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The Swiss watch industry might be perceived as being several hundred years old. But the truth is it is just out of its infancy and hitting a majestically mature stride. The Swiss watch industry is unique in that it is the sole high luxury industry that was almost completely wiped out during recent times. It is in fact the work of several key individuals including Nicholas G.Hayek and Ernst Thomke that enabled its re-birth. Together they reconnected us with the fascinating world of technical watchmaking. Amongst the giants who have brought the Swiss watch industry back to life is a man named Günter Blümlein. Blümlein is largely credited as the man who saved IWC and Jaeger-LeCoultre from their certain demise in the 70’s and 80’s and was also the individual who enacted the rebirth of the German watch industry with A. Lange & Sohne. While Blümlein unexpectedly passed away in the first year of the new millennium, today his name is as revered as ever amongst industry circles. But awareness of his incredible achievements has not yet trickled down to the consumer. For us, Blümlein’s story is intimately connected with the current success of Swiss watchmaking and we at HoroMundi feel it is our responsibility to tell the tale of this great man. It is with great pleasure that I bring to you the story of a man who I am honored to call my friend, Günter Blümlein.
In early March 1976, it wasn’t the best of times for the Swiss watch industry and the situation at the famous Schaffhausen watch brand IWC was one of near desperation. The then international sales director Hannes Pantli was making one of his bimonthly sales visits to Dubai, when he received an urgent phone call from his chief financial officer in Schaffhausen. The message was clear: “If we don’t have another CHF 200,000 by 20th March, we have to shut the factory down.”
Their savior came in 1978 when the car instrumentation company VDO sent Albert Keck to inspect the IWC factory for potential capital injection. Albert Keck is a watchmaker himself, trained in the Germanic style of watchmaking. Knowing that he loved watches, Mr. Pantli ensured that IWC made a conscious effort in “making the bride beautiful” so that IWC could be sold off. The factory impressed Mr. Keck so much that according to Pantli, VDO decided to take over IWC only hours after his factory visit.
But the then owner of VDO Mrs. Schindling was aware of IWC’s difficult situation and she understood the need for a strong leader who knew the watch industry. She found the then managing director of Junghans, Mr. Günter Blümlein and sent him to run IWC in 1979 to set things right. Eventually, this legendary man not only saved both IWC and Jaeger-LeCoultre from certain doom, but managed to revive their positions to stratospheric heights in prestige and value. He also re-created the Glashütte watchmaking legend A. Lange & Söhne. The magnitude of Blümlein’s contributions and genius became crystal clear when the three brands were sold to Richemont just over two decades later for a total of CHF 3.08 billion, in the year 2000.
The revival of IWC: The Rise of the Germanic Sports Watches Knowing that IWC was in dire straits, the first compromise Blümlein made was to pursue the newly forged co-branding partnership with Porsche Design (from 1978). This would give IWC critical revenue and cash flow. Blümlein knew the Porsche Design-IWC partnership was IWC’s lifeline and he pumped up its production in the next few years at the risk of diluting the brand equity and becoming overly dependent on a single range.
Blümlein was a man with long term vision: his short term compromise was not due to short sightedness but a very calculated move. He understood that once survival was assured, IWC had to quickly elevate its image and position by following up with great products. He was rightly in charge of IWC product development at the same time from day one.
In the early ’80s, IWC watchmaker Kurt Klaus was working on the famous Da Vinci Perpetual Calendar, one in which all the relationship between the day, date, month, year and moon phase displays are fixed and coordinated. The project was deemed impossible and as a result, Klaus was at times the laughing stock in the company.
Blümlein heard about the idea when he presented Klaus with the long service award in 1982. He saw the flame in Klaus’s eyes and sensed his creative spirit almost immediately. Despite general skepticism on the viability of the project by others within IWC, Blümlein made Klaus report directly to him and asked Klaus to continue working on the project with an added complication – Blümlein wanted a chronograph on top of the perpetual calendar module. Fortunately, Kurt could work with the Jaeger-LeCoultre Caliber 889 as the base automatic movement without the need to design an integrated piece from scratch. The 1985 Da Vinci launch was a media and public sensation and the watch elevated IWC’s brand image to new heights.
