complications like chronographs,
large dates, annual calendars and additional
time zones. “We wanted to create technical
watches with a more contemporary look,”
Morf says. Take the original model, the Patravi
Chronograph GMT. Its 39-jewel automatic
Caliber CFB 1901 (with an ETA 2894 base)
features a sophisticated dual-time-zone
mechanism with a “quick set” feature. It was
developed by the company in collaboration
with a mechanical movement specialist. It allows
the wearer to use the crown to set the
hour hand independently of the minute hand.
The date at 4 o’clock adjusts automatically as
the hour is set, forwards as well as backwards.
A 24-hour bi-directional bezel serves
as a third time-zone indicator.
The firm followed that piece with a Patravi
Chronograph Big Date (2002) inspired by a
famous Bucherer big date chronograph from
1948 that contained the famous Venus 210
caliber. Carl F. Bucherer subsequently produced
an annual calendar version of the
Chronograph Big Date in 18k gold. The Patravi
Tonneaugraph, introduced in 2004, put
three features into a tonneau-shaped case: a
chronograph, large date, and power-reserve
indicator.
The most complex Patravi yet, the Travel-
Tec GMT, was announced at Baselworld 2005
and comes to market this year. In this watch,
a COSC-certified chronometer, Carl F.
Bucherer has modified its CFB 1901 caliber
with a new patented mechanism that displays
three time zones at once. You set the
local time via the crown, moving the hour
hand an hour at a time. The watch continues
to keep exact time while the time zone is being
set. Should the time change pass midnight,
the date changes automatically backward
and forward. A red central 24-hour
hand and two 24-hour rings on the perimeter
of the dial give you the time in the other two
zones. Using the crown, you set the red hand
to the second time zone, indicated on the
outer ring. You set the inner ring to the third
time zone via the pusher located at 10 o’-
clock. This patented mono-pusher for the
third time zone is a watchmaking first. (A
video showing how the TravelTec operates is
available at www.carl-f-bucherer.com).
When the watch was unveiled last year, it had
a 42 mm. case. Now, though, it has grown to
46.6 mm. They needed the larger case because
of the greater torque required for the
additional mechanism, Morf says. One unusual
feature of the case is an exhibition window
on the side that affords a view of movement.
Production of the watch is limited due
to its complexity; 25 of them will arrive in the
United States in May, Morf says, priced at
$10,400 on a leather strap and $10,900 on a
steel bracelet. A limited-edition rose-gold
version costs $39,500.
124 WatchTime June 2006

CARL F. BUCHERER
BUCHERER’S DEEP WATCH ROOTS
Bucherer is renowned as Switzerland’s
largest watch and jewelry retailer. The 118-
year-old company’s credentials as a watch
manufacturer are less well known. Here are
some of the firm’s watchmaking highlights.
1888: Watchmaker Carl Friedrich Bucherer
and his wife Luise open their first
shop in Lucerne.
1915: Carl F. Bucherer’s son, Ernst, who with
his brother Carl Eduard will eventually
run the business, is appointed official
watchmaker to Germany’s imperial
court in Berlin.
1919: Bucherer launches its first watch collection
for sale in its store under the
name C. Bucherer.
1945: After World War II, many U.S. soldiers
travel to Lucerne before returning to
the United States. Bucherer estimates
that thousands of Bucherer brand
watches were brought to the United
States by returning soldiers, greatly
increasing the brand’s recognition in
America.
1948: Launch of the Bucherer Chronograph
Big Date fitted with the very rare
Venus 210 caliber.
1964: Richard Nixon visits the Bucherer
store in Lucerne and purchases a
Bucherer chronometer watch.
1967: Needing to boost watch production
to meet demand, Bucherer takes over
the Credos watch factory in Nidau, located
in the Jura hills above Bienne.
Credos was a well-known producer
of chronometer watches. The result is
that Bucherer joins the ranks of
Switzerland’s top chronometer watch
producers. Between 1968 and 1976
Bucherer produces more than 15,000
chronometers per year, ranking third
in production after Rolex and Omega.
1969: Bucherer joins a consortium of 10
Swiss watch manufacturers to develop
and produce the first Swiss quartz
watch movement, Beta 21.
1971: Bucherer presents the Archimedes
Super Compressor watch, a large
divers’ watch. Its solid watch case is
water-resistant to 200 meters and its
automatic movement features a
world time mechanism.
1994: Bucherer develops an automatic caliber
with noted Lucerne watchmaker
Jörg Spöring. The caliber has a full
Chronograph Big Date, 1948
calendar function showing the date,
day of the week, month and phase of
the moon, all of which are set by the
crown.
