: Jack Heuer is one of the legends of the Swiss watchmaking
: industry, having led Heuer through it's most dynamic- and
: turbulent- era's.

: The watches today that we think of when people talk about their
: love of vintage Heuer watches were all created under Jack
: Heuer's leadership- Monaco, Autavia, Carrera, Monza, Montreal,
: Daytona, Silverstone- and many more.

: Having cut his ties with the company following its forced sale in
: the early 1980s, Jack Heuer went on to a successful "second
: career" in the electronics industry, before returning to
: TAG Heuer in 2001.

: But Jack is not just a link to the past- he has helped shape some
: of the TAG Heuer's that we see today.

: He is much-loved at TAG Heuer and played a key role at the event to
: mark TAG Heuer's 150th anniversary, where he gave the opening
: address.

: As well as finding out more about Jack Heuer's early days in charge
: of Heuer, I wanted to show Jack several photos of famous Heuer
: models to get some of his memories about these watches and his
: perspective on TAG Heuer today.

: Calibre 11 : I wanted to start back in 1962 when you found out
: that your uncle was selling his shares in Heuer- that must have
: been a defining time in your career?

: Jack Heuer: Yes it was, because he had no successor and we were
: still not in black figures in America, so he saw his losses
: piling up. So on a Thursday night I got a telegram in my
: apartment at 10 o’clock at night from my father saying, “My
: brother wants to sell his shares and we have a family
: dispute”. And so I went to the airport, found a plane that had
: arrived late and so it left late, so I got on the flight and the
: next morning I was in Switzerland asking my father what had
: happened.

: And within a week we managed to solve that. I was a young engineer
: from the top university in Switzerland, I was tri-lingual and in
: those years the bank would give you a loan if you had that
: background, because at the time it was one of the good
: backgrounds that you could have. Being tri-lingual [English,
: German and French] was very seldom for an engineer to be fluent
: in all three languages, so they gave me enough credit so that I
: could buy the shares from my uncle. I bought enough shares so
: that I would have the majority and then my father gave me 40%
: and I bought 12% from my uncle.

: C11: You were very young at the time [28], so what were you
: ambitions? One week you are in the US and the next you are back
: in Switzerland owning the company…

: JH: … It was very simple because I told my uncle, “Listen,
: either you sell and that is the end of my career in the watch
: industry- I didn’t break my back for two years here in New
: York to have the rug pulled out from under my feet, so either
: [you sell to me] or I go back to what I was originally going to
: do”. I had an offer from Arthur D. Little to go to Boston as a
: consultant, so that’s why he gave in and so then I could call
: the shots.

: So very shortly after that we merged with Leonidas. We couldn’t
: buy Leonidas, we merged, in other words we paid him in shares,
: so I would have lost the majority….so I had to borrow more
: money. I was able to pay back my initial loan before we took
: over [Leonidas], so then I borrowed again to keep the majority
: – that was my concern.

: C11: That 10-year period from 1964 from the release of the
: Carrera was probably the most creative in the company’s
: history…

: JH: …yes, absolutely. I can say that from 1964-74 the
: Federation Horlogere had a comparison to give the key figures
: at the end of the year. We were the fastest Swiss company in the
: watch industry. We were a little company when I took over, we
: had turnover of CHF2 million and 10 years later we had CHF28
: million, so it was quite a spectacular growth period…but then
: we fell down a lot.

: C11: Specifically I wanted to ask you some questions about
: the Monaco. Everyone knows the link with Steve McQueen, but what
: about before that- how did you develop the Monaco?

: JH: It was quite simple: we were working for 3-4 years on this
: Calibre 11 movement, the world’s first automatic chronograph,
: and we knew that would be a major event. Our Swiss chronograph
: exports starting tumbling, because in the late 1950s the
: automatic watch became the call of the day. Knowing this, we
: prepared in 1967-8 the line that we would be launching in 1969
: for the Basel fair.

: So we decided to make a Carrera, because the Carrera was already a
: very good model in non-automatic. We made it in self-winding,
: but this movement [Calibre 11] was quite a bit thicker, so we
: had to change the shape a little bit. And then we decided that
: we need something for our Automotive-Aviation market, so we made
: the Autavia and we said now we have covered our key markets, why
: don’t we do something a little more “out-of-the-box”?

: In those years it was the case makers, such as Piquarez who would
: be the creative people. They would have a designer who would
: make dummies in brass, in a softer material to see how we liked
: it. So, one day he comes with a square, waterproof case. And he
: said, “look I have a patent on this waterproof square case,”
: which had a new system.

: Chronographs when they took water, it was a terrible drama because
: everything rusted and it cost a fortune to get clean. Once they
: had invented the water resistant push-buttons, we never made any
: non-water-tight chronographs any more and therefore would
: couldn’t play with the shapes, because square watches
: weren’t really water resistant. He had a very clever system,
: so I negotiated with him an exclusivity- that was my point. I
: had the exclusive rights in the chronograph market for the
: square case, as I wanted something that Breitling or somebody
: like that couldn’t take suddenly.

