Transcript
Ben Joseph (0:00)
Foreign.
Rob (0:06)
Hello, watch fans and welcome back to Geneva watch days 2025. From the glass igloo outside the beautiful pavilion, which is teaming with people coming in for tonight's party, we are joined by Benoit de Klerk, the CEO of Zenith Watches, one of the biggest brands here, certainly one of the most famous. And we are excited to find out how the fair's been going so far for you, Benoit.
Benoit de Klerk (0:27)
Hey, Rob. Hi. Thank you for having me. First of all, I love the igloo style. This is amazing. It's great, especially with a great sound like that. The, the Geneva watch day is going great. You know, for us it's the first edition and as we say in French, you know, happily surprised, you know, and positively surprised, because it's, it's very interesting. We get to meet a lot of people and we get to know, to meet with the press as well, in a very chill environment, you know, a very nice environment and people are all very happy and chill and all that. Which, which is great. Which is great. Of course, the, the weather helps and the environment helps. So, so, so far so good.
Ben Joseph (1:09)
And you've welcomed us with vivid colors. I was blown away. Defy heritage with a chronograph. I'm like, wow. Caliber 400 vivid colors. Tell us about that partnership, how it came about.
Benoit de Klerk (1:25)
Well, that's a fantastic. You know, it's a collaboration with usm. You know, usm it, you know that the furniture. One of the most well known furniture company in the world, funny enough, or interesting enough, it's made in Switzerland in Mucin Gen, and they were created about the same year as in it. So they're almost 160 years as well. And there's a lot of similarity between the two. They use the same tools in certain aspects, you know, in terms of. But of course, that's a different scale. Their scale is much bigger. Ours is very minuscule and there's a lot of similarities when it comes on the production level. And then we came up with the idea because there's a lot of heritage, a lot of similarity. We approached them, they took their time as well. Then we revived the project and we explained to them what the idea was and how we want to bring it about and all that. And they love the project. You know, this is usm. They like Zenit and you know, we have USM in our offices. So for us it was a natural, a natural discussion, a very natural approach and we was very productive and, you know, hit it off. One meeting, second meeting, third meeting, and then that's the way that's how we took it. That's how we took it to birth. And so it's four colors. You know, these are what we call USM colors. The most famous ones, we have the green, which is their color, the blue, the yellow and the orange. And we decided to produce this watch in defy. In a defy, the heritage one, you know, the Defy revival and in those four colors. But the particularity of that thing is that we included a chronograph. So it's the first time we do a defy with the chronograph, with the El Primero 400. And this is something very new. And the first time we do it and we said we will do it for this collaboration at USM and we decided to do only and produce only 60 watches per color. Obviously, you know, when we chatted with the market and when with some experts and all that, oh, you can do 500, you can do 600 per color and all that. And we all like that. But then with time, we decided with the team to reduce the quantity and we decided for 60, because, you know, that watch, that defy watch was created in the 60s. And we said, you know what we're going to do 60 watch in green, in blue, in orange and in yellow. And so this is where the collaboration come about. And the birth of that collaboration that we launched yesterday is 60 watches of each with USM and 100% collaboration. And the beauty of that is that with each, each watch that we sell, it comes with the new sm specially made box or cupboard or mini cupboard or bedside table. It's very cool. It's very, very cool. And it's made by usm, of course, and it's produced by usm. So each watch comes with the, with that, that table, bedside table or table or, or box, which we incorporated three drawers in that, in that box in order to be able to, to be that furniture where you can put other watches as well. So you can put, of course, the, the USM watches, but you can put other Zenith watches within that same box. Up to 12, actually.