JOURNEYS

WITH JACK During his quarter-century in the

watch industry, Jack W. Heuer
was often ahead of his time.

108 WatchTime April 2007

Jack Heuer's great grandfather, Edouard Heuer,
founded the Heuer company.

BY LUCIEN F. TRUEB

J
ack William Heuer didn’t really want to be in the watch
business. Born and raised in Bern, Switzerland, in 1932,
he was a scion of the family that owned and operated Ed.
Heuer & Co. SA, the watch company founded in 1860 by
his great-grandfather, Edouard Heuer.
But Jack didn’t pursue a career in watchmaking. In-
stead, he studied electrical engineering at the Swiss
Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, specializ-
ing in what was at the time a brand-new field, a
combination of business administration and pro-
duction engineering. When he graduated, he had
very little interest in pursuing a career in the
watch industry. Nevertheless, there was tremen-
dous pressure on him to join the family business.
Eventually, out of a sense of duty, he accommo-
dated the wishes of his father, Charles-Edouard
Heuer, and entered the firm in 1958 as an engineer.
The Heuer company he joined was small. It em-
ployed 35 people and was run by his father and uncle
Hubert. Ed. Heuer & Co. served a niche market, producing

A Heuer hand-held stopwatch from 1955

April 2007 WatchTime 109

PROFILE: JACK W. HEUER
The 1966 Microtimer was precise to 1/1,000 of a second.
chronographs and hand-held stopwatches. When Jack joined the com-
pany, the major market for hand-held stopwatches was the United
States, which soaked up two-thirds of world production. Heuer’s share
of the U.S. stopwatch market, however, was a measly two percent.
Clearly, changes had to be made. The company decided to set up an
American branch and gave the assignment to Jack. At the age of 27, he
set off for the United States. There, in 1959, he founded Heuer Time
Corp., located first in New York and later in Springfield, New Jersey, where
TAG Heuer USA remains today.
Jack spent four years in the United States. During that time, he
learned marketing strategies that had yet to be introduced back in
Switzerland. One example: hiring a small advertising agency to develop
a brand at a relatively low cost. Naturally, upon returning to Switzerland,
Jack Heuer wasted no time in applying this newfound knowledge to the
European market.
In 1962, the family firm faced an ownership crisis. Heuer was owned
jointly by Jack's father and uncle. Hubert’s children were not interested
in taking over his share of the business, so he decided to put his shares
up for sale. Jack was notified in New York City by telegram, which he
The Carrera watch was Jack Heuer’s baby. He
helped design it and came up with its name.
found on returning to his apartment after dinner. He immediately
rushed to the airport and managed to grab a seat on a flight to Zurich.
He arrived at Heuer headquarters in Bienne the next morning, just in
time to pay off his uncle in full and become the company’s majority
shareholder. He was able to acquire his holding thanks to generous cred-
it and the premature receipt of a portion of his inheritance.
110 WatchTime April 2007
Jack Heuer greets Ferrari founder Enzo Ferrari
Finding Ferrari
With Jack as managing director, Heuer prospered. In 1963, he launched
the Carrera chronograph, which represented the height of wrist-chrono-
graph technology at that time and for years to come. Jack was involved in
the design of the watch and it was he who came up with the name. Gis-
bert Brunner in his history of TAG Heuer, Mastering Time, tells the story:
“Jack came up with the idea during an automobile race in the Unit-
ed States — the Sebring 12 Hour Race — for which Heuer was in charge
of the official timekeeping. While conversing with driver Pedro Ro-
driguez, the subject turned to a rally which once took place in Mexico —
the Carrera Panamericana Mexico. This race, which was quickly aban-
doned due to dangerous conditions which the drivers had to face, had
originally been planned to promote the Pan-American Highway. Jack
went back to Bienne with the name that would symbolize watchmaking
perfection throughout the world.”
In 1964, Heuer took over its main competitor, Leonidas Watch Fac-
tory Ltd., of Saint-Imier, and changed its name to Heuer-Leonidas. Jack
Heuer foresaw that electronics would transform the watch industry
and he became a pioneer in the electronic watch field, helping to
launch several of the world’s first electronic timing instruments. The
first one came in 1966, when Heuer-Leonidas introduced the Micro-
timer, a compact electronic stopwatch that could measure time to
1/1,000 of a second.
In mechanical watchmaking, Jack was instrumental in the develop-
ment of the world's first self-winding chronograph with microrotor,
launched jointly by Heuer-Leonidas and Breitling on March 3, 1969. The
microrotor in the Chronomatic, as the watch was called, was produced
by the Büren watch factory; the chronograph mechanism was made by
Dubois Dépraz. The next year, Japan’s Seiko was already marketing its
PROFILE: JACK W. HEUER

one of the first non-automotive sponsors of the Formula 1 racing circuit.

