Geneva's Watch Fair Holds Its Last Standalone Edition. What Is the Mystique of a Market Built for Watch Lovers and the World's Richest People?

How to define a luxury watch, the allure and the obstacles of the Chinese market, and the problems the global watch industry shares.

Luis Plata is 34, a sales representative at Montblanc's Mexico office. Three years ago he came first in a regional watch sales contest, and the prize was a trip to observe and intern at the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie Genève (SIHH), Geneva's international haute horlogerie salon. For a mechanical-watch obsessive, the white pavilion was as thrilling as a first trip to Disneyland.

"Display windows run down both sides of the corridor — the newest pieces from the top brands are one pane of glass away," Plata said, shoveling a spoonful of curry chicken into his mouth. He is always in this much of a hurry during the fair: more than ten hours of work a day, less than an hour for lunch. "And you never know how rich the next customer will be. One year there was a man from the Middle East in a hat studded with jewels, dragging a small case, two bodyguards behind him. He bought the two most expensive watches in the whole pavilion — more than 10 million Swiss francs."

Anna says she is a senior editor at the New York magazine Tourbillon, that she has covered the watch industry for 40 years, and that she has been to SIHH at least ten times. She has a head of red hair, carries a black Hermès Constance Alligator bag, and wears two diamond rings of different sizes on each hand.

"I write for all the brands," she said, her blue eyes on the small tin of caviar in front of her. "You know, not everyone gets to order caviar. Only super VIPs."

Cecia is from North Africa, a channel distributor who has been to SIHH six times. She buys only watches priced above 25,000 Swiss francs, for boutiques, and places most of her annual orders here. This time she brought along a new colleague; the lunch rush left only one free seat, so the newcomer had to stand. Cecia turned to coach her between bites: some brands look alike in their product range but allocate inventory in completely different ways and at completely different speeds; be wary of sales reps who lead with gold and diamonds, and don't overlook performance.

In 1931, the Basel International Watch and Jewellery Show (Baselworld) introduced "the Swiss watch industry" to the world as a single entity for the first time. Ever since, watch fairs have been at the center of how this old industry works. Plata, Anna and Cecia each play one of the three main parts: brands show their newest pieces, wholesalers or private clients place orders, and the media report the excitement.

This is Plata's third year exhibiting. Counting Montblanc, 35 brands were on show. Everything looked much as before: from January 14 to 17, at 8 a.m. every morning, 23,000 people dragging cases boarded shuttle buses at the hotels around the airport and poured into the pavilion. The women were well dressed; most of the men wore the standard European gentleman's outfit — a well-cut suit, a brightly colored tie, leather shoes. What was in the cases depended on who you were: camera gear, brand press kits, or nothing at all (to be filled with stock). Past security, a pale-yellow corridor doubled back on itself and strung the brand pavilions together, so that it was impossible to skip any of them. The public areas, furnished with sofas, dining tables and bars, were always full. People sipped sparkling water and champagne while they made calls, talked to each other, or typed on their laptops. Within one to six months, these new watches would be in boutique counters in major cities around the world.

Strictly speaking, the world has only two top-tier watch fairs: Baselworld, held every March, and the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie in Geneva (SIHH), held every January. Baselworld's history goes back more than 100 years; it is closer to a trade exposition in scale, with products both cheap and expensive. SIHH is less than 30 years old but more upmarket and more private. It began as a private gathering of five Swiss high-end brands — Baume & Mercier, Cartier, Piaget, Gérald Genta and Daniel Roth — that broke away from Baselworld. It has grown steadily since, but has always been invitation-only, with products that generally start no lower than 3,000 euros.

Between 1996 and 2008, Switzerland's Richemont Group, which made its money in tobacco, bought up Vacheron Constantin, Panerai, Jaeger-LeCoultre, IWC Schaffhausen, A. Lange & Söhne, Van Cleef & Arpels and Roger Dubuis, among others, and SIHH gradually turned into a showcase for Richemont's own brands. Over the past three years a few new members have made it more varied. The year Plata first came, nine independent Swiss watchmakers were invited to open a separate zone, Carré des Horlogers, in place of the Ralph Lauren booth, taking the total number of exhibitors to 24. The next year, the Kering-owned brands Girard-Perregaux and Ulysse Nardin joined, and the organizer, the Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie (FHH), added a public day for the first time. In 2018, Hermès joined.

