Audemars Piguet CEO: Ilaria Resta – Heritage, Embracing Innovation, & Brand Ethos

I'm very good. And you?

Good to see you.

It's a pleasure.

Of course. We are blessed.

In Milan. Yes, I remember.

Thank you.

Likewise.

In Italian and Swiss. I have both nationalities actually. That's true. I spent half of my life in Italy and half in Switzerland. So I deserve both.

I passed the exam. By the way, this is an exam to become Swiss.

It was tough because at the time my French was really not excellent. I had to do a French exam, a history exam of Switzerland. It was quite a lengthy process.

I was in Geneva. Yes. At the time. Yes.

And almost close or an hour away.

Beautiful. The best place around the world.

Actually, no. I discovered Audemars Piguet when I came to Switzerland. When you move to Switzerland, at the airport you cannot miss watches. And of course you visit the different museums and then I got to know Audemars Piguet. But I was never expecting ever to receive a call for this type of job because in watchmaking normally you see people with long tenure, long career in watchmaking. So I always felt this was a world that I could never have access to.

I've always been like that in general with the things that have a role in my life. I like them to fit into my life and not me adjusting to those. And I believe watches have a powerful influence on you, at least on me. I like that the watch represents something in my day and I don't like to have fixated rules of watches or fixated rules like men, women as you just alluded to. I don't like that type of segmentation also because it doesn't reflect what people want. People don't want to be clustered in a segment, certainly not a gender segment for watches, because there is not a reason for a watch to be male or female. Certainly there are watches that women like more than men. But that's the way I like to live. Watches change a lot. Styles completely different. I'm extremely playful with watches.

It is. And since it started people believe very recently. The Mar Pig became, sometimes is defined the enfant terrible in watchmaking, but in reality this witty spirit, this daring attitude has always been part of the history of Audemars Piguet. A company that frankly survived two world wars, multiple financial crises, and more importantly what almost destroyed the watchmaking industry, which is the arrival of the quartz in the 70s. To survive and thrive, you need to in a way break the rules. And in fact, that was also one of our mottos of our campaign. To break the rules, you need to master them, which is a very powerful motto because it tells you you need to keep looking forward. You need to keep evolving and changing by staying true to your roots. That's why we are in Le Locle because that's where we belong, where we were born. That's why we continue to manufacture watches like they were manufactured almost 150 years ago. But at the same time, we don't want to be nostalgic and look back. We want to look back and forward at the same time. That's why we play with materials. We play with innovation and also we are a bit playful in the way we communicate in an informal and fun way.

I learned in my career that pre-defining your approach, your style, your choices before you join a company is a big mistake that I've done in the past, because you want to re-apply a model that worked in the past and it worked for another context. And this is not at the best interest of the new company. So I realized when you join a company like Audemars Piguet, in a sector that I didn't know anything about, I didn't know the people, I really needed to shut up and listen and observe. And I had the possibility to do so, the luxury, because I had a very long onboarding which helped me observe and see the truth that was not necessarily exactly what I imagined when I studied at home the Mar Pig. And you realize how much one of the key drivers of the success is truly the people embodying the values of the brand and the family, because as you said we are actually the biggest family-owned company still in the hands of the founding family. And that's a responsibility for all of us to keep high the name of the people that actually for many, many years sacrificed financially and personally their time to make sure that this company could still be here despite producing something that could be irrelevant and being disrupted as it has been disrupted by many other products, right? Not many industries are disrupted and thrive after. And one powerful element is really the freedom of people, the creative freedom and the accountability that goes into it. You talked about entrepreneur. That's a really good word because what we try to do is to create a space of legitimacy for people to invent, to dare, to try. And that is exactly what led to the creation of the most successful launches of Audemars Piguet. And as a leader I learned that when I came after a few months I realized how much you need to preserve the balance between yes clear strategies that are necessary framework, cooperation, absolute obsession for details, craftsmanship and perfection, but at the same time leave so much more room to ideation, to creativity from anywhere in the organization. So ideas should and can come and come actually from anywhere, in any sector. It's not only product, it's also marketing, it's communication, it can be HR, it can be anything.

Both. But it is very often with me, even in companies that have a very different business model. I believe that when you treat the business as if it was your own business, you make the right choices. At least ethically you do and at least you can go home and say I did my best in the interest of the company and you become egoless when you think you're doing something for yourself and for your own business, right? You make the most efficient choices, the most daring choices and you take risks. I found the same. And it's precious what I heard from few colleagues at AP. They told me, you know, we feel the company belongs to us and that's something that makes me proud and I know it makes also the shareholders proud because the idea that there is a shared ownership of the company and the feeling that every day we go home, when we enter the office, it gives you much more freedom and daring spirit in a way. And it shows also in the very long tenure of our colleagues. They stay there for long. They devote their career to AP and that's important.

We like a manufacturer.

And you cannot fake it because when you see the people, that's why we like to open the manufacturer to visits, because we want to show the truth, right? And we know that clients love to see the behind the scenes of a watch and you see the passion of people when you stop by the bench of a watchmaker. These are not scripted people. We don't tell them what to say, but the level of passion, the contagious love for what they do shows to clients to the point that many tell us, 'I'm not wearing a watch. I'm wearing a work of emotions,' which is so powerful and so true.

