Thomas Pruvot’s frequent requests for the time while his mobile phone was switched off on a long-haul flight to Hong Kong in 2005 led the then 25-year-old Frenchman on a quest for the ultimate accessory.
Together with a childhood friend, Pruvot envisioned a luxury phone that would fuse modern technology with centuries-old Swiss timekeeping. The resulting startup, Celsius X VI II, developed a limited-edition titanium and sapphire crystal handset featuring a complicated mechanical watch that retails for US$329,000.
As consumers increasingly rely on phones to tell the time and wear watches for status, Tag Heuer and Ulysse Nardin have also introduced high-tech handsets. Celsius aims to eventually sidestep perennial criticism about phones’ battery life by building a model that’s completely mechanically powered.
Photo: Bloomberg
“The mobile phone is becoming the ultimate accessory,” said Edouard Meylan, another Celsius cofounder. “We see our product as the pocket watch for the 21st century.”
The market for luxury mobile phones is expected to grow 37 percent between 2010 and 2015 to US$719 million, according to Euromonitor International. The biggest markets are China, Japan and regions such as the Middle East and Russia, where luxury tends to be more overt, according to Fflur Roberts, head of luxury goods research at Euromonitor.
Displaying wealth
Photo: Bloomberg
“It’s the smallest luxury market, but it’s also the fastest-growing,” Roberts said. “It’s an extension of a luxury watch or jewelry and it’s a way of displaying wealth or success.”
Nokia Oyj’s Vertu has the biggest share of the luxury phone market, according to Euromonitor. The UK company set up in 1998 has sold more than 300,000 phones in the past decade, President Perry Oosting said last year. It has more than 80 retail outlets and sells at counters in high-end watch stores.
Vertu introduced its first touchscreen version, the US$5,785 Constellation, in October. Top-end models, such as those in the Signature line, cost as much as US$16,500. Some celebrities are migrating from the Vertu to iPhones with gold or diamond cases, said Carolina Milanese, a research vice president at Stamford, Connecticut-based Gartner.
Photo: Bloomberg
Other watchmakers have also stepped in. Ulysse Nardin has a range of limited-edition smartphones called the Chairman including the brand’s mechanical rotor that uses the wearer’s motions to automatically wind the watch and a crown that can be hand-wound. Both fuel the phone’s power reserve.
The chairman
The Chairman retails for as much as US$170,000 for the full pave diamond and black model with 18-karat white gold and more than 20 carats of diamonds. It’s the most expensive phone produced by partner Scientific Cellular Innovations.
The Meridiist handset from TAG Heuer allows users to switch between time zones and has a chronograph for measuring intervals. Retailing for as much as US$39,50, it also includes more than 430 hand-assembled components. TAG Heuer, which has developed three collections, plans to introduce at least one range each year.
The first model from Paris-based Celsius, called LeDix Origine, embeds a watch with clear panels to show its complicated mechanism on an outer flap that opens to reveal a phone using Sagem technology. The mechanical watch doesn’t have to be turned off during flights, of course. Fifteen of the 18 handsets made for the initial LeDix model have been sold.
The tourbillon timepiece, invented in the 18th century to boost a watch’s precision, contains a rotating cage that compensates for the effects of gravity on a watch’s timekeeping. About 70 percent of the value of the handset is Swiss made, with the remainder coming from France.
Deep pockets
Buyers will need deep pockets in more ways than one. At 250g and 28mm thick, the phone is 80 percent heavier and three times thicker than Apple’s iPhone 4s, which weighs 140g and is 9.3mm thick. A BlackBerry Bold 9930 comes in at 130g and 10.5mm.
“The fashion has moved on and the clam gives you a thicker design and you don’t have easy access to your screen, which is what everything now gravitates around,” Milanese said. “Luxury phones tend not to be smartphones. You don’t buy them for the technology — you buy them for the design.”
Unlike luxury phones clad in gold and diamonds, Celsius emphasizes mechanical intricacy. The tourbillon handsets include 700 mechanical parts each, about half of them in the watch alone. One mechanism designed to eject the battery consists of 50 different parts, while opening the handset to make a call also winds up the mainspring used to power the watch.
NICHE market
Celsius, established in 2006 and built with funding from investors including France’s Sofinnova Partners and IDinvest Partners, said it took six months to make each handset, which are sold through outlets including Harrods in the UK.
“As we don’t come from a watch background, we could do what we wanted and we had no history to respect,” Pruvot, an industrial design specialist, said.
While Celsius is limiting output of the three tourbillon models in the LeDix collection to 40 pieces, the company aims to introduce around the end of this year a 150-piece collection with a US$98,600 price tag. Another model to be introduced next year will retail for between US$46,000 and US$52,610 and will be partly mechanically powered.
“Going after the luxury market, although the price point can be in the thousands of [US] dollars, you sell very few units,” Milanesi said. “It’s really a niche market.”
Celsius says it plans to stay focused on mechanical ingenuity rather than number of functions. It also wants consumers to become as attached to their handsets as they are to their watches.
“We want to be the Rolls Royce — you keep it, most of the time, for your entire life,” Meylan said. “Maybe you don’t have all the functions, but you have the best and most useful ones and it’s extremely reliable.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would