Cyrille Vigneron: ‘You have to explain Cartier’s classics to a young generation in a modern way’

(ft.com) - Cyrille Vigneron is in a different mood to when I interviewed him five years ago, shortly after his appointment as chief executive at Cartier. He did not say so at the time but, looking back, “Cartier had lost its appeal [by] trying to get into areas that were not so credible or not so much in the Cartier DNA”. This was particularly true of watches. As well as making large and complicated watches, it had launched sporty lines — but sales were slow. In 2016, Vigneron took the painful decision to buy back €200m worth of stock. “There is no way you can change your product offer if you leave products on the market,” he explains. “Either your retailers will stop buying, or what would be visible would not be so appealing for customers. Most of the [watches] were destroyed to recycle the gold.”