When it comes to ambassadors, Hublot’s CEO Ricardo Guadalupe chooses the best in their fields. But, as he tells Tracey Llewellyn, when it comes to client engagement, he believes in going local.
WATCHPRO: Hublot’s retailer network is expanding in the UK. Is this because the customer base is shifting and the product now appealing to a wider audience?
RICARDO GUADALUPE: What we have done in the UK is to take things more regional versus national or international. Pre-pandemic, we were more focused on London, with Harrods, Selfridges and our Boutique on New Bond Street.
But the big lesson we learnt during lock down was that when unexpected events force the big buying markets like China to stay at home, you become very exposed to a fall in sales if you do not have a solid localised strategy.
During this time, we saw that some countries — and the UK in particular — had strong potential regionally.
So that’s why we decided to expand across the country and into different stores — Watches of Switzerland group has been especially good, enabling us to be stocked in Mappin & Webb and Goldsmiths alongside Watches of Switzerland, taking us to new cities like Birmingham, Sheffield, Reading and Bristol.
We have expanded with our partners Rox and Berry’s outside of London, and started working with a new partner, Beaverbrooks. All have been a great support on this journey.
We are booming in the UK in 2022 compared to last year. I think we are almost 50% up.
We have seen in the past year that we can have success outside of London. Of course, it takes time to build a following because Hublot is in a high price segment and we must focus on where our potential consumers are.
Manchester, for example, has a base of wealthy people that can afford to buy a Hublot watch. It is all new, so it’s a case of trying things out. And it is working — we are actually booming in the UK in 2022 compared to last year. I think we are almost 50% up.
WATCHPRO: And is this a whole new client base for the brand with a totally fresh demographic?
RICARDO GUADALUPE: I would say the demographic for us has always been more or less the same. Our buyers tend to be successful people — entrepreneurs that know their own minds.
It’s really ‘new money’, you know? It’s not people that have had family wealth for centuries. It’s people that have made their own money — the guy who has created restaurants, or the guy working in real estate or who has launched an innovation in industry.
It’s always more or less the same profile: young, successful, entrepreneurial.
WATCHPRO: Does this idea of speaking to markets directly mean that there is more need and potential for smaller local watch shows and exhibitions such as Geneva Watch Days, Watch Time New York and WATCHPRO Salon?
RICARDO GUADALUPE: Yes, it’s important to be close to the markets and understand their specific needs and cultures. This is also part of the reason we launch location-exclusive novelties because we understand our local clients and we are able to give them the best experience possible.
Watch fairs are a great way for companies to communicate and, as a brand we prefer to work with local events because we have more interaction with potential clients and of course our network of boutiques. It’s more fulfilling for us to set our launches on our own terms and combine this with unique events or experiences.
WATCHPRO: We certainly saw an upturn in watch buying in the UK during the pandemic. Now that we’re potentially heading into a recession, are you expecting to see that tail off?
RICARDO GUADALUPE: I would say that in general, it is the younger generations — not only in the UK, but in the US, China and all over the world — that we have seen come into the watch-buying market.
For our industry, this is very positive and I have to say that in more than 30 years in this industry, I have never seen the demand for luxury watches so high. Of course, all the big brands have experienced this upturn — as you know, even the biggest brand in our industry is facing problems of stock at point of sale.
So, I would say that the demand is so high that maybe a correction has to happen, but I think it will still remain positive.
Don’t forget that Europe has done incredible business over the summer and we have not seen Chinese visitors return yet. And the Chinese WILL start to travel again — maybe not this year, but possibly in 2023 — and they will be buying again, so I think that we can all be confident for the future.
Going forward, though, we will always need to be mindful about what is going on. Nobody anticipated the health crisis of 2020, or the war in Ukraine, which is also difficult for us. But nevertheless, we are confident.
WATCHPRO: Do you think certain brands were concentrating too much on China and Russia and is the practise of putting all your eggs in one basket over?
RICARDO GUADALUPE: I think that people have learned a hard lesson and we won’t go back to working like that.
China is undoubtedly the biggest market for luxury watches and for some brands it represented more than 50% of their sales.
For us it is quite well balanced with China representing about 15-17% of our sales and Russia contributing to maybe about 2% — although now it’s almost zero.
Of course, everything has had an impact, but as we are well represented in the Middle East, Japan, Europe and the US, our numbers are still very good. We apply the same local strategy that we have in the UK to the rest of the world.
So, if there is a country where we have huge potential in certain areas — like in the US where New York, Texas, Miami and Los Angeles are major markets — we work more there. Germany is another example where there is a lot of potential for growth.