But a bigger change is under way, even if it has yet to touch the daily routines of Plata, Anna or Cecia. Only a month earlier, SIHH and Baselworld announced that from 2020 through 2024 they would synchronize their calendars. SIHH will move to April 26-29, Baselworld to April 30-May 5.

In a statement, Baselworld managing director Michel Loris-Melikoff called the merged calendar "a major breakthrough for the future."

1. Who Is Leaving the Watch Fairs, and Who Is Staying?

The brands Anna "writes for" are leaving the fairs one after another.

After Baselworld closed in 2017, Boucheron, Christian Dior, Ulysse Nardin, Girard-Perregaux, Movado Group and Hermès all pulled out, some of them switching to SIHH.

Last year the number of Baselworld exhibitors fell to 650, half the 2017 figure. Swiss exhibitors alone dropped from 220 in 2017 to 130 in 2018, down 41%. The fair was cut from the usual eight days to six, and revenue fell by 46 million Swiss francs.

Last July, Swatch Group, which had the biggest exhibition budget of all, also announced it was leaving Baselworld. The group owns nearly 20 mid-range to high-end brands, including Breguet, Blancpain, Omega, Longines and Tissot, and had been spending as much as 50 million Swiss francs a year on the fair. It plans to meet retailers separately in Zurich from March 19 to 26 this year.

Between late last year and early this year, the independent watchmaker Richard Mille, Audemars Piguet, and Richemont's Van Cleef & Arpels each announced they were leaving SIHH.

Exhibiting at SIHH is as expensive as Baselworld. According to Huang Junyi, Audemars Piguet's general manager for China, it costs "well over ten million Swiss francs." Audemars Piguet has come to SIHH for 19 straight years, and this will be its last.

"This has nothing to do with cutting the marketing budget. Audemars Piguet's 2018 sales were 1.1 billion Swiss francs, up 10% on the year, seventh among global watch brands. But we shipped only 4,000 pieces, the smallest volume in the top ten," Huang told QDaily. "Headquarters wants to spread that fair money across other markets, or spend it on our own events for media and retailers. It's more efficient and more direct."

The bigger reason is a change in sales channels. Audemars Piguet's own stores account for 40% of its channels, and it wants that share higher, which leaves it less need to find new wholesale partners at a fair. Richard Mille is in a similar position; in earlier interviews it said its retail strategy was shifting toward single-brand boutiques rather than multi-brand retailers.

Independent watchmakers, though, still need an influential platform to amplify them. These brands have traits in common: short histories, small output, high quality at high prices, inventive watchmaking ideas, and a knack for social media. This year their zone sat between Hermès and Greubel Forsey, almost directly opposite the pavilion entrance.

"Personally, I think it's ungrateful to walk out of the fair once you've got stable wholesaler relationships," HYT creative director Francois Nunes told QDaily. Founded in 2012, this independent brand makes only 450 pieces a year and pioneered the idea of telling time with liquid. "The most important thing a fair does is let the industry speak with one voice and bring people from every market into one place."

Ressence was founded in Antwerp, Belgium, in 2010, and specializes in fusing smart-watch elements such as Bluetooth with mechanical watches, aiming at young people who love intricate mechanics but also want a sense of the future. Day to day it relies more on Instagram to reach consumers directly, and has 57,000 followers.

"Frankly, it's hard to persuade people to spend tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of francs on a brand they barely know. But if the famous names draw people here and they happen to see our products and want to learn about them, that's a good start. So we need those well-known traditional brands here," Ressence international brand director Gaëtan Gaye told QDaily.

Broadly, who stays and who leaves comes back to the multichannel strategies of watch brands: established names want to depend less on middlemen and connect directly with consumers, while the direct-to-consumer brands born in the internet era want to use an offline fair to find middlemen and widen their sales channels.

