Wilhelm Schmid, CEO of A. Lange & Söhne

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Wilhelm Schmid, CEO of A. Lange & Söhne - Outlook 2017
At the brand’s annual pre-SIHH event in its home town of Glashütte, we quizzed CEO Wilhelm Schmid on the outlook for the coming year.

"As we prepared our budget for this year in February I said it would be a difficult year. If you think about just three questions - Will the war in Syria spread? Will the United Kingdom pull out of the European Union? Will Trump become president of the USA? - it just shows how fragile the world is and in how much turmoil it is. In the 1990s things were all about planning and today they are all about reacting, so we try to keep things as flexible as possible. This year was difficult and our financial year does not end until the end of March next year. Nevertheless, 2016 will still be one of the top three most successful years in our company’s history. I think we are in a period of consolidation. I can’t say whether the industry as a whole has bottomed out yet but what I know for sure is that when I started working at A. Lange & Söhne, which was only six years ago, I didn’t have to worry about currency fluctuations.  Now there isn’t a week when we don’t analyse them. I wish I could go back to what we had six years ago and simply focus on designing, developing and producing beautiful watches, but things are a bit more complex today."

“We are not a brand for tourists, with the exception perhaps of Dubai. You can see that our own stores are not designed to cater for tourists. The emphasis is always on local customers and in certain cities like Hong Kong, Singapore and New York there will always be tourists. But this is the cherry on top of the cake, not the cake itself. If you focus on locals you automatically focus on repeat business. We very much pride ourselves on the fact that once you are with the brand you stay with us for quite a while. That comes from a very big collector who told me it is like a virus and the only good news is that it doesn’t make you feel sick, it actually makes you feel happy. I think that is the core of our business model more than anything else. This means, of course, that in the heyday of tourists you will not grow as fast as other brands, but when the tourists move on you don’t suffer as much either.”

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Wilhelm SCHMID