But he remains humble.
“I have to say that’s not just my doing,” he said. “At the end, it’s the product. If you want to be successful in the long term, it has to be the product. And I also believe if you want to be successful, you cannot be really successful in just one market.”
Hence UlysseNardin’s expansion across the globe, something Hoffmann himself directly influenced.
“What I did in the United States was only possible because I had the support from Switzerland,” he said.
As for what’s next for UlysseNardin, Hoffmann has a few things in mind.
“The watch industry is actually very old-fashioned,” he said. “I think the way things are being put together are still the same, but the materials we work with have a lot of potential. You know, in the past you had the time where everything had to be complicated. The more complication you could put in the watch, the more proud you were. Today, I think it’s going back to simplicity.”
This simplifying state of mind can be noted in the recent wave of thin watches that have inundated the market.
“A lot of companies are going to go thin,” he said.
But UlysseNardin will keep its feet firmly planted in each market, serving their needs and wants respectively.
“One thing that is a very healthy aspect of UlysseNardin is the distribution is mixed very equally. So the Americas, Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia,” he said. “The growth is going to be in India, in the Eastern European countries, it’s going to be in China. And Brazil is a place where luxury is going to have a big place in future.”
But UlysseNardin still counts the United States as one of its major markets – a fact Hoffmann has a personal stake in.
“The United States was the biggest market for