From 1971 to 1979 all Ferrari drivers were under contract to wear the
Heuer Carrera gold chronograph.
The relationship with Ferrari lasted nine years, culminating in the de-
velopment of the ACIT system, which used a radio system not only to
identify each racing car, but also to report its lap time and number. This
was the same basic principle that was employed by TAG Heuer between
1992 and 2003 in the FIA Formula 1 world championships, and is now
also used by the Indy Racing League (IRL). Thanks to these ties to Ferrari,
Jack Heuer came to know personally all the Ferrari drivers, as well as the
company’s founder, Enzo Ferrari. The hookup also led to one of the
watch industry’s most famous product placements in a movie. When
Steve McQueen was filming the movie Le Mans (1971), he sought au-
thenticity by imitating Jo Siffert. As a result he wore a Siffert-inspired
racing suit sporting the Heuer logo and a Heuer on his wrist. McQueen
personally chose the Monaco watch seen in the movie from a selection
of Heuers that Jack Heuer showed him.

Jack Heuer (center) with Ferrari drivers Niki Lauda and Clay Regazzoni
own automatic chronograph at half the price of its Swiss competitors. The
pressure on the profit margins of Heuer-Leonidas was considerable. It was
a foreshadowing of things to come.
Jack was a pioneer not only in electronic watch technology, but also
in sports marketing. In the late 1960s, he looked for ways to identify the
Heuer brand more closely with Formula 1 and Ferrari. He learned that Jo
Siffert, the Swiss Formula 1 driver, was looking for financial backing.
Embracing Electronics
Running a Swiss watch company was not all fun and games, of course,
especially during the turbulent 1970s. In 1971, the U.S. dollar dropped
precipitously against the Swiss franc. Swiss watch prices in America sud-
denly went up by 40 percent, pricing them out of the market virtually
overnight. Companies had to reduce their prices. Somehow, Heuer
managed a slight profit in 1971, even though total Swiss watch exports
fell 1.8 percent that year, the first drop in 15 years.

Thanks to Jack Heuer, the Heuer watch

brand was one of the first non-automotive
sponsors in Formula 1 racing.

Jack approached him and soon the Heuer logo was on Siffert’s car and
Heuer watches were on his wrist. Jack soon arranged sponsorship deals
with other famous racers like Jacky Ickx, Clay Regazzoni and Niki Lauda.
Jack’s involvement in racing led to Heuer-Leonidas being selected as
the official timekeeper for Scuderia Ferrari in 1971. The Ferrari deal grew
out of Heuer’s own love of sports (an athlete himself, he was a member
of the Swiss University ski team) and his desire to develop timepieces
and timing devices for sports applications. Ferrari mistrusted the official
timekeeping in the long-distance races, and gladly accepted Heuer's of-
fer to build a special time printer that could identify the cars, their lap
numbers, and individual lap times. In return, Ferrari displayed the Heuer
logo on all its F1 and GT vehicles, and its drivers wore the logo on their
uniforms. The exposure did wonders for the Heuer brand, which was Jack Heuer’s baby: the Carrera

112 WatchTime April 2007

PROFILE: JACK W. HEUER

Upon his return to Switzerland, he called Pierre Renggli, the general

director of ASUAG, at that time Switzerland’s largest watch group,
whom Heuer knew personally (Renggli had been Heuer’s childhood
scoutmaster). He told Renggli what he had seen in California and
warned that it would change the Swiss watch industry forever. The
CMOS circuitry he’d seen there had extremely low current consump-
tion, which made it possible to power a watch’s integrated circuit for
several years with a single miniature button cell. For Jack, it was the right
time to shift gears — especially since ASUAG was able to afford it: it
cost less than a million dollars to set up a production plant for manufac-
turing integrated circuits. Sadly, Renggli did not heed Heuer’s advice.
In 1972, Heuer presented the world's first digital stopwatch, the Mi-
crosplit 800, a hand-held quartz stopwatch with an LED display. It be-
came a sensation. It initially cost 1,500 Swiss francs, but the price fell to
SF590 within a year. The LCD version, released a year later, sold for just
SF190. When it came to semiconductor technology, Heuer's company
was an early adapter among the Swiss; however, it would be a long time
before it earned any money with these new products.
Convinced that the electronic watch had a future, Heuer launched its
Chronosplit, the world's first chronograph watch with a combined LED-
LCD display, in 1975. It indicated time to 1/100 of a second on the LED
display. The Chronosplit Manhattan GMT, introduced in 1977, was an
even bigger success. It had an analog quartz movement made by Citi-
zen, in a hexagonal steel case, together with a liquid crystal display that
could be selected to show either the date or elapsed time.
Jacky Ickx wore the Heuer logo as a Ferrari driver.