Absolutely. I think you captured a lot, many of the most important elements of family. I would add definitely the honesty and the straight talk. The ability to have a free space of expression, which is extremely important, because the other side would be toxicity, right? Is when you cannot be yourself, you need to hide or you cannot speak up. And we want to have really, at least that's my leadership model, I call it circular leadership, of a leader that sits really literally with the people and listens to the colleagues. Not in a company that has the shape of a pyramid. Even the family, yes, you have the parents, the kids, but when we sit, we sit around the table and we talk and we can all express opinions. There is one other element of the family spirit that I love, is this idea that you give space to each to express their personality, their dreams and their desires without setting expectations up front. And that's how our creativity works. We try not to create too many boundaries and put in too many frameworks around the creativity and the job scope. Why? Because we want to let people in a way flourish and find their own space and their own passion. That's why we encourage what we call internal mobility, is the possibility of people switching functions, roles, responsibilities, which is counterintuitive to a hyper-specialized business like watchmaking. But we allow that because we want people like in a family, you know, to grow, choose their studies according to their passion. And life is not ever fixed, right? You can have a path that is not linear and we love this non-linearity which is an investment for the company. Because if you think about it, it is much better to have everybody specialized in doing one component, one job, and repetition drives excellence and efficiency. But we don't want that. We'd rather invest in spaces for creativity.

But also family is the relationship we have with all the people around us, right? I hear this word family so many times and then at the end it's not real and authentic. What we want is really when we work with our, we call friends of the brands, like people like you, is to give you the space and the creative latitude to be you. And we don't script. We don't like that. That's why people who come around us are not — are passionate about watches. This is a starting point. We don't want to have ambassadors, friends of the brands who have been given a watch and they don't even know what it is. We want them in the first place to be genuine, passionate about watches. We want them to come and visit Le Locle. It's a bit like getting engaged, right? You go and visit the parents, you go in the house of the person you love. And for us, it's important that you come home and to see where we are, how we work, because that defines who we are.

People ask me often how do you make such events so fun and successful. And I look at the people asking me the question and say, it's you, because it's truly, it's really not the place, it's not the entertainment or the food. Definitely we take care of all these aspects with the greatest level of detail, but it's really mixing people that are truly different but with one common passion, which is of course watches, but also with the attitude of having fun and sharing. These are, we like to think the people around us are extremely generous with their authenticity and with their ability and desire to put themselves out openly without creating and putting a mask on, which is the mask of the role they have. Right? So when you come to an event and you see a football player or singer or you or all the others, really you see the real person behind the artist, many are artists, or the real person behind the professional, it could be a professor, could be a doctor, they remove this, I don't want to call it mask because it's who they are also, but you see the true person. And why? Because watches, I believe, let the emotion talk much more, which is incredible because it is a piece of metal, gold, whatever, mechanical, but in reality there is always a story behind each watch. And it's what I found fascinating, after the beginning of introduction all of a sudden the event turns into a party, into an emotional moment of fun and authenticity.

What I like of these exchanges with the collectors that are extremely precious for me and they were indispensable to learn about Audemars Piguet. First of all, there is always an emotional trigger when the collection started. It could be the gift from parents, it could be the memory of a moment in their life. And each watch, despite these collectors have many, many, many, have a very strong memory attached to them. At the same time they go deep. I rarely have a conversation with somebody who cannot tell me exactly the movement, when it was done, this, the reason why that movement is so good. And it's a precious exchange because they tell you also what works, what doesn't work, how is it different from their expectations. It's a precious source of inspiration for us. And you can tell there is a common thread of bringing together, building together pieces of history. Watchmaking has been there for hundreds of years. The industry itself way before even Audemars Piguet of course was founded. And for them, they participated to the life of humanity for a certain point in time. They bought watches that are 200 years old, 150 years old, and they can tell you what happened in that very moment in the history, and maybe in the history of their family if it's a gift coming from the family. So it's a way, if you want, to feel immortal and to be connected to the past and hopefully to leave something to the future.

Well, both. I must say that since I arrived it was evident that we have two souls. One soul that looks forward and one part looks back, and the two are interconnected because lots of inspiration comes from the past. The trap we should avoid is the trap of reproducing the past as it was. That's not going to happen. When I arrived with one of the people responsible for our archives and museum, we decided to create a unit. I call it a business unit, in reality it's him with other very few people, with the idea, and we call it Musée Atelier. It's an homage to the system of production in the past where you had multiple ateliers specialized in each component and then a central role of assembling all these pieces into a watch. This idea that there are hyper-specialized ateliers around you has been one of the reasons of the success of Audemars Piguet and the watchmaking in general. And we wanted to relook at that model. So we recreated this system for very few watches that get inspired by the past. So we look at the archives, we look at the pictures, very often drawings because we don't even have pictures. Of course, we are talking hundreds of years ago. And the idea is really to do it with intent, to relearn certain ways of working that do not exist anymore. That's for me fascinating because we have no intent to create necessarily revenues or financial results out of this unit. The idea is to learn and put it to the service of the rest of our innovation program. At the same time, there is a team that is truly obsessed about materials. They have a different type of expertise. And they like to cook. As I said, they're extremely creative, of course, with incredible engineering background or chemists. They try really to play with the material in a way that blends with the history of the watch we're trying to create and the purpose of the watch. So it's not creation for the sake of creation of a new material. There is a lot of thinking about why this material makes sense for this type of watch. Why titanium? Why forged carbon? And why these colors? And we let imagination go and it's a work hand in hand between the materials and the movement of the watch.

