The name Westime is known in its native Los Angeles as the place where celebrities and star athletes get their wristwear (especially when showing a discreet interest in timepieces beyond their current ambassadorship deals). The four Westime boutiques (Rodeo Drive, Sunset Boulevard, La Jolla and Miami in the US) are emporia of fine watchmaking, with brands ranging from Grand Seiko to MB&F.
Within the industry, Westime is known as the retail operations of the Simonian family. John Simonian, founder of Westime, was born in Lebanon and moved to Switzerland before finally settling in the US in 1986, where a year later he established what would become the most prestigious watch retail business on the West Coast. Since he founded Westime 33 years ago, Simonian has drawn respect and admiration (and not a little jealousy) from industry peers who recognise his keen business acumen and, above all, his uncanny sixth sense of which new up-and-coming brands will be tomorrow’s household names.
To that end, he expanded the family business into distribution, introducing the North American market to brands such as Richard Mille, Greubel Forsey and Urwerk. As the distributor of Richard Mille in the US and Canada, with controlling rights to brand distribution in the Western Hemisphere, Simonian is rightly seen as one of the international watch market’s key strategic personalities and the gatekeeper of modern horology’s most alluring brands, fully deserving of a spot on the GPHG Jury in 2011.
His son, Greg Simonian, was officially named President of Westime in 2010, having grown up immersed in the family business, and selling his first watch at the age of 12. Representing the fourth generation of his family in the watch industry, Greg has been the primary driver of Westime’s move into local and national charitable initiatives, transforming the company into a pillar of the community on top of already being an essential player in commerce. As the man responsible for all of Westime’s monobrand boutiques across the US (representing Richard Mille, Audemars Piguet and Breitling), Greg exerts significant influence in shaping the consumer market in what is still one of Swiss watchmaking’s most important regions – North America.
*On the occasion of GMT Magazine and WorldTempus' 20th anniversary, we have embarked on the ambitious project of summarising the last 20 years in watchmaking in The Millennium Watch Book, a big, beautifully laid out coffee table book. This article is an extract. The Millennium Watch Book is available on www.the-watch-book.com, in French and English, with a 10% discount if you use the following code: WT2021.
