Most Smart Watches Not ‘Commensurate With What a Watch Company Would Produce,’ Says Movado CEO
Movado in the past year has made “a great deal of progress in evaluating the wearables category,” CEO Efraim Grinberg said Tuesday on an earnings call. Though Movado operates “predominantly in the luxury watch and fashion watch categories” and thinks…
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consumers “are drawn to our watches by their quality, beautiful designs and strong brand images,” the company also sees “significant opportunity in this new emerging space” of wearables, he said. “We have always embraced technology that allows us to make well-designed products that provide consumers with desired functionality.” And so Movado has “a number of projects” in the works “in close collaboration with several tech companies to develop smart watches for Movado that will celebrate a point of difference, with introduction planned for either later this calendar year or early next year,” he said. Movado as a company has “always been a leader in embracing innovation to make beautiful products,” Grinberg said in Q&A. “So when technology allows us to do that, we will embrace it and those are the projects that we are working on” in the wearables space, he said. But when it comes to most smart watches that previously have been introduced, “you’ve seen a lot of wearable products out there so far that are not beautiful products or commensurate with what a watch company would produce and much more commensurate with what a consumer electronics company would produce,” he said. “So those are the projects that we’re working on. And that’s really probably all I’m going to say, other than the fact that we are partnering with several technology companies on that front, and as soon as we have more news to announce about that, we will.”