Early in his career, Jeffrey Cohen, the president of Citizen Watch America, quickly learned that he needed some sort of release from the pressures of work. So he started collecting Cuban cigars.
He estimates that he now has 4,000, in all shapes, sizes and taste notes.
“One hundred percent, smoking cigars is a form of relaxation,” he said during a video interview from his home in Florida. “You don’t think about it, but the breathing in and out, the nourishing taste of the flavor, it relaxes you and gives you time to think differently, to become creative and contemplate things you want to accomplish. I call it a good massage for the mind.”
Mr. Cohen, 64, is not the only executive who pursues a passion so he can get lost for a moment outside the watch world. Others include Laurent Lecamp, the managing director of Montblanc’s watch division, who runs marathons in freezing temperatures; Yves Piaget, the chairman of Piaget, who cultivates roses; and Georges Kern, the chief executive of Breitling, an avid cyclist.
Karl-Friedrich Scheufele, the co-president of Chopard, owns a winery; Marc Hayek, the chief executive of Blancpain, is a scuba diver; and many in the watch universe, including the independent watchmakers Richard Mille and Laurent Ferrier, enjoy motorsports.
And of course, until he sold his herd of dairy cows recently, there was Jean-Claude Biver’s renowned cheese making, with the watch veteran sharing tastes of his L’Etivaz cheese with friends and at watch events for almost two decades.
Echoing several of the watch executives turned hobbyists, Mr. Biver, now 75, said the time he spent with his cows and making cheese “became my passion. It enabled me to bring my passion to the highest level of art.”
Taking an Interest
Mr. Cohen — who is responsible for eight watch brands, including Citizen and Bulova, in North America, Latin America, Britain and Ireland — has been collecting Cuban cigars for nearly 40 years.
As a child, he recalled his father smoking cigars from time to time.
But Mr. Cohen didn’t begin to enjoy cigars himself until the mid-1980s when he was working at the Movado Group. Gedalio Grinberg, its founder, had fled Cuba during the Fidel Castro regime and had a great love of cigars.
“Gedalio Grinberg would walk around the office with a Cuban cigar in his mouth, and some of the other people in the office would smoke, too,” he said. “Smoking in the office was OK then, so I naturally took an interest.”
According to Mr. Cohen, he really honed his knowledge, taking an interest in how cigars are made, including the ripening of the leaves, the rolling of the cigar and the nuances of individual flavors. In recent years his hobby has expanded into collecting cigar accessories and cigar-related art, some of which he has on display in his office and throughout his three homes, and some of which he stores in his walk-in humidor at the house in the Berkshires, in western Massachusetts.
He has joined cigar clubs in New York City: first, the Grand Havana Room, but when that closed, Club Macanudo. He says he often invites business associates to join him there. “There is a great social aspect inherent in smoking cigars,” he said. “You share a mutual interest and discovery and by talking with others, you realize that many have the same other hobbies and likes.”
Many cigar lovers also are watch collectors, he said: “Both are generational, both involve hand craftsmanship and both offer a sense of fulfillment.”
Colors of Nature
Benoit de Clerck, the chief executive of Zenith, has been sailing (often competitively) since he was in his teens, a pastime that even has taken him around Cape Horn and into the Beagle Channel at the southern tip of South America.
“Everything changes in just a couple of seconds when you sail,” Mr. de Clerck, 55, said in a video interview from his office in Le Locle, Switzerland. “While it is a way to decompress, it is also a way to travel mentally.”
About 12 years ago sailing also led him to another interest — watercolor painting — as he realized the need to capture on paper the beauty of what he was seeing.
“It is a way for me to disconnect; it’s like an off button in my mind,” he said. “Not only is painting very calming, but it is a way to put a zillion things in my mind on hold.”
He said he painted landscapes, especially sunsets and sunrises, because he enjoyed color in nature. And while he understands watercolors’ traditional techniques, he tries to let his mind wander, rather than focusing on them.
“Painting can be challenging, but in a beautiful way,” he said. “It is a creative way to express what I see, to preserve the memories without a phone.”
Sometimes, Mr. de Clerck said, he paints for only 20 minutes or a half-hour, depending on the subject and his available time. Sometimes he keeps his paintings, others he has given away or even discarded.
But then, he said, painting is a lot like sailing: “It lets you express the way you live, the things you see, it lets you occupy your brain with something else so when you come back to reality you have a new perspective.”
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