2001: Bucherer launches the Carl F. Bucherer
brand and moves its factory to
larger premises in Lengnau.
Bucherer art déco watch Bucherer Chronometer, 1968
Beyond Patravi
Complementing Patravi is a second men’s line,
the newly launched Manero collection. The
round, tripartite Manero case measures 40
mm. in diameter and is modeled on one of the
old Bucherer models. The debut piece is the
Manero Retrograde, containing the firm’s second
developed-in-house caliber, CFB 1903,
with an ETA base. The watch has four subdials,
two round and two retrograde. It uses retrograde
indicators for the date at 3 o’clock and
42-hour power reserve display at 6 o’clock. A
round subdial at 9 indicates the day of the
week; the one at 12 is a 24-hour, second-timezone
indicator. It comes in steel ($6,300 on a
strap; $6,700 on a bracelet) and rose gold
(around $17,000) versions. Later this year, CFB
plans to unveil a gold Manero Perpetual Calendar
watch, with a novel moon-phase indicator.
The Carl F. Bucherer brand is not only for
men, however. “Bucherer has a strong business
with ladies’ jewelry watches,” Morf says.
To maintain that tradition, CFB launched the
Alacria line of curved rectangular watches
126 WatchTime June 2006

CARL F. BUCHERER
The limited-edition Tribute to Mimi watch contains calibers from the 1920s.
three years ago. The watches, in steel or gold,
some with diamonds and colored gemstones,
come in three sizes, mini, midi and diva. Today,
women’s watches represent 40% of sales.
Finally, there are the limited editions. “A
new brand like us has to make some noise,”
Morf says with a smile. “The Patravi Fritz Brun
was a test. I wanted to find out if we could sell
watches at the $30,000-plus price point.” Patravi
Fritz Brun was the firm’s first limited edition
watch, a gold, COSC-certified, perpetual
calendar chronograph that marked the 125th
anniversary of the birth in Lucerne of the noted
composer Fritz Brun. The watch aced the test.
CFB produced 75 in rose gold ($32,000) and
25 in white gold ($38,000) and sold every one.
On the heels of that success, the company
launched a limited-edition ladies’ watch last
year. Tribute to Mimi is a modern interpretation
of a vintage art déco diamond watch using
original shaped calibers from the 1920s.
The company will make 70 pieces priced at
$53,000. The watch honors Wilhelmina
“Mimi” Bucherer-Heeb, the daughter-in-law
of Carl F. Bucherer. She and her husband, Carl
Eduard Bucherer, had a watch and jewelry
business in Santiago, Chile. In 1927, after a
visit to Switzerland, she was returning to Chile
aboard the Italian steamship Principessa
Mafalda when it sunk off the Chilean coast.
Mimi and 313 others perished. The wreck was
never found. “Among the watches and jewels
Gold Alacria watch with diamonds and
python strap
from Switzerland that were stored in the ship’s
safe,” the company explains, “were also
Mimi’s own watch, one of [Bucherer’s] first
wristwatch models created for women: a diamond-studded
work of art in the art déco
style.”
■
WHEN HANS MET CARL
Rolex founder Hans Wilsdorf (left) with Ernst
Bucherer, son of Carl F. Bucherer.
One of the Bucherer Group’s claims to fame
is that it is the world’s largest seller of Rolex
watches. The two firms are today Switzerland’s
largest luxury watch producer and
largest luxury watch retailer. To a large extent
that is due to a deal made more than 80
years ago by the firms’ founders. Carl F.
Bucherer and Hans Wilsdorf were rugged
individualists, each of whom refused to join
the powerful cartels that dominated
Switzerland’s watch market in the early
20th century. Instead, they defied the cartels
and entered into one of the most successful
collaborations in watch history.
Lucien Trueb, in his book “The World of
Watches” (Ebner Publishing International,
New York, 2005) explains what happened.
“The cooperation began in 1924 when Rolex
refused to join the newly established
Federation of the Swiss Watch Manufacturers
(FH) while Bucherer would not join the
Watch Retailers Federation. Thenceforth,
Bucherer could not buy watches from FH
members, while Rolex could not sell its
watches through member-retailers in
Switzerland. For decades, Rolex was only
available at the Bucherer stores while
Bucherer sold only Rolex and its own
Bucherer watch brand.”
The 1924 agreement, Bucherer says,
“marked the start of an amicable and successful
collaboration lasting to this day.”
128 WatchTime June 2006