It’s that time of the year, when your brain starts cooking because of all the watch fair planning, the spring issue magazines, the school holidays, the events, the articles, and the social media. And when shall we fire up the grill? Not to mention making time for that spring skiing session.
So, what is the solution to all this? Meditation? Jogging? Or simply making use of one of the most ingenious, funny, and clever horological inventions: the Hermès Le Temps Suspendu? With a movement crafted by Agenhor, this timepiece has a button that puts the hands in an impossible V-position of 3 minutes to 12.30, thus “suspending time,” and letting you live your life at your own pace. In the meantime, the watch keeps recording the time, and whenever you feel ready to return, you press the button again, and the correct time is displayed.
I spoke with a good friend in Paris last night who said he’d made some enemies along the way, because he is honest and refuses to take shortcuts. In a successful career in the luxury industry, he has never been afraid to speak his mind, even in a crowded room, that is, if his two cents are asked for. Whenever I have met him, he has never felt the need to convince a room that he is right by speaking the loudest or oversharing. But if his opinion is asked for, he will give it to you. Sadly, this is not accepted by some people, and funnily enough, history tends to prove him right.
He has also never been afraid to walk away from a business deal if it didn’t feel right. In the past, he has revived businesses with a simple recipe: working at a top-class artisanal level and not worrying about time. This, of course, attracts high-paying customers who want the best. However, this in turn sadly awakens greed among owners or financiers. If you succeed because of being top-level, you simply cannot start taking shortcuts and think that you will make more money. We see it in watches, I have seen it in glass companies in Sweden, and we have seen it in so many industries. In my friend’s case, a healthy business with high double-digit million-dollar profits plummeted to about a third only a few years after he left. Why did he leave? Because the owners did not want him to continue working with the best materials and suppliers, allowing things to take however long it takes to achieve excellence.
And perhaps that is the solution to the first-world problems described at the beginning of this letter: to do what you really believe in, and to do it in the best way you possibly can. Then time won’t matter.
