NEWS
WHAT I’VE LEARNED
IN CONVERSATION WITH THE CEO OF TISSOT
Thanks to hit collections like the PRX and the eye-catching Sideral, Tissot is having a storming 2023. We asked its CEO what it takes to keep the momentum going.
In watches, history matters.
The most important thing I’ve learned is: don’t touch the brand’s legacy. It’s tempting, when you’re appointed CEO [Dolla joined in 2020, after 10 years at Hamilton], to impose your big ideas, to overhaul everything and to take big risks. But if you have a brand with a really rich history like Tissot or Hamilton, you have to pull yourself back: in our industry, history is the most important thing we have, and it’s my job to use that and evolve it, not to try to revolutionise things.
Less is much more.
We used to launch 150 new watches every year — Icut that by half, and instead of launching across all 10 collections, we are focused on our three key pillars: the PRX, the Seastar (dive watches) and Le Locle (dress watches). So although we’re launching less, we’re iterating those core collections more. People today want to feel they can find that special colour, something that’s different and feels customised to them. That’s what we’re trying to respond to.
Raid the archive.
My aim was to elevate Tissot from being seen simply as entrylevel to a real object of desire. The PRX [Tissot’s 1970s bracelet watch, relaunched in 2021] was made for this. It didn’t come from nowhere; it is from the archive and we stayed true to the original. It’s an incredible design, with authenticity and a great story, but we talk about it in a really modern way — it’s not a museum piece, you can have fun with it. It has been a magic recipe.
Get playful.
We saw that in Switzerland you could get a really high-end digital watch, or something with a digital twist; and obviously you can get low-end digital watches, but there wasn’t something in between. Tissot did digital watches in the 1970s, and we thought we could do something that had that retro-cool sense to it. We really hesitated about whether to do it with the PRX, since there was never a digital PRX, but you can get playful with it and it works beautifully.
Power is with the young.
Tissot is a very broad brand — we go to all groups and all ages, but we try to gear our communication to those in their twenties — young, ambitious people who are the most likely to buy a Swiss watch. That has driven growth in Europe and the USA, wh