2. Three Challenges for the Swiss Watch Industry: Excess Inventory, Digitization and the Smartwatch

Multichannel strategy is only one of the industry's problems.

Richemont never breaks out individual brand results in its financial reports. At SIHH almost no brand discloses them either, apart from Hermès, Audemars Piguet and H. Moser & Cie — the first is a privately held group, the other two are independent watchmakers. All three said they grew by double digits last year, and Hermès stressed that China was its largest market.

Export figures show the overall trend more clearly. The latest data from the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry shows that after the slump of 2015 and 2016 the industry is recovering. Total Swiss watch exports in 2018 topped 21 billion Swiss francs (about 146.3 billion yuan), up 7% on the year, though still a little short of the record 22.2 billion francs set in 2014.

Asia remains the most important market. In the first 11 months of last year, the industry's three biggest export markets — Hong Kong, the United States and mainland China — grew 21%, 8% and 14% respectively. By price band, expensive watches did best: global exports of watches above 3,000 francs (about 20,000 yuan) grew fastest, by 11%, while exports of mid- and low-end watches under 500 francs fell 15%.

But more of the industry's problems now point inward, rather than at the old doubt that "young people no longer like analogue watches." In a report published last month, Morgan Stanley boiled them down to three: excess inventory, the shift to digital, and the smartwatch.

For Richemont, the smartwatch is not yet urgent. According to Morgan Stanley, it mainly hits watches under 500 francs. "Even in an era dominated by smartwatches, the watch industry's true luxury goods will keep attracting enthusiasts."

A 2017 Deloitte survey of millennials in China, the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy bears this out: given a budget of 5,000 francs, most people would still buy a luxury watch rather than a smartwatch. Chinese consumers chose the luxury watch most often, 78% of them; Americans least often, at 46%.

The harder question is what counts as a "true luxury good."

To stop dealers from dumping stock cheaply, and to prevent the loss of product and brand value that follows when inventory leaks into the gray market, Richemont spent 278 million pounds in 2016 buying back unsold watches from Asian dealers, mostly Cartier watches in Hong Kong. From January to March 2018 it spent another 203 million pounds, this time mainly on its Specialist Watchmakers division (which includes Vacheron Constantin, A. Lange & Söhne and IWC). At the 2018 half-year results meeting, Richemont CFO Burkhart Grund said the group had put a total of $540 million, at wholesale prices, into clearing inventory.

In a BBC interview, Richemont called this an "exceptional measure" for "exceptional times."

Beyond supply-chain and management failures, the root of the inventory glut is the conflict that appeared once watch groups became large corporations: the pursuit of scale and low costs on one side, better craft and brand value on the other. The conflict has always been there, but after years of buildup, China's anti-corruption campaign, weak offline retail worldwide and a change of consumer generations made it erupt as excess stock.

Kalust Zorik, founder of the independent brand Kerbedanz, spent decades consulting for various watch groups before starting his own. "Only three or four brands in all of Switzerland can make their own hairsprings [the elastic component that governs the balance wheel's isochronous swing]; a lot of the parts actually come from different suppliers. To keep costs down, some brands order at least 5,000 cases at a time, then go looking for movements and materials to match, and then work out how to sell them all. Inventory trouble, long production cycles and slow reactions have always existed in this business — hardly anyone discusses it in public," he told QDaily.

Ariel Adams, founder of the watch blog aBlogtoWatch, once compared Lamborghini and Mercedes-Benz: a Lamborghini is not necessarily much better than a Mercedes in performance, and its premium comes mainly from brand value and design. Once watch groups became large corporations, their way of chasing profit was to build watches the way Mercedes mass-produces cars, then wrap them like a Lamborghini and sell them to more people for more money.

Digitization has become the big brands' new way of reaching more consumers; online channels also let them collect consumer data faster and more precisely, which makes inventory easier to manage — though all of that has long been common sense in plenty of other industries. Last May, Richemont bought the remaining shares in its own subsidiary Yoox Net-a-Porter (YNAP), the world's largest luxury e-commerce group. In June it announced the purchase of Watchfinder, a British platform for reselling second-hand high-end watches. In October it signed a strategic agreement with Alibaba to set up a joint venture in China.