WATCHPRO: You describe your customers as a ‘new wave’ of watch buyers, and Hublot itself is often described as a ‘new’ brand. But now you are more than 40 years old, so you have a heritage to talk about too?
RICARDO GUADALUPE: We have seen a strong comeback from vintage watches over the past decade or so and more and more vintage-style watch launches. But of course, being a young brand, we don’t really have any vintage watches that are collectible.
Our 1980s watches tend to be classic, quartz pieces. So, this is where our youth is a little bit of a weakness for us.
However, at the same time it forces us to be a leader in innovation. And this year, we combined our technical developments with some vintage touches in our novelties. But we don’t want to just do replicas, we want to be inspired by the past and try to reinvent it for the future.
So, we’ve revisited yellow gold, and also smaller sizes – a 42mm for men and a 33mm for ladies.
WATCHPRO: There is a lot of interest in the early 1980s models, would you consider a straight reissue?
RICARDO GUADALUPE: To just copy something from the past is not the right way for Hublot. To be inspired by the past, yes. But when we come with a new watch that is truly an homage to the 1980s’ version, it will be slightly different to the original.
We will certainly use a mechanical movement and we will try to make it an extra-slim watch. It may have a similar case, but everything will be reimagined.
This is actually something we’re working on. We will try and go smaller — 38mm for men and 32mm for ladies, but going forward there will be less quartz movements at Hublot.
WATCHPRO: We talked about the new customer base and Hublot has embraced the entire Gen-Z universe in areas such as Bitcoin. In light of the recent crypto backlash, was this a mistake?
RICARDO GUADALUPE: We want to be leaders in what’s going on in the world and we wanted to embrace the digital world and cryptocurrency as we know that many younger consumers come from this world of crypto and technology.
We made a watch linked to Bitcoin three or four years ago and it was only available to buy with Bitcoin — it sold out very quickly.
Today we offer customers the opportunity to buy watches online with cryptocurrency — Bitcoin or Ethereum. Yes, the value has gone down recently, but in this kind of domain you have ups and downs.
It may not be great right now, and I’m not a specialist in the field, but I am sure it will come back because I think the cryptocurrency is the future.
I believe that the traditional banking system will eventually come to crypto, maybe not tomorrow, but definitely in a few years.
WATCHPRO: So, as a young brand with a young client base, do you feel Hublot is in a better position to engage virtually?
RICARDO GUADALUPE: I believe strongly in the future of crypto, but also in the world of NFTs and the metaverse. We first dabbled in NFTs with our last watch collaboration with artist Takashi Murakami, where buyers receiving a physical watch as well as an NFT representing the design of the watch.
But, of course, it’s a learning process and to have success in any new arena is not easy. We will have a second action linked to NFTs next year, another Murakami partnership.
Of course, the idea with an NFT is to create a buzz and I think you have to come with a rare work — maybe just one or two examples — to be able to offer an entity that will increase by hundreds of thousands of dollars in the future.
For the metaverse, we are also looking at projects. We are part of the LVMH group, which has created a department dedicated to the metaverse that every brand in the group can work with. So, I am sure we will move in that direction, too.
WATCHPRO: You mentioned Murakami and Hublot’s involvement with art, but you seem to be paring back on the universes that you partner with. Does Hublot no longer love boxing and cricket?
RICARDO GUADALUPE: We want to focus on quality over quantity. Working with Murakami — one of the greatest contemporary artists — is really the peak for us.
And when you work with him, you cannot have too many others because the artist also wants to have a kind of exclusivity.
So, our other artist partnerships are in different disciplines — Richard Orlinski from sculpture, Sang Bleu from tattoo artistry, Samuel Ross from design and Shepard Fairey from street art.
Right now, we have a strong focus on Murakami, but maybe one day we will work with another artist.
It’s the same with football. Right now, we have Kylian Mbappé as an ambassador, and I cannot have another footballer of his level on board because it just wouldn’t work.
With boxing, we partnered with the best in Floyd Mayweather and today there is not really a fighter that comes with everything Mayweather had.
Maybe we will come back to boxing but we need to wait for the right moment. Similarly with cricket — it was the right moment when we partnered with it, but the investment ran into millions and for now we are focusing elsewhere.
Football is definitely our main pillar. Sometimes you have to make tough decisions and we decided to come back to our roots — football, but also sailing with Alan Roura and the Vendée Globe in 2024.
In terms of sustainability, we have collaborations with the Polar Pod scientific research in Antarctica, and SORAI for the protection of rhinos.
Our partnerships are always shifting and evolving in line with our consumers — currently clients want to see evidence of social responsibility and we want to do more in that particular world.
