PHOTOS COURTESY HARRY WINSTON
Two watches from the House of Harry Winston's Avenue "Exotic Birds" collection.
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Winston keeps biz timely
Watches next jewel in the "King's" crown
Ronald Winston, chairman of the House of Harry Winston, the company bearing the name of his renowned jeweler father, was in town for "A Sparkling Evening," an invitation-only party for HW patrons at the Halekulani last Thursday.
With him came jewelry and timepieces that might otherwise never be seen here, including the Vine Collection of jewelry inspired by the appearance of champagne grapes growing on the vine, and the full quartet of Avenue "Exotic Birds" watches for women. Only five sets of four watches were made, and two of the watches were sold before the event started.
Although the Winston name is widely associated with diamonds, thanks to Harry Winston's fame as "The King of Diamonds," the company is quickly gaining a reputation for its watches.
"Ronald Winston started the watch business in 1989 because he wanted to extend the Winston name to timepieces," said Federica Boido, Harry Winston's New York-based marketing director, who was also in town for the event.
"As of today, nobody needs to have a watch to know what time it is," she said, referring to the ubiquity of cell phones bearing digital time displays. People who do wear watches consider them a piece of jewelry, increasingly tied to status and luxury, and Ronald Winston saw this day coming. The first watches had the Swiss imprimatur but tended to be essentially showy pieces of jewelry studded with diamonds.
PHOTOS COURTESY HARRY WINSTON
A diamond cluster bracelet from the Vine Collection.
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"But Winston knew that in order to be taken seriously by collectors and to compete with the top brands of luxury watches, we would have to create innovative complication watches." Complication watches have many component parts providing functions such as alarms, chimes, annual or perpetual calendars, moon-phase indicators and more.
That day seems to have arrived. Where complication watches were once the domain of men, there is a growing market among women. In November the company will open its own watch manufacturing company in Geneva, where, Boido said, "Hopefully we will be producing our own (watch) movement."
And a recent debut of the Opus 7 was the talk of Basel World, "the jungle of the watch industry," Boido said, where insiders prowl the trade booths in search of the next big thing. The watch face is clear, allowing its wearer to view the inner gears, typical of a complication watch, but the dial has no watch hands.
"We have created time on demand," Boido said. A push of the button moves dials to display the time.
The company is taking reservations for the latest timepiece in its "Z" series, the Z4. Only 100 will be made, and sold at $28,000 each.
Exclusivity is a major factor in the luxury market. "We only produce 5,000 watches a year," Boido said. "Our closest competitor produces 30,000."
In cases in which Harry Winston time pieces are in such demand that a bidding war ensues, the house determines who will get the watches, and even offering to pay more than the asking price won't sway them.
"No one can pay more," Boido said. "We select where it goes."