Yahoo Finance Watches of Switzerland Opens Latest Multibrand Showroom in Midtown Manhattan
Watches of Switzerland continues to expand its retail network in the U.S. with the opening of its latest multibrand showroom on the East Coast.
The newly opened boutique is located at the base of One Vanderbilt, one of Midtown Manhattan’s tallest office towers, which stands 73 stories high at the corner of 42nd Street and Vanderbilt Avenue, next to Grand Central Terminal. The new store, on the corner of 41st Street and Madison Avenue, is the group’s first multibrand showroom in Midtown Manhattan, joining existing units in SoHo and Hudson Yards.
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The One Vanderbilt boutique occupies a 2,895-square-foot space and is anchored by brands such as Cartier and Omega, which are housed alongside Analog:Shift, Watches of Switzerland’s in-house vintage and pre-owned offering. The boutique also has dedicated areas for Zenith, Girard-Perregaux, Omega and Roberto Coin jewelry.
“We see this area as another area of opportunity to show off luxury timepieces to people, particularly the kind of people that are traveling in and out of New York on a daily basis,” said David Hurley, Watches of Switzerland’s deputy chief executive officer. “It’s got incredible visibility, and even from our brand partners, they have noticed this store has significantly more people coming to this location with far more responses than we had with Hudson Yards or SoHo and I think that’s really down to the visibility that it has. It’s again similar to Hudson Yards with the storefront that we have. It’s a billboard for us effectively in that location as well. So we really see it as complementary to the rest of the distribution that we have with the New York metro area.”
The Watches of Switzerland group acquired 100 percent of the Roberto Coin jewelry brand’s North American operation for $130 million, with exclusive perpetual rights to import and distribute Roberto Coin throughout the U.S., Canada, the Caribbean and Central America.
Roberto Coin is the sixth-largest jewelry brand in the U.S., the world’s largest branded jewelry market.
“We’re certainly very serious about jewelry as a group. It’s about 7 or 8 percent of our overall sales, but obviously with the acquisition of Roberto Coin that’s going to change,” said Hurley. “We also feel that there continues to be an ever-increasing trend towards branded jewelry. And therefore to put in shop-in-shops for Roberto Coin or Messika that they can certainly sit side-by-side next to Omega, Girard-Perregaux or even Zenith, so we see it as complimentary. At some of our Mayors stores we’ve had a huge success with the renovations and expansions but we probably gave over space for timepieces so we see it as complimentary. We’ve also done some jewelry pop-ups in some of our other stores such as in Hudson Yards, SoHo and Las Vegas and we’ve seen pretty good success.”
This also marks the first Watches of Switzerland boutique that will integrate both jewelry and watches under one roof at point of opening, with the addition of Messika on the jewelry front.
The group’s plans for expansion in the U.S. do not see any signs of slowing down, as a phase of renovations and expansions are happening, including converting one of the Mayors stores in Atlanta to a full boutique, with a second Watches of Switzerland store opening up Minneapolis in 2025.
Last week financial results for the fiscal year for the Watch of Switzerland group in the U.S. were revealed and showed sales up 11 percent for the year and 14 percent for the fourth quarter ended in April.
Watches of Switzerland Group now has 55 locations in the U.S., including 25 partnership monobrand locations and 30 multibrand stores.
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