For decades marketing experts have sold luxury watches by appealing to customers’ love of adventure and adrenaline.
But a handful of independent brands are finding that it might be just as effective to tap into appetites of a more fundamental nature: Whether they are taking branding inspiration from cafe culture or producing watches with dials featuring tropical fruit and berries, watchmakers are showing that the route to customers’ wrists might well be through their stomachs.
It is not a totally new approach. About 10 years ago the cosmetics industry saw the success of so-called “foodie skin care” as beauty and wellness brands began to emphasize the organic qualities of their products. But could it really work with luxury watches?
A 2015 study by researchers at the University of Michigan found that people spend more when they are hungry, even on objects unrelated to food, so maybe watchmakers are onto something after all.
The approach can take different forms. At the simplest level, there is the industry’s tendency to rename colors as desirable foodstuffs. For example, pinkish watches are said to have salmon dials. Breitling sells what it calls a pistachio-green chronograph and Tudor, a chocolate-brown dress watch.
In September, the British brand Studio Underd0g — a company known for its lighthearted allusions to food, such as its best-selling red and green model Watermel0n — introduced a Series 03 Salm0n, its dial resembling the finely textured gray of salmon skin.
And that model came close on the heels of another attention-grabbing creation: a collaboration between Underd0g and the Swiss maker H. Moser & Cie on a limited-edition pair of watches in purple and orange meant to look like a sliced passion fruit. And called, of course, the Passion Project.
“I had spent a number of years working in the industry as a designer and I wanted to set myself a design brief: a watch that would be taken seriously by enthusiasts, but that also didn’t take itself too seriously,” said Richard Benc, the founder of Studio Underd0g. “It is a fine line to tread because it’s not the case that all I want Studio Underd0g to be is fruit on a dial.”
So far, however, the brand’s menu has included blueberries, mint chocolate chip ice cream, pumpkin and pink lemonade. But Mr. Benc noted that customers’ reactions to designs such as the duo of pizza-themed timepieces introduced at British Watchmakers’ Day in London in March has been overwhelmingly positive.
“I discovered and loved the Watermel0n project and I was like, ‘wow,’” said Edouard Meylan, Moser’s chief executive. “No way it would be something that would come naturally to me or I think anybody in my team, and it was the same thing with the purple and yellow. But the fact that we did it together helps me now perceive colors differently.”
Moser itself, however, is no stranger to gastronomic touch points, with dials in lime, citrus and — of course — smoked salmon. (Mr. Meylan also starred in a Moser Instagram video for a passion fruit “clocktail” — plus, on his personal IG channel, a blooper reel with runaway ice cubes and a dull knife.)
While color may be central to the design process, Mr. Meylan stressed that it also is important to create watches that are memorable and relatable.
“It connects in your brain with other things, and I like to find names that make that link easy to remember,” he said. “I mean, when you create a Pioneer Centre Seconds 42.8mm Automatic with a green dial, you don’t want that to be the name.
“I want them to have catchy names: the Citrus, the Funky Blue, the Green Dragon. The most successful or iconic watches usually have a nickname that is far away from the brand and model.”
For decades watch enthusiasts have come up with their own nicknames for favorite models. For example, the informal shorthand for categorizing Rolex’s GMT-Master variations has been the names of soft drinks: the Coca-Cola, Pepsi and even root beer. When the brand released a green and black model in 2022, fans deliberated before landing on Sprite.
Marketing specialists say the process helps provide a shortcut in the slow process of brand recognition.
“When you’re trying to establish, say, a new color, a new logo, a new visual, it takes a lot of impressions for consumers to link that to a specific brand name or company,” said Silvia Bellezza, an associate professor of business in marketing at Columbia Business School in New York. “When you’re adopting a new color, you’re trying to leverage the existing associations in consumers’ minds to make it easy to recall the product.”
That was the kind of thing Jonathan Ferrer had in mind when he founded Brew Watch Co. in New York in 2015.
As the name implies, the brand draws inspiration from the world of coffee. The machines and stopwatches used by professional baristas have inspired his designs, and the friendly, social nature of catching up over an espresso is something that Mr. Ferrer said he tries to evoke in everything he does.
In fact, he noted, associating his watches with a drink that a coffee industry organization says is consumed daily by almost 70 percent of all adult Americans is a genius act of covert marketing.
“The whole idea about this brand, whether you care about it or not, every day when you’re walking up the street, whether you pass the cafe or you’re actually getting your own coffee, you would subconsciously have to think about the watches,” Mr. Ferrer said. “As long as I give them that initial trigger, they’ll see it everywhere.”
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