Expensive shopping list for building a big name

High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail.

Already, LV is atwitter with excitement about the lift that, when it opens later in the year, will whisk VIP clients from the shop floor up to the ateliers high above the famous square, where craftsmen will be at their benches working on special commissions and pieces of high-end jewellery.

While this will no doubt be an impressive statement store, the real work will be taking place in an industrial park on the outskirts of Geneva, where the company’s watch division is building a large facility.

It is in the rather less glamorous surroundings of Meyrin, near Geneva’s busy airport, where the rigours of a traditional Swiss manufacture will be brought together with the fantasy and creativity of the luxury megabrand.

A decade after it launched, the company’s watch and jewellery programme is under the control of Hamdi Chatti, who has worked in the watch industry for 20 years and came to Vuitton from Montblanc, where he helped establish the Hamburg penmaker’s haute horlogerie division.

The business model he inherited was the relatively straightforward and functional one common to many of the luxury brands that have approached watches with any seriousness in the past 10 to 15 years: that of an R&D, casing and quality control operation, located in this case in La Chaux de Fonds.

Essentially an assembly plant, movements were supplied by specialist manufacturers such as La Joux-Perret and Dubois-Depraz which, he says, was appropriate for the needs of the brand at that time. However, since then, both Vuitton’s horological ambitions and the watch industry have moved on.

“The strategy was to rely on the best suppliers in Switzerland, which was a good strategy at the time. However, things have changed, because most of the movement suppliers no longer design specific movements for brands.”

This was a problem for Mr Chatti who wanted to give the watches what he calls a signature horlogère. The look of a the watch is important and, whether it is to your taste or not, the tambour is certainly sui generis and has given the timepieces a distinctive and recognisable look.

“The missing expertise was the movement.” says Mr Chatti. “The idea was that, after 10 years of developing the business, we needed to go a second level and to design specific movements that show what we stand for as a luxury company. The raison d’être of the company is travel, so we need to design movements that speak this language.”

The watch that Mr Chatti feels speaks fluent Louis Vuitton is the Spin Time, which uses a system of revolving cubes to create a timepiece that offers both home and travel time.

This movement was developed by a small, high-end movement maker called La Fabrique du Temps which also developed a minute repeater for Vuitton that displays one timezone, but gives the wearer the second timezone audibly when the minute repeater is activated. It is playful and indisputably travel-oriented, while also displaying ample high watchmaking content.

The watch was shown at the Basel fair of 2011 and it was enough to enable Mr Chatti to persuade Yves Carcelle, Louis Vuitton chief executive, to authorise the purchase of La Fabrique du Temps, whose 20 or so employees would become the nucleus of the new manufacturing HQ. Mr Chatti will not disclose the price of this acquisition, describing it only as “big money”.

But Vuitton is not afraid to pay top prices if it wants something. This is just as well because, in addition to building a new factory and buying a specialist movement maker, Mr Chatti had more things on his shopping list, among them a dialmaker.

For big runs of dials, he can rely on the production of Artecad, an industrialised dialmaker owned by LVMH that can produce dials by the hundreds of thousands.

However, he wanted to have his own dial factory to ensure creative independence. The object of bringing as many parts of the supply chain in-house is to minimise the disruption to production caused by a lack of capacity in the industry as a whole, but it was not capacity that Mr Chatti was after, rather flexibility and speed, which he identified as being necessary when it came to prototyping dials.

Although Leman Cadrans is a boutique business, capable of producing only 2,000 to 3,000 dials a year, this is more than sufficient for production of such complicated pieces of minute repeaters for the 250 or so Spin Times that will be made each year. But the real prize is that it offers a degree of flexibility that has helped bring down development times.

“Now, any time we have an idea about dials and colours and displaying the function, we can have a sample within two weeks, where it used to take six months.” When you are working, as Mr Chatti is, to a four-year plan, six months is a long time.

Since he took over the business two years ago, the number of people producing Louis Vuitton timepieces has doubled to more than 60 and, within the next two years, numbers are expected to double again as he hopes by then to have presented his first in-house movement ready for series production. If all goes to plan, it will be an impressive integrated operation by any standard, let alone that of a fashion and luxury house.

Even then, the building will be far bigger than that number of employees requires, because it will also serve as an academy of watchmaking.

Mr Chatti is not merely concerned with the design and production of watches, but also with their retail. Louis Vuitton does not wholesale, but sells through its own stores, which means that those selling the watches need to be trained.

Some of the first graduates of the Chatti academy of watchmaking will be able to put their knowledge to use when explaining the signature horlogère at the new store.