Future Shock
In the spring of 1972, Jack Heuer read a story about Silicon Valley in
Business Week and decided to travel to California to see it for himself Meanwhile, the state of the worldwide currency markets still presented
during one of his many trips to the USA. He’d been aware of electronic problems. In 1973, the further devaluation of the U.S. dollar against the
watches as early as 1960, when America’s Bulova Watch Corp. launched
its transistorized tuning-fork watch, the Accutron. (Jack's father had a
close personal relationship with Bulova CEO Arde Bulova, and even sup- The Ferrari edition of the
plied him with chronograph movements.) Chronosplit of 1975
In California, Jack decided to look up Bob Noyce, the founder of Intel.
Noyce was a passionate Ferrari fan, and since Heuer was the sponsor of
the Ferrari racing team, the two got along very well. Noyce personally
gave Jack a tour of the company. Eventually, many upstarts from Intel

Jack Heuer was a watch-industry pioneer in

his embrace of electronic timekeeping and
his emphasis on sports marketing.

would leave to set up their own companies, a development that would

contribute significantly to the growth of Silicon Valley. Digital chips
were already being produced there for use in watches with both LED
(light-emitting diode) and LCD (liquid crystal) displays. Jack Heuer's Cal-
ifornia visit confirmed his belief that microelectronics would play an
enormous role in the watch industry.

114 WatchTime April 2007

PROFILE: JACK W. HEUER

Swiss franc led to substantial increases in the prices of Swiss watches in

the U.S. market. The prices of Japanese watches, on the other hand, re-
mained stable since the Japanese yen was pegged to the dollar. This trig-
gered a Swiss watch crisis; orders dropped significantly. Another dollar
devaluation of 27 percent followed, exacerbating the situation. Be-
tween 1971 and 1974, the prices of Swiss watches on the U.S. market
doubled. Still, Heuer-Leonidas was able to close the business year 1974
with a profit of 27 million Swiss francs. The next year the company cele-

In 2001, LVMH reunited Heuer the man with

Heuer the brand after a 19-year separation.

brated its 125th anniversary. Heuer-Leonidas had 300 employees and

distribution in 100 countries. However, in 1975, profits fell by a stag-
gering 40 percent as demand for Swiss watches slumped. Global ex-
ports dropped by 22 percent in units and 16 percent in value. The de-
cline led to a series of collapses in the Swiss watch industry. Among the
firms declaring bankruptcy was one of Heuer’s large customers,
Trauner, which saddled Heuer-Leonidas with losses of several hundred
thousand Swiss francs.
As the dollar continued to fall throughout the 1970s, the demand
for classic chronographs all but disappeared. Consumers wanted mul-
tifunctional quartz watches; digital models available at ever lower
prices made old-fashioned mechanical stopwatches obsolete. Among
the many casualties in the Swiss shakeout caused by the quartz revolu-
tion was Heuer-Leonidas. In 1982, the firm was taken over by the
Piaget Group and 50-year-old Jack Heuer left the company and the
watch industry. Three years later, Piaget sold Heuer to France’s TAG
Steve McQueen wore a Heuer Monaco in the film Le Mans.
The Heuer Chronosplit Manhattan GMT with analog hands and a digital
LCD display
(Techniques d’Avant-Garde) investment group, which renamed the
firm TAG Heuer.
Jack became a partner in an independent management consulting
firm and had little contact with TAG Heuer. In addition to his consulting
activity, he built a European marketing organization for a Hong Kong-
based consumer electronics group, IDT (Integrated Display Technology
Ltd.). Jack Heuer was the European director, in charge of branches in
London, Paris, Milan, Madrid, Frankfurt and Bern. He was executive di-
rector of the IDT International Group until 2000. He remained a member
of the supervisory board and the strategic management committee un-
til finally retiring in 2005.
In 1999, the LVMH Group acquired TAG Heuer. The new TAG Heuer
president, Jean-Christophe Babin, sought Jack’s assistance and wooed
him back to the company. Today, Jack holds the position of honorary
chairman of the firm that bears his name. He advises Babin and his team
on new product development, is involved with the construction of the
new TAG-Heuer museum in La Chaux-de-Fonds and travels the world as
an ambassador for the brand. Today, at 75, he is a respected elder
statesman of the industry to which he and his family have contributed
so much. One sign of the esteem in which he is held came in January
2007, at a gala dinner in New York. There the Jewelry Information Cen-
ter awarded its Gem Award for Lifetime Achievement to Jack Heuer in
recognition of his contributions to the Swiss watch industry. ■

116 WatchTime April 2007