: So, he gave me this exclusivity and then we launched the product
: [the Monaco]…and it was basically a failure.

: C11: Too radical for the time?

: JH: It was too radical for t he time and the other thing was that
: unfortunately Seiko came out with a self-winding chronograph the
: year afterwards and then in 1970 the US dollar started to float,
: so suddenly the retail price doubled, so that’s why we made
: the Calibre 15, without losing face we could drop the price a
: little bit.

: C11: There are a few of your famous watches that I wanted to
: show you and get your recollection and memories about those
: watches.

: Firstly, this PVD Monaco that came out very late- vintage
: collectors love this one

:
:

: JH: I don’t really remember- you see, the military black became
: the fashion in the late 1970s and we were some of the early
: users of military black- it didn’t cost that much to take your
: existing case and have the PVD added, so we had to enlarge the
: collection as maybe someone would buy some more of the Monaco,
: but I don’t remember when we did it.

: C11: This Monaco is very rare- maybe there are only 15-20
: pieces…

: JH: …exactly, maybe we said let’s make 100 pieces to try it,
: but it wouldn’t have been 15- if we make it, we would make
: 100.

: C11: The next one is the “Siffert” Autavia- what are some
: of your memories of this watch?

:
:

: JH: Well the Autavia non-automatic was a watch that the
: automotive world liked- Jochen Rindt had one- it was the one
: thing that people in the automotive world liked to carry. And so
: therefore this one [The Chronomatic Autavia] we made both in
: white and black, as you know, and so because it was called
: Autavia, we said to Jo [Siffert] that this is the one that you
: should wear most of the time, so that was the idea.

: Jo as you may know from his background, he was a very poor guy and
: he was a born ”wheeler and dealer” and he would always have
: a collection of watches, and he would place them with all of his
: friends on the circuit, between wholesale and retail [prices],
: and we didn’t mind of course because it was in public and so
: actually the Formula 1 circuit, if you looked around, they all
: wore a Heuer Chronograph….

: C11: …all bought from Jo!

: JH: All from Jo! So we supplied him- he paid for it, right, but
: he got wholesale. We were very supportive of that trading
: activity because he put it exactly in the right hands of those
: in his world.

: C11: And here is another one..

:
:

: JH: Yes, this of course is the one that I gave all of the Formula
: 1 drivers and it was engraved with the name on the back and the
: blood type- not sure if they all have the blood group, but some
: had.

: One of the reasons that we put the name in the back was so that
: they wouldn’t re-sell it, because these drivers would change
: team- they didn’t stay very long with their team- let’s say
: they were two years with Ferrari and then he [Enzo Ferrari]
: threw them out and then another guy came, so over the nine years
: that we were with Ferrari we had 15 different Ferrari drivers
: and they all had the chronograph and interestingly enough it
: worked. Niki Lauda remembers his watch- it was stolen from
: somewhere in his garden, in his house.

: When we relaunched the Carrera in 1996, some of the Formula 1
: drivers came and they would all come with their gold
: chronographs to show me, so there is a lot of emotion to that.

: One thing that I’ll never forget is that 5-6 years ago it was the
: Grand Prix of Monaco and Gilles Villeneuve’s son, Jacques, he
: had this big boat and he had his mother on the boat, and so he
: gave a little reception on the boat and we had to go up these
: stairs to get to the top deck where we had the reception and at
: the top of the stairs was his mother who received guests. When I
: was introduced to her, she said “You know that I still have
: the watch that you gave to my husband” and so you nearly cry,
: it’s so emotional to think that she cherishes this gold watch,
: so these are some of the memories…this is one of my favourite
: watches.

: We didn’t sell it with the gold strap- it was the Americans who
: put it on afterwards.

: C11: This one, I know that you went across to the US in the
: ‘70s to look at what was happening with electronic watches, so
: this one was a real revolution.

:
:

: JH: Yes, the world’s first…the world’s first. You see, I
: was involved as an electrical engineer in the semi-conductor
: development and we [Heuer] were very touched directly, because
: the stopwatches were bigger, before miniaturisation had gone all
: of the way, you could make a stopwatch relatively easily, so we
: made the Microsplit, the big red box, the world’s first in
: 1/10 th/ second. We made our own custom chip in California and
: then shortly after with the 1/100 th second and then the
: semi-conductor industry started making standard watch chips, so
: it was easy to make- you could just buy it from around the
: corner.

: So, I took my stopwatch chip and we took the watch chip and we made
: two modules on the same plate- we had a factory where we had
: people doing all of these things. We mounted the two
: technologies because there was no other way to do this with LCD-
: we didn’t have the chip yet. This is the watch that Ferrari
: had made with their logo.

: And then the year later it was LCD/ LCD because we had the
: stopwatch chip- two digits- it was only 1/10/ second as you saw
: and then we had the 1/100 th second with two LCD displays.

: C11: The last one is very interesting…

:
:

: JH: Yes, very interesting…

: C11: ….because the diver watch which turned into the Heuer
: 100 and then the TAG Heuer 1000 started here, but the company
: must not have been certain about how it would be received,
: because the first watches were out-sourced to Monnin.