Under Blümlein’s visionary leadership and clear direction, IWC produced a series of impressive watches like the amazing Grande Complication in 1990, followed just three years later the Il Destriero Scafusia “The Warhorse of Schaffhausen” which included additional tourbillon and a simpler split second module, designed by a young watchmaker named Richard Habring. IWC also experimented with new materials ahead of its time, being the first to introduce the titanium mechanical chronograph in Porsche Design IWC and the ceramic case in limited edition Da Vinci and Pilot’s watches.
In the late ’70s Jaeger-LeCoultre (JLC) was bleeding. The manufacture was suffering the full impact of the quartz crisis, and scrambling to make movements cheaply available to anyone who would buy them, just to stay afloat. In 1978 JLC was purchased by VDO and after several changes of CEO, the last being Hassan Zadeh, Blümlein was ultimately placed in charge of this struggling manufacture. Blümlein understood the vast potential of this movement producer as a “manufacture” and stressed the need for JLC to reduce movement supplies outside JLC, and instead build up itself as a viable haute horlogerie watch brand.
Blümlein quickly united a team of professionals like managers Henry-John Belmont, Jean-Pierre Sassard, Jean-Marc Keller and designer Janek Deleskiewicz around him, to take a courageous strategic turn in affirming the supremacy of the brand.
And yet the company continued to lose money every year from 1982 to 1987. The financial situation at JLC was so bad that VDO served notice that it would no longer support JLC financially in 1987, which would be a death knoll for this manufacture.
Unwilling to give up, Blümlein brought Henry-John Belmont along and went to the VDO board to make a final plea for more support. The negotiation was a tough one but under Blümlein’s strong reasoning, VDO relented and agreed to pump into JLC one last amount of CHF 11 million with one non-negotiable condition, that Blümlein must find another shareholder and injected more capital into JLC immediately.
Due to the impossible timing, Blümlein had to offer an unbelievably sweetened deal and he managed to find another investor in the same valley, Audemars Piguet’s (AP) CEO Georges Golay, whose company bought over 40 percent of JLC for a mere CHF 4 million. To AP, the attraction was obvious. JLC with CHF 15 million cash not counting liability was valued at a total of CHF 10 million. While in 1987 Audemars Piguet could be said to be doing better than JLC, business for the Le Brassus watch brand wasn’t exactly booming. Even the mere CHF 4 million was a big investment for Golay and he had to raise funds by selling additional Audemars Piguet shares to new partners. This was how a respected Singaporean businessman Sunil Amarasuriya became one of the AP shareholders through his company BP De Silva.
With the new CHF 15 million capital injection, 1987 proved to be the turning point for JLC, from which point JLC has been able to completely refinance itself. In 1991, JLC, at the behest of Blümlein, revived the almost forgotten Reverso in a stunning comeback piece in the form of the pink gold limited edition 60ème, the first modern wristwatch with solid gold movement. Following a series of complicated limited editions like the 1993 Reverso Tourbillon, 1994 Reverso Répétition Minutes, 1996 Reverso Chronographe Rétrograde, 1998 Reverso Géographique and the 2000 Reverso Quantième Perpétuel and many other bread-and-butter Reverso watches like the highly successful 1994 Reverso Duo and the 1997 Reverso Duetto, JLC Reverso became a huge success by 1995.
On reflection, it was Blümlein who positioned JLC clearly; he had an industrial vision and little known outside JLC, Blümlein initiated the now crucial Autotractor project and laid the groundwork to expand production beyond just watch components into more intimate parts around escapement and balance wheel, etc – a move which turned out to be invaluable for the now dynamic brand.
The rebirth of A. Lange & Söhne: The High End Glashütte Princess The idea of reviving A. Lange & Söhne struck Blümlein big time on the evening of 9th November 1989, the day the Berlin Wall fell. Blümlein was having dinner with Albert Keck and Hannes Pantli in Schaffhausen as the video image of the Berlin Wall being knocked down was streamed into every TV screen and the whole of Germany was in a state of delirium. Blümlein suddenly realized the possibility of reviving the Glashütte watchmaking tradition. Blümlein’s intention in the Lange project was to revive the Glashütte watchmaking tradition, to create the first highest end watches outside of Switzerland that are “typically German”.
Blümlein’s approach was calculated and systematic: the approach of Walter Lange, tedious and troublesome buying back, fighting for and the settlement of the Lange family brand “A. Lange & Söhne” from GUB, which should have rightfully been returned to the Lange family in the first place. The whole episode was effectively narrated by Blümlein in his 1998 interview by journalist Peter Braun.
Says Mrs. Günter Blümlein, “He worked all the time, even at home, sometimes during dinner with the family, he wrote something on a piece of paper, his mind was focusing on the task he had to do the next day. The loss of his time with the family increased further from the year 1991, when he started A. Lange & Söhne. He spent a large part of his time in Glashütte and the family suffered a lot. There was no Sunday and no holiday with the family. That is the extent of his dedication to his companies.”
Lange Uhren GmbH was registered on 7th December 1990, with Walter Lange given 10 percent share of the company in exchange for his family travel book. Blümlein’s strength is again to give the brand a clear image and strategy. Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Big Date patented technology was revived and implemented specifically for Lange under the guidance of IWC’s Kurt Klaus and Lange’s Helmut Geyer and Annegret Fleischer.
The project was so critical that Blümlein put in all his personal and group resources into building the brand. The emotional investment by Blümlein was obvious as he even wrote the Lange catalogue and marketing materials personally in most cases.
The Lange watches are distinctively German in style and extremely high in overall quality. Blümlein proved to be open minded when he accepted a bold suggestion by their Asian retail partner Sincere Watch, to use the then-nascent medium, the Internet, to market the brand. The Internet watch enthusiast communities are one of the important factors in the rapid ascent of the brand equity within a very short decade.
Mr. Blümlein was a man of impeccable taste without being ostentatious; he enjoyed good Cohiba cigars, liked fine Bordeaux and Burgundy wine, was always perfectly dressed by his bespoke tailor in Schaffhausen and enjoyed good food in the finest restaurants he frequented.
The last public appearance of Mr. Blümlein outside his inner circle was probably at the Basel fair in April 2001, a period when he was still busy presenting the 2001 Lange collection, being congratulated by scores of industry friends for his new appointment to run the technical watch brands in the Richemont Group while hosting collectors and retailers dinners. One evening as he was walking out from a restaurant, he tripped, fell and broke his legs.
He went to his doctor and was hospitalized immediately, and supposedly at that admission, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Says Mrs. Blümlein, “He went to see the doctor in April 2001, the doctor suggested that he be warded in the hospital. For the first time in his life, he was not able to solve his problems, he didn’t even talk about it. He remained steadfast and was working non-stop till his final days. I don’t know what he was thinking then though, he didn’t say.”
The disease wore Mr. Blümlein down very rapidly and on Friday 28th September 2001, most of his company friends were informed by the very emotional Lange marketing director Annette Bamert that Mr. Blümlein had suffered a serious stroke, and that the situation was critical.
On Monday, 1st October 2001, the legendary Günter Blümlein passed away.
Günter Blümlein was a man with complex personality, “Seldom have you found someone who brought together so many talents, analytical, strategic in thinking,” said Dr. Frank Müller. To many in A. Lange & Söhne, IWC and JLC, he was a tough boss and had very high expectations of people around him. He set impossibly high standards by example and he expected others to do the same. For those who could withstand the pressure, they grew in capabilities. He mentored and made promises to those around him, and all his promises were delivered without fail.
Blümlein constantly projected the image of a very tough boss who likes to be in charge, he was always rational and strategic in appearance and took no nonsense from anyone. He was frequently quoted as someone who believed strongly that a corporate boardroom has no place for democracy. But at all times, he was willing and eager to be challenged by good arguments from anyone. Once he was convinced, he could change his mind very rapidly.
Jaeger-LeCoultre CEO Jérôme Lambert explained, “Without Günter Blümlein, we will not be here today,” when he dedicated the manufacture garden area to be the permanent “Espace Blümlein”. During a speech inaugurating the Espace Blümlein in 2005, the CEO read out, “Günter Blümlein, you were a great man, we have not forgotten you, your philosophy and your teachings are still alive in the Manufacture, here in the Valle de Joux.”
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