H. Moser CEO Ed Meylan on Innovation, Collaboration, and the Building a Brand Identity
What is one supposed to make of H. Moser & Cie.? Ask a room full of collectors to describe the brand, and there are a handful of responses you’re sure to get: exciting, modern, and fun being foremost among them. Moser, under the watchful eyes of the Meylan family, has cultivated a unique offering, one characterized by a contemporary, streamlined (pun regrettably intended) catalog and an eye toward collaboration. Whether you’re wondering at one of the brand’s latest high-complication pieces or throwing on any of their impeccable time-only sports watches, it’s hard to deny that few brands manage to balance an appetite for solid, wearable, everyday watches with elegantly implemented complications, so nimbly as Moser. Even fewer manage to accomplish this while navigating the self-serious world of watches with the same sense of humor and energy that H. Moser & Cie. has under the stewardship of the Meylan family. I was lucky enough to spend an hour with Edouard Meylan, the CEO of H. Moser & Cie., to talk about everything Moser, and right off the bat, he acknowledged this tightrope. “I think we went further into this idea of bringing those two worlds together [the traditional and the modern]. Staying very traditional, like the movements and those kinds of things,” he explained, “but at the same time bringing a touch of more modern, more us. I couldn’t picture it back then I knew I wanted to bring that.” “I remember the first Baselworld, it was like the first...