: JH: Not quite true. You must see, where did we sell our sports
: timers? We would go the world’s sporting-goods fairs and our
: importers would go the local sporting-goods fairs because the
: sporting-goods dealers would buy stopwatches.

: And in these fairs we would have a stand and also show wrist
: watches, because in those years we were happy for any sale, we
: didn’t care about distribution in the late 70s in the middle
: of the crisis!

: And so people came from the skin-diving companies and they said
: that we have problems getting a good quality skin-diving watch-
: they couldn’t get it from a big brand, they didn’t want to
: allow them to buy it with the [Skin-diving] brand, and so we
: started making and double-branding with some of the big names in
: skin-diving equipment, such as Auricoste.

: And would you believe it, these watches started selling like crazy!
: The company came out of trouble because of these watches. You
: know, Bo Derek wore one; we have it now in the museum. Somebody
: sent back to the factory two of these models from Colombia [USA]
: and we couldn’t repair them and didn’t have them in the
: Museum, so we offered the guy one new TAG Heuer if he left the
: watches with us.

: Actually, the company started getting out of trouble because of
: these watches and we had the guts to be a little bit like Rolex,
: and actually Rolex tried to give us a hard time but they
: couldn’t because it [some of the design elements] was now in
: the public domain. The market which exploded was Japan. I took a
: new agent in Japan and he started in the sporting goods and it
: suddenly took off. He went into the area of Tokyo where the
: young people would go and that’s how the company took off
: again in 80, 81, 82, this was the thing that was growing.

: So, some we didn’t make them ourselves, so yes once we sourced
: from France, but we also sourced from Switzerland, so yes, we
: did source from France, but not in the beginning, because we
: designed the outside and the dial also.

: C11: I now wanted to move forward- I know that in the 1980s
: after you left and went into the electronics industry, so what
: was it like in 1996 when you started to see the re-editions of
: the watches that you’d built 20 years earlier?

: JH: I didn’t give a damn…I was still angry.

: C11: So what changed with later re-editions when you came back
: after LVMH bought TAG Heuer?

: JH: That was different approach. Jean-Christophe [Babin- TAG
: Heuer CEO] was very smart because he would tell everybody
: “listen, I don’t understand this industry, explain it to
: me” and then he invited me also, because he wanted to see the
: people who used to run the shop and somehow it clicked, we got
: along- I gave him some recommendations and it work, so it just
: clicked, so that’s nice.

: C11: My last question is how you are involved with the company
: today- which of the current designs have you been involved with?

: JH: Well, I’m not operationally involved- at all, but I do
: get- or used to because I’ve slowed down now that I’m
: getting older- a briefing every quarter or 2-3 times a year on
: what was being done in R&D, because Jean-Christophe felt that it
: was quite good if I talked to these young engineers who were
: hired by the group, so I would sometimes give them some
: recommendations or point out little details, which they
: appreciated- some didn’t, which is fine.

: So that’s one thing and then when there were major product
: developments they would ask me what I think, and I’d give my
: opinion- but it’s only a recommendation and one opinion- its
: important to put it in context.

: But I did get involved in the Grand Carrera, because there was
: another name at first that I didn’t like [“Vanquish”]- and
: I did not like Vanquish and they said, well there is an Aston
: Martin called this, but I just didn’t like it for a watch. So
: that was one of the few times that I made some resistance. In
: the end they didn’t ask me about the name Grand Carrera, but
: of course I was delighted.

: We went through about three design processes for the Grand Carrera
: and we got stuck- they would show me all the time- and one of
: the things that I pointed out, the key was that something was
: missing – look at the Carrera bezel- the depth of the bezel is
: so important in a dial. And they suddenly put in the inner bezel
: and the Grand Carrera looked totally different – it added to
: the depth, so there I made a contribution, but that’s one of
: the very few cases.

: The Pendulum I contributed to- I pushed that. The engineer who had
: the idea, he called me up and I liked working with these
: “out-of-the-box” ideas. He already had the mock-up in wood.
: He called me up at home and said, “What do you think about the
: idea”? And I said that it was a terrific idea, if you manage
: to get it working it will be sensational.

: And then I helped him to get a budget and they were able to prove
: that it was feasible and then TAG Heuer had to put a lot of
: money into it! But I can say that I did push Jean-Christophe to
: bring it out for the 150 th year anniversary, I said,
: “Listen, this is such a major thing that it will shake up the
: industry and people will have a hell of a lot of respect for us
: having tried, to think out of the box like that”.
: ***
: Of course, I would happily have discussed these vintage Heuer
: watches with Jack for another few hours, but there were
: customers to meet- everyone wants to meet Jack Heuer. What I
: liked was that the "out of the box" spirit that Jack
: said drove the original Monaco is the same spirit that he saw in
: the TAG Heuer Pendulum. The watches may have changed, but the
: passion and desire to push the boundaries have not.
:

: Photos:
: 1) TAG Heuer
: 2)-6) OnTheDash
: 7) Classic Heuers
: 8. TAG Heuer
: