0024watchworld.com

Let’s talk timezones – world timers and GMTs. There’s a lot of them around at the moment. If you live in the UK and find yourself travelling a lot to the continent – or anywhere else for that matter – having a watch that tells you the time back home, or in whatever your next destination might be, is a very useful thing to have.

It happened last year, on September 8, but it hit the headlines recently. Caroline Gruosi-Scheufele (49), co-president of Chopard (the other co-president is her brother Karl‑Friedrich), was in Hong Kong for the opening of a new Chopard store. During a visit to the ladies’ room of the Four Seasons Hotel’s Harbour View ballroom she took off her ring to wash her hands. Seven minutes later she realized that she had left the ring in the ladies’ room and she raced back only to discover that the ring was gone.

Every year the Digital Luxury Group unveils during the SIHH (Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie in Geneva) the market research results for Haute Horlogerie brands in its WorldWatchReport.

The Report is based on millions of searches by independent and anonymous consumers through the leading internet search engines (Google, Bing, and others) and provides a unique view of preferences and topics of interest.

On January 16 this year Bloomberg, the American journal, paid attention to Cartier, the jewellery maison owned by the Groupe Richemont. In an article by Dermot Doherty, Bernard Fornas, CEO of Cartier, is cited as stating that Cartier is gaining a lot of market share because bigger watches are losing a bit of ground and customers are buying more discrete timepieces such as models of the Ballon Blue collection (introduced in 2007). In uncertain times people go to the authentic brands and not to fashion brands.