A little more than a year ago, when Ilaria Resta was interviewing for the role of chief executive at the Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piguet, she and her family spent a few days in the Vallée de Joux, the area in the Jura Mountains known as the cradle of Swiss watchmaking.
“It was a way for me to immerse myself where it all started,” Ms. Resta, 50, said on a video call last month from the brand’s boutique in Geneva.
“I walked around the lake,” she said, referring to the Lac de Joux, a five-minute drive from the brand’s headquarters in the village of Le Brassus. “You see this view, this calm. All of a sudden, the notion of time is changing. And that was a moment for me. I said, ‘OK, I feel I belong here.’”
Ms. Resta, who joined the brand in August, now commutes to Le Brassus from her home in Geneva, where she lives with her husband and their 16-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son. The 50-minute trip north, which she called “a meditation drive” because the poor reception prevents her from making phone calls, places her amid both the literal and metaphorical peaks of Swiss watchmaking.
Since its founding in Le Brassus in 1875, Audemars Piguet has been at the prestige end of the watchmaking spectrum. Regarded by watch insiders as one of the industry’s “Big Four” brands, along with Rolex, Patek Philippe and Richard Mille, the family-owned company had an estimated 2023 turnover of 2.35 billion Swiss francs ($2.6 billion), according to Morgan Stanley. That report, issued in February, ranked it fourth by sales, behind Rolex, Cartier and Omega.
With no experience in the watch industry, Ms. Resta, was not an obvious choice for the chief executive role. Introduced to the brand by a recruiter, she had been working since 2020 as president of a global division at Firmenich, a family-owned fragrance company in Geneva. She also spent 23 years at Procter & Gamble, most recently as senior vice president of its North American hair care division, based in Cincinnati. She is a native of Naples, Italy, with a bachelor’s degree in economics and marketing and a master’s in financial mathematics from the University of Naples Federico II.
Despite her lack of watch experience, Ms. Resta said, she certainly was familiar with timepieces after living in Geneva for the better part of the past 22 years. “You cannot exit the airport without being an expert on all the watch advertising,” she noted.
Jean-Philippe Bertschy, a luxury goods analyst at Vontobel, a private banking and investment management group based in Zurich, said that hiring an executive from a nonluxury background was “a bold move” for Audemars Piguet.
Oliver R. Müller, founder of LuxeConsult, a watch consultancy in Aubonne, Switzerland, said he was surprised that the brand hadn’t hired an executive from the hospitality industry, given the luxury watch trade’s growing emphasis on experiential retail.
“But Ilaria is definitely a triple A choice,” he said. “It’s very wise to take, finally, a woman and secondly, someone not from the watch industry. She will bring fresh air. She won’t say, ‘At this brand, we did it this way.’”
Statement of Intent
Ms. Resta succeeded François-Henry Bennahmias, who started at the brand in 1994 and rose through its ranks until he took the top spot in an interim appointment in 2012 (the title became permanent in 2013). He announced in 2022 that he would be leaving the following year.
Beloved by collectors for his brash leadership style, Mr. Bennahmias presided over a period of noteworthy growth for the brand, much of it driven by partnerships he helped cement in the music business and a greater focus on direct-to-consumer sales. In 2017, the brand opened the first in a series of AP Houses, private clublike spaces designed to foster social interactions with clients, which now operate in global capitals from London to Tokyo.
When the brand made Ms. Resta’s appointment public in May 2023, speculation in the watch press centered on what it hoped to achieve with a female chief executive, one of just two in the industry’s upper echelons (the other being Catherine Rénier of Jaeger-LeCoultre, a neighbor in the Vallée de Joux).
“To me, the appointment of Ilaria Resta is a very clear statement of intent from Audemars Piguet,” Wei Koh, founder of Revolution magazine, wrote in May. “And that intent is that they have every ambition to take over the No. 1 position in luxury watches from Cartier.”
Mr. Koh cited a 2023 interview with Revolution’s Eleonor Picciotto in which Mr. Bennahmias was quoted as saying the brand’s immediate future was with women: “We want to make our women’s watches the equivalent of the Hermès Birkin.”