Richemont chairman Johann Rupert's verdict: "Not an option, but a serious decision."

Richemont's latest quarterly report shows group sales in the three months to December 31 up 25% on the year, at 3.92 billion euros. Strip out YNAP and Watchfinder, the two e-commerce businesses acquired last year, and growth was only 6%.

3. How Do High-End Watch Brands Find Their Customers?

Hugh Jackman, in a dark blue suit, stood at the podium. This was the best-attended of the dozen or so public talks at SIHH. Nothing he said had anything to do with watchmaking. Most of the time he simply raised his wrist to show the audience a piece from Montblanc's newest collection and described how he felt shooting an ad on a snowy mountain.

IWC parked a Silver Spitfire fighter plane in its exhibition hall and designed the booths — where media examine watches up close and sales reps talk business — to look like the inside of a cockpit. At another talk, two flying enthusiasts sponsored by IWC described their big plan for this summer: flying the Silver Spitfire around the world. They call it "The Longest Flight."

Celebrity endorsement and high-end sports marketing are the two oldest models in the luxury watch business, and they still work. They are considered relatively precise and direct, and good at conjuring a way of life.

The other traditional route is the collaboration, with partners picked to fit each brand's character. Panerai, which grew out of military manufacturing, brought four brand ambassadors this time, all from extreme sports: freediving world champion Guillaume Néry, explorer Mike Horn, the Italian Navy's COMSUBIN commando unit, and the Luna Rossa crew, which will sail in the 36th America's Cup in 2021.

Ulysse Nardin, which stresses a refined and elegant character, hired the erotic comic artist Milo Manara to draw its dials, using ten illustrations to tell the story of the mermaid Manara falling in love with the human girl Nardin.

The more interesting question, though, is how each brand is repositioning its products to find new customers in a weak market.

Richemont sees Baume & Mercier as a key brand for winning younger buyers. At this year's SIHH, Baume & Mercier launched a new perpetual calendar: three subdials for the perpetual calendar functions plus a moon phase, the new in-house Baumatic BM13-1975AC-1 movement, a five-day power reserve — and a price of only 180,000 yuan. Against other Richemont brands, that counts as good value for a new release. Richemont COO Jerome Lambert told Reuters last May that the group would use Baume & Mercier to release more lower-priced watches and concentrate on younger customers.

Three years ago Cyrille Vigneron took over as Cartier's CEO and rewrote the strategy for its watches: stop stressing complications, professionalism and technical prowess, and lean toward "a female clientele and elegant men" — closer to jewelry that happens to tell the time. It seems to have worked. In the three months to December 31, 2018, third-quarter sales at the group's core jewelry division, which includes Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, rose 8% to 1.985 billion euros.

Cartier stayed on that road this year: the number of new pieces at SIHH fell from more than a hundred to just over 70, concentrated on the women's Panthère and Baignoire lines and the men's Santos line. The presenter, in black gloves, rarely mentioned the movement or other performance points; most of the time she was explaining diamond-setting techniques and new bracelet-watch designs.

Piaget looks to be going the same way. CEO Chabi Nouri said in a video interview with WatchAdvisor that the brand launched a well-received 12P watch two years ago to mark the sixth anniversary of its ultra-thin movement. "But that was six years ago, so this year we wanted to show that Piaget also has real craft and tradition in hardstone." Hence the most prominent of the new pieces: "meteorite dials." Piaget even released a Possession piece set with more than 700 diamonds, "a river of diamonds." A brand manager said the collection is Piaget's most popular in China and has "introduced more young consumers to Piaget."

Of all the exhibitors, the one that changed most, and stirred the most argument, was Audemars Piguet. Where other brands mostly added pieces to existing lines, it launched a whole new collection, CODE 11.59, dropping the octagonal Royal Oak dial design it is best known for. The case is rounder, the crystal curved, the lugs openworked and half-welded. A brand manager afterward asked Chinese journalists, a little anxiously, what they thought; some muttered among themselves, "Why give up the most classic design? Now it has no recognizability at all." "We wanted to try to find new customers with the new collection."

