Inside LVMH Watch Week: Execs Sound Off on the Future

In January 2020, LVMH, the world’s largest luxury goods company, held its first dedicated watch week in Dubai. The event, which featured four of the group’s brands—Bulgari, Hublot, TAG Heuer, and Zenith—served as a statement-making counterpoint to Baselworld, the longstanding yet troubled Swiss trade fair where watchmakers had traditionally unveiled their newest timepieces. So successful was the event that in subsequent years, LVMH brought it to Singapore and Miami. 

This year, the group had planned to stage its 2025 watch week in my hometown of Los Angeles, at a hillside villa, by all accounts spectacular. Tragically, two weeks before the festivities were due to get under way, L.A. was devastated by wildfires, forcing LVMH—and its nine timepiece brands, including watch week stalwarts Bulgari, Daniel Roth, Gérald Genta, Hublot, TAG Heuer and Zenith, as well as newcomers Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co. and L’Epée 1839—to make a drastic pivot. 

Which explains why last Monday, Jan. 20—Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, as well as Inauguration Day—I found myself on a flight to frigid New York City. The new epicenter of the two-day affair (not quite a week, but who’s counting?) was Tiffany & Co.’s Landmark Building at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street.

When I arrived for my first set of appointments on the morning of Tuesday, Jan. 21, I rode the elevator to the 8th floor terrace and exhibition space, where it was impossible not to admire the view: To the north, the eye-popping façade of the under-renovation Louis Vuitton flagship, designed to look like a stack of enormous luggage trunks, and to the east, on the snow-covered terrace, a 13-foot-tall animatronic light sculpture featuring Tiffany’s Jean Schlumberger-designed avian icon, Bird on a Rock, illuminated with over 60,000 LED lights. 

For the next several hours, I rotated between product presentations and CEO interviews, beginning with a tour of the Tiffany archives on the 10th floor, where I marveled at the brand’s most recent acquisition: a historic pocket watch purchased by three women as a gesture of thanks to the captain of the passenger ship R.M.S. Carpathia, who saved them along with 700 others when their luxury liner, the Titanic, sank in April 1912 after striking an iceberg.

Later that night, journalists and brand executives mingled at Casa Cruz, a private members’ club on East 61st Street. After cocktails and canapes, we took our assigned seats for dinner, and I found myself seated at a long table in the back of the room, across from Frédéric Arnault, LVMH Watches’ 29-year-old chief executive.

Over dinner, I learned that Frédéric’s father, LVMH founder and CEO Bernard Arnault, the wealthiest person in France and the fifth wealthiest in the world, had attended the Trump inauguration the day before along with his son, Alexandre, and his daughter Delphine. (Indeed, photos of them standing behind Bill and Hillary Clinton were the talk of the town in the days that followed.)

Frédéric and I chatted a bit about L.A. and TAG Heuer’s exciting new Formula 1 sponsorship (wrested away from Rolex, no less), not to mention the highlights of the week’s novelties. But for real insights into the state of the business and the strategies the group’s brands are using to navigate a tougher economic climate in 2025, I went straight to the CEOs.

Many of their remarks were vague and filled with typical management platitudes, but
below are some of the snippets of conversation that caught my attention over two days
of schmoozing with watch executives employed by one of the most powerful groups in
the industry.

Frédéric Arnault, chief executive, LVMH Watches, speaking on Jan. 21 in a welcome address to journalists and brand executives at Casa Cruz:

“So, as you all know, we were supposed to be in L.A. initially. And, of course, all of our thoughts go with the people of L.A. that went through and are still going through a very difficult time. We felt we didn’t want to take a risk of still doing the events there and also of respect to the people in L.A. It was an event that we organized for eight months. We had to reorganize a little bit in two weeks.

