The Citizen Blue Angels Skyhawk A-T
What have you learned from that
store in Times Square?
We’ve learned how to become better storytellers. We
have in-store events and we have window displays that
our retailers around the country can copy. We have
done some amazing displays for the Promaster there,
and then make versions of them for our retail partners.
Also, our ambassadors we’ll tell their stories from within
that store.
We encourage our consumers to upload pictures of their
citizen watches to social media. We sell via social media sites like
Instagram. We are very technical company, so we want to see how
we can take the whole digital customer experience to the next level.
What are Citizen’s top sellers?
Eco-Drive is over 90% of our range, and that is what differentiates us from the
rest of the world. It is not just a light power; it is a proprietary technology. And
we enhance this every year. The technology is so advanced today you cannot
even tell if these are solar panel dials. We have many models where the entry
points for light is actually the ring around the dial. This allows us to have
many more metal dials. And take a look at Eco-Drive One, which is so thin
and yet has a very long power reserve. Not only is it more efficient, we actually
had to find new suppliers for the cells because they were so thin.
Do you have a recommended service time for
Eco-Drive watches?
They go forever basically. We might get watches ten or fifteen years later that
need a capacitor replaced, but that is it. The inner workings from Citizen
watches are far superior to anything from the Swiss industry. It is almost over-
specified. That is how we build our watches. People love them because they
are maintenance-free. That is why many people keep buying Citizen.
How important is the U.S. market for Citizen?
For Citizen, the U.S. and Japan are the two most important markets. We are
always looking into new materials and consumer preferences. In the U.S. we
are seeing that what is old is new again. Straps are back and older styles are
back. Some of the NATO straps that we introduced last year at Basel are doing
very well. Even on our website, you see many people posting their own inter-
pretation of our pieces with their own straps.
the creative and product development is separate.
We also can tell between each of the brands where
there is extra space and where we have room to excel. In
Torrance, California, we do have one central infrastructure loca-
tion for logistics and shipping capabilities. We have state-of-the- art call
centers for each of our brands to give their consumers and retailers the
experience they deserve.
Because we have the one center for distribution we can re-distribute
the savings into each of the brands. We can increase spending to get more
eyeballs on each of the brands. We have separate sales managers and each
company has a managing director.
With Bulova, our aftersales are quite different from Citizen. We kept our
watchmakers in Queens because the competency level is very high there for
these specific services. It is hard to get good watchmakers, and I don’t want to
play with that Brand’s DNA.
We made a tremendous investment to keep that staff in that building. It
could have been very easy to combine Citizen and Bulova, but I am not doing
it. We are getting ready to launch a Bulova museum. And we have an accom-
panying book underway. It’s an amazing history.
How do you oversee the Citizen group of companies,
which for the U.S. also includes Bulova, Frederique
Constant and Alpina?
We have very strong guardrails up, and I am the referee. I make sure each
brand has a distinct point of view. They each represent something different
to the consumer. This is very, very important. All the sales, promotional and
marketing activity -- even merchandising-- has a separate infrastructure. All
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