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What makes a watch industry veteran working for a luxury conglomerate ask for a step down the corporate ladder?
Jérôme Lambert, who up until recently was chief executive of Richemont, saw an opportunity when the group’s chair and controlling shareholder Johann Rupert decided to shake up the management structure.
“It was a privilege to be able to ask Richemont’s new CEO [Nicolas Bos] if I could come back to the job I love for a second time,” says Lambert, referencing his first stint at the helm of the watchmaker Jaeger-LeCoultre between 2002 and 2013.
In reappointing the energetic 55-year-old Frenchman to the Jaeger-LeCoultre top job, Richemont is not purely granting Lambert’s wish but is also hoping he will be able to repeat some of his past performance at the brand.
Lambert is widely regarded as having taken the once dusty dial name into the present by prioritising remarkable haute horlogerie creations such as the three-dialled Reverso a Triptyque, the cutting-edge Extreme Lab concept watch and the chunky, zeitgeist-capturing Master Compressor sports series.
When Lambert first took over the running of Jaeger-LeCoultre, the Reverso accounted for 65 per cent of sales, a figure he was keen to reduce. By introducing new models and upgrading existing ranges, he got that down to the 40 per cent at which it roughly remains.
“The Master Moon has been a tremendous success and the Rendezvous [a round-cased women’s watch introduced by Lambert in 2013] has been developing very nicely, as have the grand complication pocket watches.”
But when Lambert returns to the forward facing side of watchmaking for the first time in eight years at this week’s Watches and Wonders it will be new, complicated Reversos that once again take the spotlight, one being a minute repeater and the other a Geographic timezone model.
And Lambert acknowledges he will be presenting the models — along with a selection of high craftsmanship watches featuring snow setting, enamelling and lacquerwork — to a different watch buying public than the one he knew when he left Jaeger-LeCoultre a dozen years ago.
Reverso Tribute Minute Repeater
Reverso Tribute Geographic
“Watchmaking knowledge is shared between more countries than before, and now we have many connoisseurs in many different markets,” he says. “To me, that presents an opportunity. You can be more radically true to what you are because you don’t have to be ruled by one trend or one market. I find the watchmaking industry less technical and in-depth, but more diverse than before.”
Lambert also believes the recent “correction” in the pre-owned watch market has increased buyers’ expectations for a better value proposition across the board. The broader slowdown in luxury spending and the deflation of the pandemic-era boom has seen resale prices come down significantly.
“Being a rare, old watch is no longer sufficient to express value. Because of that, I believe we are all being pushed to new boundaries in terms of offering greater value.”
He also notes a return to the use of technical materials in sports watches following a period when they have taken a back seat to traditional metals, and that he now sees the manufacture with different eyes than he did the first time around.
Since 2018, the brand’s position among the hierarchy of Swiss watch houses in the annual industry report by Morgan Stanley and LuxeConsult has slipped from 10th to 15th, while rival big names such as Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin have sat more-or-less steady at fourth, fifth and eighth respectively.
While Lambert would not comment on the accuracy of the Morgan Stanley analysis, Richemont’s specialist watchmaking division — which included seven other brands in addition to Jaeger-LeCoultre — reported in January an 8 per cent drop in sales for the final three months of 2024. The overall Richemont group however posted better than expected sales — mostly thanks to the performance of its jewellery brands.
During the six-year leadership of previous chief executive Catherine Renier — who now leads Richemont stablemate Van Cleef & Arpels — Jaeger-LeCoultre favoured focusing on minor tweaks to established models, which proved to be a polarising move for established collectors of the brand.
One notable exception came in the four-faced Reverso Quadriptyque, a 10-piece, €1.35mn limited edition created to mark the 90th anniversary of the polo watch in 2021.
London-based collector Sid Vasili, who established the Invapay electronic payment service during the early 2000s, says collectors will again embrace Jaeger-LeCoultre if Lambert is given free rein to revive it. “I think his vision was outstanding and the brand was undoubtedly at its peak during the years in which he was in charge,” he says. “He is a visionary with great depth, style and panache.”
Before deciding to return, Lambert says he reflected on the hygienic words of former longtime Richemont executive Franco Cologni, who told him that “when you bathe, you never bathe in the same river”.
“I did consider that, but now I am back, I see the Reverso is still the icon of the brand and many of my previous colleagues are the same — but the maison is not the same, because it has evolved and been enriched in the same way that it has constantly elevated itself over the course of 192 years,” says Lambert. “We are all standing on the shoulders of giants.”
He compares this gradual development to the evolution of the Reverso between the time of its revival in the late 1980s, to the arrival of the Duoface model a few years later and on to the Triptyque of 2006 and the Quadriptyque of 2021.
