As more women become interested in fine timepieces, female ambassadors have become a key marketing strategy among the brands. Omega, Audemars Piguet, Jaeger-LeCoultre and Frederique Constant are among those who have hired beautiful women to wear their beautiful watches.
At the recent Jaeger-LeCoultre boutique opening in Vancouver, actress Sarah Gadon emerged from a limo looking radiant and glamorous. She smiled for the cameras, posed for selfies with guests and proudly showed off her diamond-set Rendez-Vous timepiece. She had spent the previous day being interviewed by reporters. “When I visited the manufacture, I was fascinated by the enameling process,” Sarah told me. “I watched someone paint the cover of a Neil Young album onto a tiny watch dial. It was crazy. It turns out watch people are just as focused as film people.” It’s the kind of response watch companies hope for in an ambassador. Gadon went on to draw the similarities between the brand and her own art cinema, in which Jaeger-LeCoultre is deeply involved. Her enthusiasm is a contrast to the response one star reportedly gave when asked at an event about the watch on her wrist (placed there by the company for which she had signed on as an ambassador): “I don’t know anything about it; they just told me to wear it.”
Ambassadors are effective because they humanize a product, inferring a status and credibility beyond what a logo or an ad can do, so the best brands invite their ambassadors to the manufacture, thereby providing them with talking points for the press. “We usually start out by naming someone as ‘friend of the brand,’” says Jaeger-LeCoultre CEO Daniel Riedo, who says the relationship grows organically from there, generally arriving at a relationship that is different with every ambassador. Ladies’ timepieces now represent 45% of Jaeger-LeCoultre’s production by volume.
Frederique Constant is partnering with Gwyneth Paltrow, as a “charity ambassador” and donating some of the sales proceeds to charity. An ad campaign featuring Paltrow will support the charity DonorsChoose, in which she will be wearing the new ladies’ watch, Classic Delight. “Having a brand ambassador with similar values as our brand is a real added value,” says CEO Peter Stas. “Gwyneth Paltrow is a genuine classic beauty, which fits very well with our classic brand Frederique Constant.” The company plans to organize a charity event in the U.S. with Paltrow by the end of the year to raise funds together for supporting DonorsChoose, the foundation we decided to support through our advertising campaign.”
Omega has long worked with ambassadors to fuel sales for its Constellation and other ladies’ lines. Cindy Crawford has been with the brand since 1995, and helped redesign the Constellation collection. The actual terms of endorsement contracts are the industry’s most closely guarded secret, but during a personal appearance/press conference at the Basel fair in the late ’90s, a reporter asked Crawford how much Nick Hayek Sr. was paying her. Her response: “Not enough.” Hayek: “She is damn right!”)\ Nicole Kidman has been an ambassador since 2005.
François Bennahmias, CEO of Audemars Piguet says his brand spokespeople were essentially ambassadors before being formalized as such. “They were already into the brand before they started officially representing us,” he says. “If you take Jay Z for instance, the first time I met him he already had about 14 of our watches, and he really wanted to do something with us and have his own limited edition. We can say the same for Serena Williams, who really doesn’t need to wear AP on the court to get exposure. When she does it, it is simply because she feels like it.” Like most brands, Audemars invites its ambassadors to the manufacture in Switzerland for a briefing. “They love to discover Le Brassus, which is usually a million miles away from where they live,” says Bennahmias. “They talk to the watchmakers, we make sure they get a try at assembling a movement so that they realize how crazy that job is. This is usually the fun part, as some of them do not have watchmakers hands!”
