'Luxury watches are for keeps'

Fashion may change with every season, but luxury watches are forever, says president and publisher of Chitralekha Group Mitrajit Bhattacharya, who is also the creator of the annual Watch World Awards.

Time pieces are being used as fashion accessories too, but Bhattacharya says there are very few common points between luxury watches and accessories.

"Apart from passion for their crafts, there is very little common between luxury watches and fashion accessories unless the watch is a line extension of a fashion label. Watches are for keeps whereas fashion changes every season," Bhattacharya told IANS.

He says a watch is a combination of art and science.

"Watches are as much of an art as it's a science. The passion comes from mechanical watches - hand-wound and automatic as well as quartz watches. Most sports watches are quartz or automatic ones. Digitial too exists for the younger target audiences," said Bhattacharya.

The fourth edition of Watch World Awards, which honour the best in the world of watch-making, will be held in Gurgaon Friday.

Bhattacharya believes that watch industry values old brands with updated technology.

"It's (watch industry) a 300-year-old industry which values old brands and new technologies. Though the brand values get passed on to newer generations, technological developments are a constant phenomenon," he said.

He says that Swiss is the gold standard in watch-making, but one can also get very functional watches from Japanese brands.

"Over the years, brands like Ulysse Nardin, Zenith, Harry Winston, Hublot, Cartier, Bulgari, Breitling, Citizen and Titan have won big due to their avant-garde products and marketing efforts," said Bhattacharya, who believes India is the future market for luxury watches.