When the redesigned Louis Vuitton Tambour was introduced in mid-2023, it marked a change in direction for the Parisian luxury company’s watch division.
The time-only steel sports watch started at $18,900, about three times the cost of the collection’s previous entry point. At the time Jean Arnault, the company’s director of watches, acknowledged that the new design, with its focus on high-end finishing, was “a gamble.”
Eighteen months later, Mr. Arnault said the bet had not yet paid off, but he was playing a long game. “Commercially, it’s working quite well,” he said. “But collectors I was in contact with initially were happy to see Louis Vuitton moving in that direction, but skeptical when it came to buying.
“It takes around three years for a design to settle — 2025 will be that year.”
And last month he added a new series of 11 Tambour models at even higher prices than the 2023 pieces.
One of them, the Tambour Convergence, is what watchmakers call a montre à guichet, or aperture watch, with a window in the dial through which the time is read on two rotating discs. The 37-millimeter watch, which Mr. Arnault said was intentionally designed to be unisex, is offered in pink gold ($33,500) or platinum set with 795 diamonds ($60,500).
“All of our watches in the future will be unisex as long as the competition allows,” he said.
The Tambour Taiko Spin Time collection features an existing Louis Vuitton complication: spinning blocks at the 12 hour-marker points indicate the time. The six-model collection includes a world-time version called Air Antipode ($99,500), and tops out with the Air Flying Tourbillon, a design that displays the tourbillon, a device that counters gravity’s effects on timekeeping ($172,000).
Louis Vuitton also introduced four new in-house automatic movements into the Tambour collection.
“I like for collectors to understand Vuitton is not in the watchmaking business to make volumes,” said Mr. Arnault, 26. “We’re here to please collectors. We’re not trying to triple volumes. We stand for artisanal watchmaking.”
As a result, some designs may have a deliberately short shelf life. “I’m a conservative guy and I want to make sure collections are as small as possible,” he said. “As soon as we introduce something new, we remove something else. Will Convergence become part of our core collection? I don’t know.”
Under Mr. Arnault’s direction, Louis Vuitton has integrated skills and artisans into its La Fabrique du Temps watchmaking factory in Geneva. The division, called La Fabrique des Arts, was opened in 2023 and has added enamelers, engravers and gem setters. He said the factory’s staff numbers had increased to about 200 from 60 and that more than 80 percent of any Louis Vuitton watch is now produced in the factory.
Mr. Arnault declined to provide sales figures, but said the watch division’s annual output was in the low thousands and that he hoped to grow production by 2 to 3 percent a year.
Is there a market for Louis Vuitton watches beyond collectors? “It’s too early to say,” Mr. Arnault said. “But a lot of the feedback from top collectors is that they love Vuitton watches because they don’t see them on other people’s wrists. I want to keep that.
“It’s sort of anti-business, but it’s better for us to position ourselves in that community rather than to have a watch on everyone’s wrist.”
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