Watches Take Center Stage at JCK
Diane Taylor -- Tradeshow Week, 6/12/2008 2:56:00 PM
There’s a whole lot of jewelry to look at on the JCK Las Vegas showfloor, but ask Bill Shuster, senior editor of JCK Magazine, about the show’s importance to the watch industry and he’ll say: “It’s the most important watch show in the Western Hemisphere.”
Shuster has covered the watch industry for 20 years, and said keeping tabs on tradeshows in that marketplace has gotten harder. “Years ago, if you covered the watch business, you went to the Basel (Switzerland) tradeshow and that was it,” he added. “Then manufacturers began hosting their own shows, world markets and manufacturing centers changed, and customer preferences changed.”
The big shows today, according to Shuster, are in Basel, Hong Kong and Las Vegas. At the most recent JCK Las Vegas show, held May 30-June 3, 10 percent of the Sands Expo’s showfloor was devoted to watch exhibitors, 300 of them. Another 22 high-end Swiss watch companies showcased their latest product lines in suites at the Venetian Resort Hotel & Casino.
In the aptly named Hall of Time at JCK, the changing watch market was clearly on display. Gone are the days when a watch given to the high school graduate may have lasted a lifetime. Along came quartz, as well as fashion and people with money and egos. As Steven Jay, vice president of marketing for Croton, said, “Today, our customers change watches with their moods and lifestyles.”
Croton, like many manufacturers, has noted growth in its high and low-end watches, but less in the mid-range. When asked about the effect of the current high price of gold, Jay said, “Croton had some older gold watches in the vault. We melted them down to recover and reuse the gold.” How important is JCK to Croton? “We must be here,” Jay said.
A new exhibitor at JCK this year was Dunamis, a 4-year-old Beverly Hills, Calif., company that displayed an $80,000 diamond-studded mechanical watch on a model behind a glass case. Jason Arasheben, Dunamis’ North American distributor, said his goal in exhibiting at JCK was to find 10 outlets for his pieces, which range in price from $7,000 to $1 million.
Celebrities also play an important role in the watch market, often receiving watches as gifts from manufacturers. At JCK, Intl. Watch Magazine introduced a new publication, CelebWatch, a magazine devoted simply to photographs of celebrities wearing watches.
At the other end of the spectrum, Ken Genender, CEO of Genender Intl. and chairman of the U.S. Watch Council, noted that the trend he has seen in the under-$100 market was the emergence of stainless steel as a watch material and “greening” initiatives such as watch batteries with no mercury and alloys with no lead. Also among lower-end watches, he said, “it’s all about color.”
