You may have heard a little buzz, a ticking if you will, echoing through the blogosphere last year about Gigi Rüf and Mark Sollors new sponsor-hOme. What’s hOme you ask? This rider owned and operated brand is coming straight out of a small town in the Swiss Alps, dropping some insane Swiss-made time pieces just in the nick of time for holiday orders.
hOme recently teamed up with the good people at C3 Distribution to handle US sales of its watches, apparel, and accessories, and the interest is cranking following the signing of these A list riders, as well as Robjn Taylor and Absinthe’s Brusti, as well as first peeks of the product on the site and at trade shows such as Bright.
The brand, which originally started making limited apparel lines several years ago, was founded by brothers Eddy and Jacques Dousse and Steve WJ Harris, owner of Whistler’s The Circle snowboard shop. We caught up with Eddy via Skype to learn more about the brand’s story and why they see room for a new player in the high-end action sports watch world.
We’ve been interested in hOme since you signed Mark Sollors and Gigi last season, and I was stoked when George reached out and said you guys were making a move with C3 over here. Give us a little background-you got the idea for starting hOme with your brother while working in a skate shop right?
We didn’t actually work there; it was just a place we’d hang out. I think I was 15-my brother was 18. That’s where we went every day after school, and we wanted to keep the vibe of all your friends coming together to talk about snowboarding, skateboarding and whatnot. We wanted to have a shop with a good atmosphere and call it hOme to emphasize that feeling.
In the meantime, we made t-shirts, my brother [Jacques] went off to graphic design school, and I went on to do my class-b pro-snowboarder career before heading out to University later. In the midst of all that we met Steve Harris and all of that sort of got mixed together, all very spontaneously. Then one day a very good friend of mine suggested we should consider making watches. The initial reaction was like « yeah, right », but I slept on it and the next day it just clicked, in a total yoda moment, this all seemed to make so much sense for us.
There are so many clothing brands out there, and we wanted to focus on details. We’re in Switzerland; a country of watchmakers ; yet at the same time we had that sort of, not to be pretentious, but some sort of international aura with the name and with Steve being in North America and us being here.
It all took about three years -the financial crisis hit right after we started looking for funds. I think we put together a 200-page business plan with like 800 graphics and illustrations and photos. It was like a book, binded and everything. It sounds a little crazy, but that’s what you need to convince people that your idea is really thought through. We found all that we needed towards the end of 2009, and then it was just getting the project together.
It seems like it’s really easy to get a clothing brand off the ground, but with watches, there’s a much stronger barrier to entry here. How about in Switzerland, is it fairly easy to get into?
It’s definitely part of the general culture. People know a thing or two about watches. Selling watches that are not Swiss Made to people in Switzerland is not easy. Obviously Nixon is here, and other brands, like Fossil, but apart from that there’s an old joke that everyone in Switzerland has a relative that works in the watch industry. That said, finding the right partners for production was one of the biggest challenges.
How come?
There are not so many brands that have vertical production, even less that can manufacture for you. You have the Swatch group that has about 30 brands, Swatch being just one of them. So they have their production lines, but then there are many of the other brands, whether it’s luxury or regular brands, that go through private manufacturers, names you’ve never heard of.
There’s only so many good ones, obviously, and there’s only so many that make Swiss made stuff, and those people are very discreet, their client list is always secret, and not all of them are pleasant to work with or efficient. We’ve had some bad experiences; it’s part of the process. But that’s such a strong point now, we have a great relationship with the guys we work with, they have about 45 years experience. They really back us up and give us the flexibility and response that we need, because otherwise it just wouldn’t be possible.
Here’s a look at Home’s story, vision, and business model:
That proximity has to be huge with your factory just down the road.
Yeah, especially having worked in China before, it just takes so much of your energy, and there is so much you don’t get to see. Over here you can crack jokes with the women in the assembly room, which means you know personally who is handling all these precious components for you, it’s very direct.
For people that haven’t seen your product yet, how would you describe the look and feel of it, and what are the price ranges?
The thought pattern was that we don’t want to target the kids so much; it’s really more like that 25-40 year old, board sports or action sport enthusiast. You still have your roots, but you’ve kind of moved on, there’s days you wear jeans and hoodies, and there’s days you’ll wear something close to a suit. It sounds cliché but I’ll say it any way : it is a clean, timeless aesthetic. We try to build stuff that lasts.
It’s interesting, Most of the brands I’ve seen coming out of Europe that are checking in the States lately are kind of along a similar line, focusing on an older demographic, brands like WeSC and Makia and stuff like that. Are you seeing a lot of that over there or is it more just what’s translating to the US?
WeSC and Makia, they’re just good inspirations as far as where we want to be. If you were to put hOme next to other brands, I think you called it right. What I’ve seen is things are changing-what we’d call the boardsports market, is opening up lately to more of the lifestyle aspects and you see interesting partnerships. Are we further ahead with that trend being in Europe? Maybe, it seems so.
So you launched at ISPO last winter, what’s been the response, and the growth since then?
It’s been really good in the sense that if you think of what we have to show now compared to what we had to show at the time. We signed Gigi I think a month before ISPO. At the time we had three out of the twelve watches-so not much to show, and an interesting but short history, yet we still managed to reach our first objectives with only a handful of territories, including Japan and Korea. It’s been a great response to people in the know, people that have been leading this industry, or this market in Europe, everybody has just been talking and talking, and we got great credibility with having very little to show.
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TAGS: Bob Gundram, c3 distribution, eddy dousse, gigi ruf, gumby, home watches, jacques dousse, Mark Sollors, nixon, robjn taylor, snowboard accessories, snowboard watch
