George, welcome to Hong Kong. Very excited because yesterday I spent the whole day with the UG team looking at the UG production pieces for the first time. Absolutely amazing. Congratulations.
Three questions for you. What made you decide to acquire UG way back when when it was dormant? Okay.
So, first of all, Breitling was booming and I said to the shareholders, we can do much more than just Breitling. We have a great team. We have the financial means etc. Then we looked into existing brands to buy, you know, running brands.
But usually the running brands for sale are not performing. Yeah.
So, you know, you don't want to buy stock, you don't want to buy problems, capacities, etc. And then quickly we said okay let's check out sleeping dormant brands. And then I asked my heritage team what brands we should buy and why, and they came up immediately with Universal. Everybody for decades wanted to buy Universal. I had breakfast with the seller from the Wong family, and thank God they sold it to us. Why were we so interested? First, it's a brand with full passion. The collectors are so passionate. Don't ask me why. It is as it is. And by the way, the Universal collectors are also Rolex and Patek collectors. So that's number one. Number two, you have an incredible history with stories with Nina, Eric Clapton, Bruce Lee, etc. It's phenomenal. Then you have Genta, whose first design was a Polo for Roger when it was the first commission work for Genta before he went into designing the Nautilus and the Royal Oak. Then you have really products like the Doric, the Cabriolet, etc., which are so different from the rest of the market with a clear style. So all the boxes we could tick, and this is why it was so difficult to buy the brand because the seller knew exactly what they had. And here we are a couple of years later with a full collection under the umbrella of what we call the Couture La. This was also a striking element when we analyzed the brand. 'Couture La' sounds extremely sexy in French. The English translation is much less sexy because it says 'the tailor of watch', but we kept it in French. I think people understand, and it allowed us to structure the collection with couture, capsule, and what is quite unusual: it's 50% women and 50% men. I mean, there's only one brand which is 50/50 in the market, and we all know which one it is. Otherwise, all the other brands are either clearly female or clearly male. And here we have another brand 50/50. With a structure of couture, capsule, and we have a very easy way of explaining the product with these famous micro rotor movements. I hired the biggest specialist in the market to make that. We developed three movements in three years: a chrono microtor, a chrono automatic, and a hand-wound for the Cabriolet. And we are the only brand having microtors both in automatic and chronograph. So this journey has been amazing.
Moving the brand forward in 2026, how do you balance iconic and innovation?
Okay. So, I have an advisory board of 40 collectors, the biggest collectors in the world, and they've been amazing. But I told them two things. Number one, don't tell me what I should do,
What we're not going to do, what you probably want to do is make re-editions, and we don't want to be a vintage brand. Okay. But second, tell me the mistakes we should avoid,
You know, in terms of design, in terms of products, they contributed dramatically in putting this collection together. But when you look at the products, I don't think they're vintage. They're modern. And
And but you're right. Let's take the Poler. The difficulty was how can we jump 50 years? Assume Genta would have stayed.
There would have been three or four more additions or adjustments on the lines, like the car industry every four or five years they redesign the Porsche 911. So we had to jump over four iterations of the Poler to have the product we have today. That was a very difficult exercise with the steel bracelet, all the characteristics, the cross on the Poler, the date, the twisted lugs. But I think everybody loves it. So I think this went very well. Then the Compax in a way was the easiest because it's so obvious, the design is so timeless. The Dioramic, the Disco Volan, we launched one new product which is a mini Disco for ladies, the Bangal. So it's amazing.
And I think as a whole it really looks modern, fresh, and new in that segment. And it's funny, I have many customers telling me that there might be fatigue of the consumer in the super high end.
They have everything. They bought all the brands you have in mind. Yeah. And that these clients are looking for something new.
And we were really impressed by their reaction because they all were enthusiastic and bought the products because they have everything anyway.
