Panerai
With CEO, Jean-Marc Pontroué
“H
ow can you create the watches of the future?”
More modern tech? Lean into luxury? For function only?
This was the question posed by Jean-Marc Pontroué when we sat down to talk with the Panerai CEO earlier this year. Of course, he already knows the answer, at least for his company. To the man at the helm of the forward-thinking brand, it’s none of those things, but sort of all of them, too.
Like the soft, relaxed tailoring omnipresent in the streets of Milan, or the storied cuisine bolstered by centuries of customs and traditions, there’s a certain authentic elegance that the Italians have mastered. It’s no surprise this ethos extends to a watch brand that was conceived there. Still heavily influenced by its birth country, even though many of its operations have now moved to Switzerland, Panerai represents an amalgamation of all the characteristics men love in a watch. Exceptional function. Luxurious style. Masterful craftsmanship.
But Panerai is doing something wholly unique in the sometimes uniform watch culture. Panerai’s designs can be bold, big and eye-catching. They are also reliable, functional and ready to tackle the toughest conditions. And an increasing number of their designs are all of these things while maintaining a cutting-edge focus on sustainability.
“Innovation is not only about movements or product,
it’s also about the way your customers experience the brand.“
The brand’s origins trace back to its namesake, Giovanni Panerai, and his repair shop and watch making school founded in 1860. From these humble beginnings, the Panerai name planted roots in Florence and was contracted by the Italian Navy to craft functional, yet distinctly Italian timepieces. Many of the brand’s signature characteristics can still be traced to these early days: the big cushion-shaped steel case, large Arabic numbers on the face, luminescent numerals and indexes, and wire lugs welded to the case.
Many of the brand’s innovations evolved over time from this military-driven focus, but in the early ’90s, Panerai introduced several designs into the consumer market for the first time. Building on their design and technical know-how, the brand began to take off, introducing their distinctive aesthetic to a broader audience.
Around this time, Panerai caught the eye of Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone, who chose a Luminor Marina to wear in his 1996 action flick, “Daylight.” This fortuitous partnership was the spark the brand needed, and by 2002 they had released their first in-house movement, signaling the shift from function-focused designers to true innovators in the world of watches.
“When we were created originally, we were instruments for the Italian Navy,” Jean-Marc says. “Today we are one of the top 20 brands in the world. We have our design center in Milan, which is inspired by all of what’s happening in Italy, especially in Milan where we are surrounded by fashion houses and accessory companies.”
Today, while many brands carve out a specific lane—luxury, adventure, legacy—Panerai has been able to channel all these pillars into their design and unite around a shared vision of Italian style and Swiss watchmaking innovation. All this is embodied in their Laboratorio di Idee.
“It’s a special department that we have in Neuchâtel [Switzerland] in which about 30 people are working on new ideas,” he says. “This is the only department in our company which has the authorization to get up to 99% of failure.”
This license to fail is the type of creative freedom that has produced some of the brand’s iconic innovations over the last decade. All in all, the painstaking craftsmanship and detail of these watches is a remarkable thing to behold.
“We have about 60 different steps in developing products,” he says. “All of these are made by hand. You have up to 500 components in some of our watches. In a normal Panerai watch, you have about 160, 170 different components. A watch, if you use it every day, is something which has to work all the time.”
But even with all these details, Jean-Marc is quick to point out that it’s not just about the nuts and bolts.
“Innovation is not only about movements or product; it’s also about the way your customers experience the brand,” he says.
And they are curating a special community tied to experiences that gives more meaning to the Panerai world, centered around their partnerships with professional explorers and adventurers like Mike Horn and Jimmy Chin, and an upcoming event with the Navy SEALs.
“When we create experiences like we did with Jimmy Chin in Jackson [Wyoming], we invite something like 25 of our best customers,” Jean-Marc says. “They can have the watches only if they participate for 48 hours with Jimmy. It’s part of the emotional dimension of the brand. And we work a lot on this aspect.”
These once-in-a-lifetime experiences give even more commemorative meaning to the watches that are tied to them. And their ambassadors are intrinsically tied to the brand’s sustainability mission.
“Mike Horn was telling me, ‘When I go to the North Pole, there is nobody here, and nobody has been here before me, but I see plastic pollution because of the wind, because of the flow of the water. You should do something about that,’” he says.
Because of Panerai’s connection to the sea, they were especially motivated to help. One day as Jean-Marc was visiting him, Horn had to replace a propeller shaft in his boat.
“It happened to be made from the same steel that we use for some of our watches, and he said, ‘You should make something out of it,’” Jean-Marc recalls.
“When we create experiences… it’s part of the emotional dimension
of the brand and we work a lot on this aspect.“
In Neuchâtel, the watchmakers were able to repurpose the shaft into cases, crowns, bezels and case backs. The material was dubbed EcoTitanium, and the limited-run watches were eventually offered as part of an experience training with Horn in the Arctic. It spurred them on, and since this discovery, the brand has brought a new sense of urgency to its sustainability commitment.
“We decide every day on new measures to fight against our carbon footprint, not once a week or once a year,” he says. “We created the eLAB-ID, which is the first watch that is close to being 100% recycled. By 2025, all our steel models will be switched to eSteel. All our packaging will be recycled by 2023.”
They’re understandably proud of their innovations around the recycled eSteel concept, but they realized that to make a bigger impact, they needed to go a step further. So they’ve gone completely transparent, inviting competitors to access their costs, methods and suppliers for the material.
It’s an unusual approach in the normally secretive world of luxury watchmaking, but one that Jean-Marc feels is vital. Because there’s the way things have been done in the past, and what we’ve known to be true, and what can be possible in the future. Like any great adventurer, for Jean-Marc, and for Panerai, the excitement is in the blank canvas of the undiscovered.
