Who owns tourneau watches

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Select language English United Kingdom. Select language English. Bucherer announces acquisition of Tourneau LLC. Addition of Leading U. Bucherer, the leading European retailer for fine watches and jewelry, announced today that it has acquired Tourneau, the largest U.

The Company is renowned for its unparalleled customer service and extensive selection of new and Certified Pre-Owned watches. This is also a great opportunity to firmly establish the Carl F. So to get a feel for how Bucherer may develop and what direction it will take, we turned to David Coleridge, chairman of Bucherer in the UK, a man who created and sold a major luxury watch group in the UK to the Swiss-based retail giant. First a bit of background so that Mr Coleridge can be mentally placed in the pantheon of senior international watch executives.

He first got into the luxury watch business 30 years ago with a company called DM London that was renamed The Watch Gallery in There is no equivalent to the pulling power of this watch concession, known as The Wonder Room, in the United States. Since it opened in , most brands will say that if you are not in Selfridges, you do not exist in the UK. The department store delivers a higher footfall of customers than any other retail space in the country, and The Wonder Room sells them watches from every major brand bar Patek Philippe — a sore point for Mr Coleridge who has pleaded to work with the watchmaker for decades.

It had two of its own multibrand showrooms in London and a Rolex monobrand boutique in Knightsbridge, where it is a near neighbor to Harrods. That store was recently expanded and refurbished and is now the largest Rolex monobrand in Europe.

Bucherer bought The Watch Gallery in March , adding the portfolio of stores to 29 other locations in Europe comprising 16 in Switzerland, 10 stores in Germany, and single boutiques in Vienna, Paris and Copenhagen.

This is a strategic goal that Bucherer will without doubt build on in America. In the past two decades, Mr Coleridge has seen these groups get bigger and more powerful. Outside of these, there are a couple of independents: Audemars Piquet and Patek Philippe. Bucherer in the UK has autonomy from its Swiss head office to make decisions on multi-million dollar refurbishments and which brands to work with, but the same cannot be said of the executives Mr Coleridge works with on the brand side.

But when, for example, we are opening a new shop and want to speak to the brands locally about it, we can discuss it in this country, but it will ultimately have to be approved by their headquarters. Central control has really developed now. My instinct tells me that all groups have gone far more for central control than they ever did before.

Mr Coleridge is too much of a politician to show too much desperation at the lack of decision-making allowed at the local level, but it is obvious that the protracted long distance negotiations are frustrating. It has led to a hollowing-out of subsidiaries at the UK level, and many have alarmingly high staff turnovers as people quickly move on once they discover their impotence. For fear of a backlash from the most powerful brands, they keep their frustration private.

The situation is so dire that at most companies publicly-owned or independently-run , company departments are having their finances micro-managed so heavily and so arbitrarily the behavior is akin to punishing their in-country employees. When Bucherer gets stuck into refurbishing its American stores, all hell will break loose as brands fight for every square inch of space in the new showrooms.

America has often been made to feel that the extra miles distance from Switzerland means it is not listened to or understood by the watchmaking groups in the way that European peers are. If it is any consolation, the British do not feel any different. These are our shops, but there has been something of a land grab by brands, by which I mean that brands want to placed and presented in their proscribed way within our shops.

The brands should be more accommodating, after all it is retailers that are investing so heavily in creating sumptuous stores and filling them with cash-chomping stock.

It is a really expensive upfront investment. The direction of travel for luxury watch retail in the UK is the same as for the United States.

The biggest brands are trimming their networks so that those remaining do more business. Five years ago I think it had TAG used to have accounts, it has around now.