‘I am totally in the world of Calvin Klein here in Dubai’

Going from journalist to president of a big-name watch and jewellery brand is an unconventional career progression — but like Arlette-Elsa Emch, president of CK Watch & Jewellery, declares, “The best way to be a good journalist is to find a way to go out of journalism.”

Sitting across from me at the Park Hyatt, in Dubai to launch the newest collection of CK watches, she tells the story of how she came to be the one being interviewed, rather than the other way about. “Switzerland is a small country and within ten years of being in journalism, I was bored,” she says candidly. Having sat down to interview Nicolas Hayek, chairman of the board at the Swatch group, and having been impressed, she wrote him (“a one page letter, no more, as he would naturally be a very busy man”) and asked for a job that involved working with him directly. He hired her immediately and put her to work in the communications department. 
Five years later (journalists have short attention spans), she was bored again, as she tells it, and told Hayek she wanted to do something else. With her family having been in the watch business, she asked to lead a brand. “Of course, he said, ‘but you don’t know anything about it,’ and I said, ‘I can learn’ and that was that. About six months later, he rang me, and asked if I was still interested. So when I said yes, he said, ‘start tomorrow,’” which is how she came to her job. Her first task was to launch the new brand — Calvin Klein watches — by the end of October that year, exactly nine months away (“a very short time to start work on a new brand”), so as to be in time for Christmas 1997. “It was out on November 3, three days late, which was just about acceptable.”
The brand itself, she says, “was an immediate success and that was the beginning of everything.” Among her responsibilities, she is member of the executive leadership of The Swatch Group, president of Léon Hatot fine jewellery and member of the board of directors at Jaquet Droz, Breguet and Glashütte Original. She is also responsible for the Swatch Group in Japan and South Korea. That’s when she isn’t heading up the management of Dress Your Body, which designs, develops and produces the jewellery lines for the different Swatch Group brands. So, she says, she isn’t bored yet, there’s enough on her plate to occupy her mind.
Her newest challenge is the unbranded jewellery sector — one of the pieces on display at the event is a broad white metal cuff bracelet with Calvin Klein emblazoned onto the front, rather than discreetly engraved on the back, where you might normally expect it to be. First the designers took ownership of your chest, then they moved to your undergarments, now it seems they’re seeking to cuff your wrists with their name. Slave to the design?
“Fashion is now much more about making an individual statement, about mixing and matching, about wearing Calvin Klein and H&M and Jimmy Choo all at once. So a branded bracelet must be a knock-out to reflect that,” Emch says, before explaining the brand’s raison d’etre further.
Schooled in economic and political journalism, she brings it down to the money: it’s part of an attempt to make inroads into the unbranded jewellery sector. “The watch industry discovered fashion only with Calvin Klein, Gucci, Armani. The first steps were very classic, earlier, people bought a watch for life. Swatch revolutionised that, and presented the watch as an idea, an attitude, a moment of life. For the fashion brands, watches are part of life, but also part of a dream. Like they revolutionised the watch industry, fashion designers are now revolutionising jewellery. Only a small percentage of jewellery is branded,” she says, throwing some numbers at me: the global watch business, she says, is worth $10 billion, while the jewellery business is five times more important. “And only a small part of that is branded, about ten per cent, made up by Tiffany, Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels. There’s a big difference between five and 50 billion and the case to enter the business is huge, everybody’s discovering that now. So we’re going to see are more and more jewellery brands.”
Calvin Klein jewellery was successfully launched in 2004, with a signature that was true to the brand’s style: sleek, sharp and sexy. Perhaps one of the first to seriously explore jewellery for men, with a strong, masculine, sexy feel, the brand confirmed that if jewellery is important to women, it is also becoming so for men. The jewellery is now available alongside the watches in the 60-plus markets where the brand is available.
Of these markets, the Middle East is the third most important segment after Europe and the Far East, with about 15 per cent of the total pie. “The Middle East is like our brand, it’s growing fast, it’s very unique and very modern. The architecture is kind of exaggerated, and the region is young and in the future, not static but dynamic,” says Emch. “I am totally in the world of Calvin Klein here in this part of Dubai. The world is one universe today, young people in the Middle East think and dress the same as young people in London and New York.”
So what’s her next step, then? Does she go back to writing? You can only keep a journalist away from her keyboard for so long, after all, before her fingers begin to itch to cast life into metaphor. Right on cue, Emch says, “Writing is like a sickness. Playing with words is something beautiful, so I think I’m going to write a book next. Behind every journalist is an ethnologist who’s constantly observing people. Travelling to the region, to Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Muscat, the cultures are fascinating.”