“We decided very quickly on New York, and we thought, ‘Okay, we have probably the best monobrand stores in the world with the Landmark and Tiffany was also the No. 1 in terms of sales for the group. The new Louis Vuitton store that you all discover and, of course, the flagship of Bulgari. And the two of them are almost on the same block. And so we’re creating our own watch fair with a magnificent flagship.”

Antoine Pin, chief executive of TAG Heuer, during a press roundtable on Jan. 21:

“I would rather call [the current period] normalization or back to reality than a major crisis. But it’s true that for some brands, it’s probably a wake-up call. And it’s particularly painful when our industry being what it is—that is to say, a very long-term industry—is placing orders for next year. (Right now, we’re buying components for 2026.) If there’s a drop, you’re stuck with pieces that you don’t necessarily need. And so the notion of cash has always been a real question for this industry. For years, we were dealing with low interest rates. Money was not expensive. It’s not the case anymore.”

On the appeal of Formula 1:
“When Netflix brought out ‘Formula 1: Drive to Survive,’ you feel the tensions. You feel the rivalries. You feel the fear. You feel the eagerness. You feel the jealousy. You feel something that looks very, very mechanical and somewhat harsh from a pure technical perspective, and it ends up being a men’s battle. And it’s not just the races. It’s all of the things that are happening between the races that actually turn the championship into a long, long story…. This emotional connection, that’s what we can bring. We can continue to play the role of Netflix in a different perspective.”

On bringing clients to Formula 1:
“You can imagine that with these kinds of things, there are lots of people, lots of stakeholders that are queuing. But you know the beauty is we’ve got 10 years to take everybody. That’s true. Because we don’t have so many seats. So people will have to wait in the queue probably.”

Julien Tornare,Hublot’s new chief executive, during a roundtable press meeting on Jan. 22:

“The purpose of the brand is to inspire people and empower them to acquire a watch that would reinforce their singularity, their personality. Hublot is not a watch that you buy, you put on your wrist, you get on the plane, and you see half the plane wearing the same one. If you want that, there are other brands. You wear any Hublot and it’s also to show that you want to be special. You want to be unique. You want to be different, and you are proudly different.

“Now, the idea is, how do we go to the next step? How do we continue this? Keeping in mind that Hublot cannot be normal. Hublot has to be different, has to be disruptive to exist and to reinforce itself because that’s really the DNA of the brand, since Mr. Crocco.” (Tornare was referring to brand founder Carlo Crocco, who, in 1980, made watchmaking history by producing the first luxury gold watch on a natural rubber strap.)

Benoit de Clerck, chief executive of Zenith, during a one-on-one meeting with Robb Report on Jan. 22:

“There are two types of collectors: One type is like art lovers. They go deep into their purchase and they buy a nice piece of art. And they spend millions on this. And then you have the other type of collector that is in the business to do business. That means that they’re more transactional. But they have time and they have money. I’m not saying one is better than the other, but in my view, there are two types. And when I talk to collectors, the first time I see them, I always try to understand, is he a flipper, an investor, or is he a watch lover? And then the discussion is very different.”

Matthieu Hegi, artistic director of La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton, during a Jan. 22 meeting at Louis Vuitton’s temporary flagship on East 57th Street where he showed off the brand’s newest Tambour wristwatches:

We are focusing on being “state of the art in terms of finishing. We are really going up and up. Our aim now is to have something that really is more and more elegant.”

Michel Navas, co-founder and master watchmaker of La Fabrique Du Temps Louis Vuitton, during a Jan. 22 preview of new Daniel Roth timepieces:

“I love Daniel Roth because the mindset is always as an artist, as a watchmaker, and you can very quickly discover a Daniel Roth because of the shape. It’s a double ellipse case, and it’s beautiful.

“We want [the finishing] to be discreet and, of course, with the utmost respect for high watchmaking, but subtle, very, very delicate. That’s what we want. And if you see the shape of the bridges—the aesthetics mean a lot for us. In terms of the movement, we want it to be about aesthetics.”

Credit: robbreport.com