The International Herald Tribune, France
March 18, 2010 Thursday
Upstarts get a big stage;
The luxury retailer Westime searches for the rising stars of high-end
watchmaking
by Victoria Gomelsky
LOS ANGELES
ABSTRACT
John Simonian has plucked independent watchmakers with big talent and
small marketing budgets from obscurity and given them a worthy stage
at his two retail boutiques.
FULL TEXT
John Simonian, the founder and chief executive of Westime, a watch
retailer based in Beverly Hills, California, describes success in the
watch business by using a simile that comes naturally to people in
this city.
”It’s like Hollywood,” Mr. Simonian said. ”You have 100,000 actors
and 100 superstars, and I think the odds are the same in
watchmaking.”
It would seem appropriate to compare Mr. Simonian to a director or producer.
Over the past decade, he has plucked independent watchmakers with big
talent and small marketing budgets from obscurity and given them a
worthy stage at his two retail boutiques, and along the way he has
anointed them the rising stars of haute horlogerie.
”John’s a true mover and shaker in this industry,” said Thomas Mao,
a management consultant in Los Angeles and the founder of
ThePuristS.com, a Web site for watch aficionados. ”He’s up there with
Chronopassion in Paris, Hour Glass in Singapore and Cellini in New
York,” Mr. Mao said.
Among those retail temples in the watchmaking community, only Hour
Glass and Westime share the distinction of being equally influential
as distributors.
In addition to Westime, Mr. Simonian owns Richard Mille U.S.A. and
distributes seven niche brands across the Americas through a parent
company, Ildico. His brands include Greubel Forsey, Urwerk, HD3, Alain
Silberstein, MCT, Vincent Bérard and Roland Iten Mechanical Luxury.
For each brand, Mr. Simonian uses ”microdistribution” to preserve a
cult following among collectors. He perfected the sales tactic through
his relationship with Richard Mille, the enfant terrible of high
watchmaking, whose forward thinking in the business made a big
impression on Mr. Simonian around the turn of the millennium.
”Until Richard Mille, there was the bean counter looking over the
creative guy as he made a watch to fit the market,” Mr. Simonian
said. ”Richard Mille came along and said, ‘I’m going to make the
finest mechanical watch, and if it’s superexpensive, it’s
superexpensive.’ So he comes to the market with a tourbillon that’s
$140,000.”
That was shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, and not everyone in the
business shared Mr. Simonian’s enthusiasm for the upstart brand. But
that did not matter. He had already fallen in love with it.
The appreciation was mutual. Six months after Richard Mille named
Westime his first North American retailer, in November 2001, he gave
Mr. Simonian the distribution business for the United States and
Canada. That was followed in 2005 by the rights to the rest of the
Western Hemisphere.
Mr. Simonian, who was born in Beirut in 1956 to parents who belonged
to the Armenian diaspora, made his first trip to Switzerland at the
age of 12 with his father, a Swiss watch importer. Although he had a
great uncle who specialized in watchmaking, he gravitated to the
business side of the industry.
In 1986, he and his Swiss wife, Barbara Simonian, moved with their two
children to Los Angeles, where he briefly owned the largest Swatch
store in the United States.
In 1987, Mr. Simonian opened Westime in the Westside Pavilion, an
upscale mall in West Los Angeles.
”Americans were superignorant about watches at the time,” he said.
”They knew Rolex and Timex and nothing in between.”
As the economy revved up, Westime’s success in cultivating collectors
also picked up.
”One of the reasons I went with all these independent brands is
because after selling watches to all my good customers, I had nothing
else to sell them,” he said.
”They had their Breguet, their Vacheron, their Audemars Piguet and
Richard Mille. So I brought them something new,” he added.
Today, between the West Los Angeles location and a salon on Rodeo
Drive that opened in 2003, Westime stocks about 50 brands, from an
inexpensive surfer’s watch called Nixon to far-out creations from Guy
Ellia and MB&F.
Mr. Simonian’s son, Greg Simonian, 24, the chief operating officer of
Westime, runs the retail operation, and he follows his father’s
commitment to exotic but little-known brands. The elder Mr. Simonian
focuses on distribution and the growing Latin American market, where a
new group of collectors awaits.