Time Travels Nick's Picks.(The Good Life; BASEL WATCH FAIR)

Byline: Nick Foulkes

It was the penultimate day of the Basel watch fair (known as Baselworld) and I was chatting with Karl-Friedrich Scheufele, co-president of the watch and jewelry house Chopard. "Well, no one is going to bail out the watch industry like the car industry,' " he said. On the face of it, Scheufele's remark seemed rather obvious. But after giving it some thought, I began to see his point. After all, the Swiss watch industry employs real people and forms the heart of such communities as La Chaux de Fonds and Le Locle--and right now it is going though difficult times.

However, unlike Detroit, Switzerland can at least console itself that watchmaking culture is in better shape now than it was 30 years ago when cheap electronic watches from the Far East all but finished off the luxury mechanical timepiece. From near extinction the Swiss watch industry has battled its way back to occupy a place in the pantheon of personal possessions that would have once seemed unimaginable.

Until recently, a watch was for life. Now watches have become wardrobe items, with most affluent men having a small, or not so small, collection of watches for different occasions: sports, business, dress, the beach, etc. This cultural shift--coupled with the increasing number of business executives in the so-called new markets of the East--has created the watch boom of the last 20 years. Exports of Swiss watches have climbed from 5.1 billion Swiss francs in 1988 to 17 billion last year.

Given these demographic patterns, Tag Heuer CEO Jean-Christophe Babin expressed cautious optimism about the long-term future of the luxury watch. This is not to say that Babin does not see difficulties in the short term; as a producer of between 600,000 and 800,000 watches a year, his challenge is to spread the impact of the downturn across the company. One way that Tag Heuer is reacting to the crisis is by presenting pieces such as the new Aquaracer 500, a handsome, good-quality sports watch that epitomizes what this brand does well.

The same was true of another large-volume watchmaker, Rolex. Long one of the most reserved and opaque brands, there is a hint of glasnost at the home of the timepiece with the coronet. After many decades under the stewardship of the Heinniger family, there is a new CEO, Bruno Meier, who gave a much buzzed-about interview at the end of March with the Neue Zurcher Zeitung that ran under a headline claiming that watch exports might shrink by as much as one third. With this stark message in mind, Rolex launched one of its most commercial collections in some time: after such cult pieces as the Milgauss and the Deep Sea, this year saw the arrival of a new Datejust in a 41mm case, a more contemporary, attractive and salable reworking of what many people regard as the classic Rolex.

Another much-discussed brand in Basel was Breitling. Until now Breitling has relied on buying in the "engines" for its watches, but now it will be able to offer its customers the choice of a proprietary movement with a longer power reserve and other mechanical enhancements over current models. According to Count Franz Larosee, the architect of the brand's success in Britain, interest was brisk. "People seem to be adjusting to the crisis and realizing that while they have to be more careful, there is still business to be done," he said.