Audemars Piguet's global CEO, Francois-Henry Bennahmias, appeared at the end of the launch to host a prize quiz about the collection. He threw a giant dice-shaped microphone into the audience, full of energy, and asked a Chinese journalist who gave his name as Henry what C, O, D, E and 11.59 each stood for. "Challenge, Own, Dare, Evolve," Henry answered, then stalled on the last one. Another journalist, who gave his name as Joe, stood up: "11.59 means 11:59 — one minute later, a whole new day begins."

Bennahmias patted Joe on the shoulder, called him up onstage and handed him a paper bag with a bottle of champagne in it. "I hope you'll all remember this and report it accurately to your Chinese readers. Thank you for your support! And if you don't, I have everyone's address, phone number and room number." He squinted one eye, half joking. Laughter spread through the room and out beyond it.

4. Real Watchmaking Innovation Is Getting Rarer

"The whole industry has been through a long stretch of mergers and consolidation. Big companies bought brands as an investment, but many of those brands had no room left to grow afterward," Ariel Adams said in a BBC interview. "New watches today are nowhere near as exciting as they were 10 years ago. That's not a problem with consumers. It's a problem with the people selling the watches."

Max, founder of the blog WatchMax.net, thinks much the same. "More of the innovation now happens at independent brands, like MB&F and Urwerk, and only a little of it is visible at the traditional brands inside the big groups," he told QDaily. Of the five best SIHH watches Max recommended on Instagram, four came from independents.

A mechanical watch has at least 100 parts, and the movement is its heart. In the 1980s the quartz movement hit mechanical movements hard, and the whole industry fell into a chaos of restructuring and mergers. ETA, bought by Swatch Group, then came to dominate mechanical movement manufacturing, supplying industrially mass-produced movements to many brands.

After a brief stall, mechanical watches came back to the market in the 1990s in a new guise: less about usefulness and accuracy than about intricate craft and the bond between a watch and its owner. That was exactly when Richemont arrived, starting the large acquisitions that turned a tobacco company into a luxury group; and it was exactly when Swatch Group stopped supplying movements to some third parties — either out of a genuine wish to protect the industry by raising the barrier to entry and pushing more brands to develop their own movements, or out of a pursuit of profit, wanting to move from movement supplier to brand owner and capture more of the money.

Since then the watch has been a hybrid of function and art. Every brand has signature details that enthusiasts love to argue about: the octagonal bezel of Audemars Piguet's Royal Oak, Panerai's crown guard, the horizontal Nautilus stripes on Patek Philippe's dials, the distinctive typeface of the IWC dial logo, Girard-Perregaux's tourbillon with three gold bridges.

At SIHH you hear the same vocabulary over and over. Some of it resembles the way the car industry talks about its products; the rest is the kind of keyword only luxury goods bother with. How much the power reserve — how long the watch runs without winding — has improved; automatic or manual winding; whether the movement is made in-house; which complications are offered (perpetual calendar, date, month, day, moon phase, chronograph, multiple time zones, minute repeater); whether the dial is made of aventurine, currently in fashion, or mother-of-pearl; which cutting technique shaped the crystal; what new setting holds the diamonds on the case.

"What watchmakers pursue now isn't just accuracy, it's a more all-round kind of innovation." Vincent Robert used to be a watchmaker and now works as an educator, teaching everyone else along the chain: managers, sales reps, brand managers. That is how he explained the direction of watchmaking innovation to QDaily.

"If you use a new movement, how does the shape of the watch have to change to fit it, so that it is both beautiful and functional? How do you make a watch with several complications thin and light? Is there a new way to express time, and how do you express it through complicated mechanics and still make it easy to read?"

In Switzerland, more and more people are following Robert into watchmaking education. Some worry that traditional watchmaking craft is close to dying out for want of people, while the new generation of consumers has neither basic horological knowledge nor the means or the desire to acquire it. Trouble on both sides, supply and demand, could undermine the future of the global watch market.