Ms. Resta would not go into detail about strategy. She said her first order of business had been “getting to know the people.”
“And then it was a full immersion in the manufacture,” she said. “I visited every workshop, literally almost every bench of all the manufacturing sites in Switzerland. And that was eye-opening. You could read as much as you want, you might see all the videos about watchmaking, but when you see how long it takes to do it, the precision required, the attention to detail, you realize, ‘My God, this is really impressive.’”
In October, Yoni Ben-Yehuda, head of watches at Material Good — the New York retailer that operates the AP House in New York City and three of the brand’s boutiques across the country — met Ms. Resta in Le Brassus, where he helped train her in the brand’s history, timepieces, collectors and market positioning.
“It’s so exciting to know that a leader who doesn’t come from this world has a point of view, but is humble enough to listen, take information in and apply that information to insight,” he said.
Since Jan. 1, when Ms. Resta officially took over from Mr. Bennahmias, she said she had focused on three areas: “innovation, client-centricity and savoir-faire.” (She also is working on her French, the language used at the brand’s headquarters. She said she spoke Italian and English, but, in French: “My starting level was pretty basic.”)
Innovation — especially in the form of ambitious building projects — has been a running theme at the brand for the past few years. In 2020 in Le Brassus, it opened a museum, the Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet, designed by the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. A year later, it completed a manufacturing site in Le Locle, another village about a 90-minute drive northeast of Le Brassus. A former Renaud & Papi workshop, the Manufacture des Saignoles now specializes in the brand’s most complicated timepieces.
In 2022, the brand opened a luxury hotel, Hôtel des Horlogers, also designed by Mr. Ingels, in a space adjacent to the museum and factory in Le Brassus. And in late 2023, it began construction of a new industrial building in Meyrin, on the outskirts of Geneva, that is to house the company’s case and bracelet production starting in 2025, when the project is expected to be completed.
Next year the brand also is scheduled to complete the first stage of what arguably is its most ambitious architectural project to date. Known as the Arc, the U-shape building will be connected to the factory in Le Brassus and total nearly 183,000 square feet across three floors and a basement. A news release said that, in addition to offices and work spaces, it is to have “a variety of small convivial spaces favoring relaxation and informal communication.”
The second phase of construction, targeted for completion by 2027, is to replace the factory with a new building “to ensure greater architectural coherence,” according to a statement from the brand.
A Circumspect Tone
Ms. Resta has entered the luxury watch business at a precarious moment. Sales soared during the pandemic, with demand in the primary market outstripping supply. That led a lot of prospective buyers to the resale market, pushing prices for sought-after steel sport watches — including Audemars Piguet’s defining model, the Royal Oak — to go for as much as five times their retail value.
Since the market began to cool in 2022, watchmakers — Ms. Resta included — have struck a circumspect tone about plans for growth.
“I am, in a way, glad that I’m entering at a moment where the market is going back to a more structural, organic type of growth,” she said. “I’m not obsessed with growth — what I’m chasing is the well-being of the company, so we can grow organically over another 150 years.”
To manage that effort, Ms. Resta said, she intends to draw on the marketing and brand building strategies she learned at Procter & Gamble, and her experience in different divisions. “It’s a tough test of surviving each quarter in a publicly traded company,” she said. “And I did it in different countries, so I was exposed globally.”
And the years she spent at Firmenich, she said, showed her “how to manage a family company with a Swiss governance.”
“I feel business prepared, not category prepared, but that’s how I staff my team,” she said. “I don’t look for expertise, I look for experience. And I look for skills and agility.”
After all, she said, “I like that I come with a fresh look and my questions enable others to challenge the status quo, which is important in any industry.”
One thing onlookers should not immediately expect is a radical departure from the agenda set by Mr. Bennahmias.
“I’m very cautious in not driving change unless I understand, because when you settle on ideas and impressions, sometimes you can change your mind,” Ms. Resta said. “I’ve been blessed in all my experiences to have people who have been extremely successful come before me, which sets the bar very high. And I love that.”
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