Because we believe we have the honor and the responsibility to keep this industry alive and known. The watchmaking industry is more than an industry. For me, it is at the crossroad of history, art, mechanical sciences, material sciences. It's extremely rich and is part of the heritage of Switzerland and many other countries. When we did, you were part of it, this event in Shanghai a few weeks ago. It was an event where we decided to open the doors to anybody to come and visit, with the idea of opening the doors to watchmaking. Why we do that is not to delight the prospective clients, it is to delight people and give them access to learning on this fascinating world. It's a bit like museums when they were born, it was really the idea to share knowledge, to share passion and emotion. And definitely we are seeing more and more young generations being interested in that. That's why we are starting to do more and more master classes. The idea of letting people touch components and see with their own hands and eyes how complicated it is to not even assemble a watch, which is absolutely difficult and requires years, but just to pick up a small screw from the bench is already extremely complicated. It requires dexterity. That's why we have a museum with the open doors to allow people to come and visit. And we created in Japan the AP Lab. And the idea of the AP Lab was really to be in a very young district of Tokyo to open the door and share to the world, in Japan, what it is to talk about watchmaking. And we even did it without necessarily branding many of the stories. It was really the idea of opening the door. So I'm a big believer that we have that responsibility also to recruit the future watchmakers and the future people to always continue carrying the tradition of this wonderful job.

If we talk about the Vallée de Joux where we are located, which is in the Jura mountains, you see a lot of watchmakers there, not only Audemars Piguet. And the story is related to a group of people who fled for freedom, freedom of religion and freedom of expression. Unfortunately, they arrived into a wonderful place indeed in terms of nature, but with very limited resources. So, there was a lake, so water, there was forest, so wood, and there was rust, which allowed metallurgy to start, but the quantity was so small that they couldn't do big metallurgy. They could only do small components. That's why watchmaking started in the proximity of Geneva where there was watchmaking starting, given jewelry was not allowed for a long time. So watchmaking was the alternative solution for many to do their work. The other help was the long winters in the Vallée de Joux. So many people who were farmers and had the kettles, they could do nothing else and spend their time in the homes and they started working on these very small components that then they sold to Geneva, to Paris, to London, for watchmaking. All of a sudden this system of households started because each, we're talking households, we mean like husband, wife, and kids maybe working on components. And all of a sudden this became a network of families, a network of ateliers connected one to another. That's why you see so many companies, important watchmaking companies based in the valley. And that's why we remain there because for us the reason why we were born, how we were born, means so much in the values. For us this notion of freedom comes from them. We have amazing stories of devotion to watchmaking from all the branches in the family. And for us it's important that we give them the right place in our memories and we continue being inspired by what they did.

I'm positive, so everything is fantastic.

Perfect. Let me start from lapel then.

So we end with fantastic?

For me, lapel, there's this bias on watchmaking. There are many — men's watches, women's watches, or if you don't come from watchmaking, you cannot work in watchmaking. These biases, lapel.

Then fantastic, a lot of things. First of all, fantastic to have around us so many young kids. As of the age we have clients at 17, 16 who want to buy watches. This desire of learning and discovering an object like a watch is fantastic. Fantastic, our people, everybody in watchmaking, not only at Audemars Piguet, all the people that devote years and years in developing and becoming a watchmaker, which requires dexterity, passion, patience. Fantastic.

Well, I started by saying that the career advice I got when I was very young is to define a dream and be obsessed and go after the dream. I think this is a bit dishonest. This is a thinking that creates expectations on a path that is not necessarily the most advantageous for you. In my career I had lots of twists, turns, up-downs, choices that were totally unexpected. I went for avenues that I thought were big and in reality were smaller and then the other way around and I learned a lot in both. So for me it's much more — yes you should have a dream. Yes, if you have clarity when you are young, go for it. I don't know. I was not so fixated about becoming a CEO. Of course I had this dream later in my career, I really wanted that, but I didn't start with that. I followed truly, truly what I felt at the right balance of passion and learning. So it was something I felt comfortable working in but not too comfortable. So I like the idea of stretching myself into the unknown. Learn a lot. It's very important. It gives me adrenaline and energy. So I would say to people: look up, have a side view to the avenues and to the streets you didn't consider and ask yourself a question before you continue on autopilot in your life and career choices.

The power of choice, I would say.

Likewise.

I was so impressed with Shanghai. More to come. Many more years to come.

Thank you so much. A pleasure to be here.