NEWS
HOW TAG HEUER’S NEW HERITAGE DIRECTOR LED THE BRAND TO ITS FINEST HOUR FOR DECADES
“For the last 20 years we’ve basically lived in an era of complete marketing bullshit,” declares Tag Heuer’s Nicholas Biebuyck with his trademark, ahem, directness.
“Brands realised they could dip into their heritage and pluck little threads out of it, but actually, a lot of the stories were figments of the imagination, or at least no one had bothered fact-checking them. Often when you dig a little deeper, you realise it’s a story to support a narrative the current CEO or current marketing boss wants to project.”
It’s a bold gambit from the heritage director of a brand in the midst of a 60thanniversary relaunch for its iconic Carrera chronograph. He gets away with it because a) he acknowledges Tag Heuer has itself fallen into the trap in the past, and b) his real point is that these marketing myths can end up obscuring a more interesting reality.
Biebuyck, who previously worked in the media and as a watch specialist at Bonhams and Christie’s before joining Tag Heuer in 2021, is regarded as a highly energetic, outspoken and intellectually rigorous heritage director. Talking at Formula 1 speeds here amid the pristine, hushed company museum in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, he brings something of the young and edgy academic. “Heritage director” is still a new role among watch brands, and is often taken by nerdy archivists or PR-y comms guys; unusually, Biebuyck feeds into the creation of new models. It was he who suggested that the product team base the Carrera Chronograph’s 60th anniversary edition on the 1960s 2447 SN “panda dial”, the most desirable model among collectors. (And, as he notes, “just such a beautiful watch”.)
His involvement has paid off. The Carrera has been reinterpreted many times since it became — arguably — the first big reissued classic Swiss watch back in 1996, and most iterations have been somewhat lacking. Either the 1963 version was copied too slavishly so the exercise seemed pointless, or the new version seemed garish and missing the original’s elegant, minimal essence. With this edition and the further four that have followed this year, they’ve got it right. Throw in Ryan Gosling wearing three Carreras in the Barbie movie and starring in a genuinely funny Tag Heuer commercial and this looks like the watchmaker’s finest hour for decades.
The story of Carrera is well-known. The young Jack Heuer takes control of a family business specialising in sports chronographs and, inspired by Mexico’s dangerous Carrera Panamericana road race, modernist design and an obsession with analogue dials, launches a new watch aimed at racing drivers. The potentially life-saving legibility