In 2017 the British watchmaker Peter Speake-Marin left Speake-Marin, the independent Swiss brand he founded in 2002, and started a website called The Naked Watchmaker, something like a Wikipedia for general watch knowledge. His Speake-Marin brand was also on show this time in SIHH's independent watchmakers' zone.

"The goal of the site is to gradually build up an index. I don't see it as a consumer guide to watches but as a form of education. That way people can look inside the product and understand what they are actually buying. Symmetry of information matters," Speake-Marin said in an interview with The New York Times. He funds the site out of his own pocket and has no support from brands.

Marco Schommer, director of the Watchmakers of Switzerland Training and Educational Program (WOSTEP), made a similar point in the same article. "The new generation of Chinese customers paying for expensive products often don't understand what they are buying, or how good the quality really is. You have a duty to explain to a customer everything that lies behind a watch, so that they know they haven't wasted their money."

5. What Makes the Chinese Market Different

On January 14, Xu Fengli sat below the stage at IWC's "The Longest Flight" talk, fiddling with his phone. He has more than 8 million followers on Weibo, and this was his first invitation to SIHH; he had promised to make and post photos, text or video for every brand. Each time he published something new he looked slightly tense, glancing down again and again at the reposts and likes. One post picked up more than 100 reposts as soon as it went up, and Xu seemed to relax a little, turning to chat with a friend. The next day he would take the stage himself as a featured speaker, on "The Meaning of Online Influence in China."

Chinese celebrities including Hu Ge, Lu Han and Zhang Han came too. They turned up at different hours outside the booths of the brands they endorse, talking with brand directors or playing to the Chinese journalists who rushed over, showing off the watches on their wrists. The photos spread fast among fans on Weibo, tagged #SIHH or #GenevaWatchFair.

Terry von Bibra, Alibaba's general manager for Europe, and Toby Bateman, managing director of Mr Porter, Richemont's e-commerce business, also appeared in the lecture hall. The host warned the audience in advance that they could not discuss the Richemont-Alibaba deal, but were happy to take any question about luxury and digitization and about the Chinese market.

Von Bibra kept explaining Alibaba's reach to the European audience: it can connect to 600 million consumers and more than 100,000 brands, with 70-80% of users on mobile. He also spelled out the entry requirement for Luxury Pavilion: brands must be top-tier.

"Chinese consumers really admire the long traditions of European brands and want to know how a century-old brand pulled it off. Luxury consumers there are also 14 to 20 years younger than in Europe, and they like social media and their phones. In the future China will account for 44% of the global luxury market, and we will help you understand consumers there."

Influencers, celebrities and e-commerce are the three distinctive ingredients of Chinese luxury consumption. They may not help young consumers understand watchmaking or grasp why one watch is worth a fortune, but they do let more brands be heard and seen.

The years of easy money from the gray market are over, but Chinese consumers still buy watches and other luxury goods much as Europe or Japan did twenty or thirty years ago: consumption as a display of social standing, identity or wealth — precisely the comfort zone traditional brands know how to sell into. Morgan Stanley's report last December made this point, and the Deloitte report cited above supports it: forced to choose between a luxury watch and a smartwatch, Chinese millennials picked the luxury watch more often than their peers in the US, the UK or Italy, at 78%.

What cannot be ignored is how thin the soil is for watch culture in China. According to one industry veteran who asked not to be named, a common trait of Chinese watch fans is a love of "bargain hunting" — finding a watch cheap and hoping it appreciates. "For a long time China imported only Rolex, so consumers here had no access to good watches and could only mess about with cheap, coarse ones. As good watches gradually arrived, a lot of people got their knowledge from watch forums — scattered, unsystematic, full of mistakes, rarely checked. Plenty of people see an in-house movement, or a brand the media have been hyping for years, and chase it wildly. That's speculation, not knowing watches."

His example: the independent Swiss brand F.P.Journe (FPJ) got a cold reception in China and pulled its counters in October 2017. In Switzerland FPJ is called the "second Breguet," after the house whose founder, the Swiss master Louis Breguet, invented the tourbillon. "Chinese watch fans don't understand that either. What they know is that FPJ makes very few pieces a year and is hard to find. And once you find one, there aren't many comparable pieces to price it against, so it's no good as an investment."

