THE MECHANICS OF TIME

Disobedience is central to Zenith. In fact, it is in many ways what saved the brand. Back in the 1970s when employees at Zenith were told that they were to destroy or sell all the tools, components and machines used to make the El Primero mechanical movement, one of them – Charles Vermot – disobeyed. He hid all the vital components in an attic in the watchmaker’s manufacture in Le Locle, along with detailed notes on how to reassemble the machines. A decade later when the brand decided to revive the El Primero – a robust automatic chronograph movement – it was Vermot’s hidden stash that the company fell back on to revive the calibre.

Today, the brand is based out of that same manufacture in Le Locle in Switzerland – which also happens to be the very same manufacture where it all began for the watchmaker in 1865. e El Primero is still the hero calibre for Zenith. Last year it debuted a rose gold Chronomaster Sport with an El Primero 3600 movement that is accurate to 1/10th of a second. is year, at the LVMH Watch Week, Zenith turned its attention to its Defy collection. It rolled out the new Defy Extreme Glacier, Defy Skyline and Defy Skyline Skeleton. “ e Defy is a key collection for us, a er the Chronomaster. It started with the Defy 21 which had a chronograph that was accurate up to 1/100th of a second. Now, we have the Defy Extreme, the Defy Skyline and the Defy Skeleton which are very much an expression of modern watchmaking,” says Julien Tornare, CEO of Zenith.

Tornare and has since then been streamlining its production they buy vintage watches. If people want classic [design], they buy classic watches. But most people watch. at 21st-century design is very much re ected in the new Zenith Pilot collection that was launched at Watches and Wonders last month. Today, Zenith is the only watchmaker in the world that is allowed to use the word ‘Pilot’ on the dial. “Our founders, Georges-Favre Jacot, patented the word in French in 1888, and in English in 1904. Since then, the patent has been renewed and the word Pilot [on the dial] can only be used by Zenith.

Tornare took over as CEO of the brand in 2017 and has since then been streamlining its production and operations. He has nearly halved the number of references to 110 from around 200 that were in the collection at the time he started with Zenith six years ago. e design aesthetic of the watches has also been repositioned to be mostly forwardlooking, rather than one that is stuck in a draining vortex of nostalgia. “If people want vintage [design], they buy vintage watches. If people want classic [design], they buy classic watches. But most people today want to buy a 21st-century watch. ey don’t want to buy a watch that their father or grandfather would wear, but one that belongs to the current day. Zenith expresses that 21st-century modern, contemporary and dynamic [design],” notes Tornare.

“Pilot has been a very important line for us. We’ve formerly had a vintage look to it, but we now have a much more contemporary watch. From a technical point of view, we have an instantaneous big date which updates very quickly,” says Tornare. The Pilot Big Date Flyback watch revealed at Watches and Wonders has an automatic El Primero 3652 column-wheel chronograph calibre where the date change jumps in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it 0.007 seconds. The 42.5mm timepiece comes in options of either a classic stainless steel or a slick black ceramic case version.

Tornare explains that the positioning of the brand’s pilot watches is adventure, rather than combat. It did not want the watches to be a nod to fighter jets or even commercial aeroplanes. “[Our pilot’s watches] are more about the emotion and the sense of adventure. If you think about Louis Blériot, when he crossed the English Channel with a Zenith watch, it was about a sense of adventure more than anything else,” says Tornare of the aviation pioneer who was the first to successfully fly across the Channel back in 1909. The current range of pilot watches just released at Watches and Wonders are not limited editions, but the CEO sheds light on what to expect from the collection. “We already have plans for a limited-edition and also plans to introduce some complications to the pilot’s watches that are linked to the world of aviation. For now, we have a big date and flyback mechanism, but you can imagine a split seconds, dual time, and world time making its way to the collection one day. We’re not going to put functions that aren’t relevant to aviation such as tourbillons or minute repeaters [in the pilot’s collection] as those won’t make sense.”

Zenith currently produces around 24,000-25,000 watches annually. All Zenith watches are not only purely mechanical pieces, but they also make use of only in-house Zenith-produced movements. “If I want to produce more [watches], I need to get more spare parts and I need to get more watchmakers on board to raise the production levels – and this is not easy. If we grow [our production numbers] by 10-12 per cent in a year, it will be enough. At some point though, there will be a ceiling. I don’t know where that ceiling would be, but there is always a ceiling if you want to maintain the same levels of quality.”

ABOVE: Zenith Defy Skyline Boutique Edition

TOP: Zenith’s new boutique in Riyadh

OPPOSITE PAGE: Zenith Defy Extreme Glacier

Here, in the Middle East, Zenith has been pushing forward with opening its own boutiques. It took over the management of its boutique at Dubai Mall – where we met Tornare for this interview – and he says that there are plans for another boutique in the UAE. It also formally opened its boutique in Riyadh this year. “In Qatar and Kuwait, we have partners, but we don’t have our own boutiques there. But one day, we will. We have many requests coming in for boutiques, but I cannot go too fast. I cannot do too many boutiques at the same time and in the same region since we’re also receiving requests from Europe, America and Asia. When I came on board, we had only around five boutiques worldwide, today we have 35. Also, at the time I joined Zenith, we had mostly wholesale across 850 doors worldwide. We would have shrunk down that number to 550 by the end of this year to give our existing partners more watches and an increased market share.”

As part of the LVMH Group, Zenith’s siblings include TAG Heuer, Bulgari and Hublot – each of which has extensively developed their individual watchmaking capabilities. “We collaborate and we share information, but each brand at LVMH has a lot of independence and has to work for itself, with its own set of strategies. We are friends, but we are also competitors and that’s something I believe is very positive,” observes Tornare.

As Tornare defines the evolution of the brand, he’s also opening up new frontiers for it. The watchmaker became the founding partner and official timekeeper of Extreme E, the all-electric SUV race. “Car and watch brands have always been partnering with each other. But I didn’t want to do another regular car-watch deal. I wanted to find different angles. That’s what we found with Extreme E. We go to extreme locations in Saudi Arabia, Scotland, Iceland, and Senegal where the teams undertake races in extreme conditions – so it’s a fantastic concept.”

Another front that Tornare is driving is Zenith’s e-commerce model. Pre-Covid, it didn’t have any of its own e-commerce operations. Today, e-commerce accounts for approximately 5-6 per cent of its global business and the aim is to further scale that figure. Another strategy that Tornare is pushing ahead with is to ensure the authenticity of its watches in the vintage market. The Zenith Icons project is one such endeavour where Zenith restores specific vintage watches that are important from its history such as the A386 that had El Primero movements from the calibre’s birth year of 1969, or the A384 from 1971 and the A385 from the following year. “When you buy vintage watches, you never really know if it’s the real one or if it’s functioning well or even the actual maintenance history of the watch. What we do with the Zenith Icons programme is that we work on buying back certain iconic watches from our history from the secondary market, restore them, add our certification of authenticity to it and sell it with a three-year warranty.”

Tornare reveals that after having focused on its Defy, Chronomaster and Pilot collection over the last few months, it is the watchmaker’s Elite collection which will be the next to be overhauled. “It’s very important for us to get more people to understand what the brand is all about. We don’t want to be show-offs – we don’t want to use the red-carpet effect. Zenith is discreet, it is serious.” And he might as well add another qualifier that has long served it well: disobedient.