Which may mean that middle-class buyers without much watch knowledge switch brand loyalties easily as conditions change. One distributor who asked not to be named told QDaily that she used to carry Maurice Lacroix. By early 2018 she found it was not selling as well: "For watches over 1 million yuan, people have become much more careful; Tissot and Longines are actually selling better." So this year she took on several independent watchmakers instead, including HYT and Laurent & Ferrier — the first makes 450 pieces a year, the second only 150. Her reasoning: go after the steadier market of committed watch fans.

Another distributor, Kou Hao, believes the very rich are steadier and more loyal than the middle class. The brands he carries include DeWitt and Kerbedanz, both independent Swiss watchmakers, with even smaller output than HYT or Laurent & Ferrier and higher prices, mostly from tens of thousands to several million francs. "People who can afford a million-yuan watch aren't much affected by what's happening in the wider economy, and their brand loyalty is higher too."

6. What Do Consumers Actually Want?

Kalust Zorik founded Kerbedanz in 2011 and runs the business the old way. It works like a workshop, mostly on commissions, making everything from movements to cases in-house, with a team of only a dozen or so people divided down to the enameler. The enameler does nothing but enamel coating, trained at a specialist school, and can spend five days on a single miniature enamel lizard to decorate a watch.

"I only make money from the 300,000 richest people in the world," Zorik told QDaily. "For them, buying a watch is a pleasure. What you have to work out is how to serve them well."

Making everything in-house is how they do it. Kerbedanz can build a custom watch in 10 days for a client hurrying to a wedding, or spend five months discussing dial designs with a perfectionist Russian client. Zorik opened his laptop to show us a sketch: this client loved rock music and was a Libra. Kerbedanz designed him a logo that reads as both a guitar and a pair of scales, with the client's name on one pan and the Latin meaning of "Libra" on the other.

By his account Kerbedanz turned a profit in its fourth year and has grown every year since, apart from a slightly weaker 2017. Its main markets are Russia and the Middle East, then China, then the US and Europe.

"People always say demand is changing. Much of the time demand hasn't changed at all — only the way of meeting it has," Zorik said.

Max, the founder of WatchMax, thinks age is no barrier to appreciating or buying watches, and neither is the channel. "It's the same for every generation — taste and spending power both change with age."

Max studied computer science for his doctorate. After he graduated, a mentor gave him a watch, which got him interested in the industry, and he went to work at the blog aBlogtoWatch. Six years later he wanted a more balanced way to run a publication — offering opinions, staying alive financially, not leaning too hard on brands for money, not turning into an advertorial machine ("too much watch media has sunk to that," he said) — so he started WatchMax, writing watch criticism from a collector's point of view.

"I didn't understand watches when I was young either. The more you read and the more you see, the better you get at telling good from bad. When you're young you may only afford things under 3,000 euros; once you're a bit more established you can start collecting more expensive pieces." Max is 43 now and has bought many of his watches on eBay. "I've seen every kind of watch at the fairs, so buying online is both good value and convenient for me."

Luis Plata has sold Montblanc watches for three years and doesn't feel the job has got any harder lately. "My trick is reading the customer," he said, scooping up the last of a chocolate mousse with a big spoon. "The super-rich are often paying for their own ego. They don't care what it costs; they just want something rare that nobody else has. What the middle class buys is aspiration — you have to know what they aspire to: a better life, with more culture and more taste."

On this trip Plata sold two watches at nearly 500,000 francs each in two days and finished his sales target early. In four hours he would be on a flight home to Mexico and his family.

He looked down at the Montblanc he has worn for three years — a plain watch with a brown calfskin strap, a white dial and a simple three-hand layout — checked the time, and was satisfied.

(At the interviewees' request, Anna and Cecia are pseudonyms.)

Unless otherwise noted, the cover image and all photographs were taken on site by QDaily. In the wide version of the cover image the watch is a Vacheron Constantin; in the tall version it is the display window of the Richard Mille hall.