Jack Heuer

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Jack William Edouard Heuer (born November 18, 1932 in Bern ) is a Swiss entrepreneur in the watch industry.

Jack Heuer was the managing director and majority shareholder of the family company Ed. Heuer & Co, which later became the watch company TAG Heuer, from 1961 to 1982.

Life

Jack Heuer grew up in Biel in the canton of Bern , where he also attended schools. His great-grandfather was Edouard Heuer , the founder of the Swiss watch company Ed. Heuer & Co. Jack Heuer grew up speaking several languages. Biel is a bilingual city on the language border between German and French-speaking Switzerland. His mother also had English as her mother tongue. He graduated from the municipal high school in Biel and graduated in 1951 with the Matura ( matriculation examination ). He then chose a newly offered course as a production engineer with basic training in electrical engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich ( ETHZ ). During his studies at ETH he was able to do an internship in a New York company that was a customer of the watch company Heuer. He graduated with a very good result at the end of 1957 as a graduate engineer. He then joined the family business and from 1959 built up his own sales organization, Heuer Time Corporation in the USA. Because his uncle Hubert wanted to sell the company shares, he was able to acquire a majority stake in the family company as early as 1961 by means of a bank loan and with his father's assigned shares. At the age of 28 he was now largely responsible for the fortunes of the family company. He introduced marketing methods he had learned in the USA and was an innovative designer of new watch models himself. He shaped the company for the next 20 years. After its predecessors, the company earned as a supplier of precision stopwatches and chronometers had been made public, he increased the awareness of the brand Heuer sports applications by known brand ambassador as an actor, race car driver and politicians as well as by a first partnerships with Formula 1 -Rennstall Ferrari followed of further advertising agreements. In 1974, a team from Heuer developed the Automatic Car Identification Timing System for timing in automobile races , which for the first time allowed real-time recording of the order of racing cars on an experimental basis. However, it took until 1992 for the successor organization, TAG Heuer , to convert the original prototype system into a series-produced timing system. This timing system served as the official timekeeper for all Formula 1 races for the next 12 years. This year also tried early to develop electronic watch models. To this end, in 1978 he founded Heuer Microtechnic for the development of customer-specific integrated circuits , so-called ASICs , together with Eurosil in Munich and a semiconductor company in Silicon Valley . Thanks to this initiative, it was possible to use a CMOS chip with built-in liquid crystal control, manufactured exclusively for Heuer, for the new Heuer LCD Microspit stopwatch . It served as the official stopwatch at the 1980 Olympic Games . In addition, the then Heuer-Leonidas company joined forces with Omega and Longines to form the "Swiss Timing" group in order to be considered as the official timekeeper at the Olympic Games.

The massive devaluation of the US dollar in combination with the difficult changeover from mechanical movements, especially from stopwatches and chronometers, to quartz-controlled electronic products (so-called quartz crisis ) brought Heuer-Leonidas into financial difficulties. In the most important sales market, the USA, general importers became insolvent so that the Heuer company had to write off the corresponding outstanding payments as losses. The lending banks organized the takeover of the company by an outside company in 1982. Jack Heuer lost both his position as managing director and his business assets and was the last representative of the family to leave. For the next few years he worked as a management consultant. In addition, he took over the representation of Integrated Display Technology (Hong Kong) for Europe.

Only after the acquisition of Heuer-Leonidas by the Arab group Techniques d'Avant Garde (TAG) in 1985 and a renewed takeover by the French luxury goods company LVMH in 1999, Jack Heuer reconciled with the new management and was appointed honorary president of TAG Heuer . He held this position with many representative tasks for 12 years. On the occasion of his 85th birthday, TAG Heuer launched the Heuer Autavia Caliber 02 Special Edition Jack Heuer 85th Birthday in recognition of his achievements .

This year is married and has two sons and a daughter.

Honors

  • GEM Award for Lifetime Achievements. American Gem Society / US Jewelry Association. New York 2007.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gisbert L. Brunner: TAG Heuer - The rule of time . Editions Assouline, 2002, ISBN 2-908228-83-1
  2. ↑ a b c d e James OH Nason (Editor): The Times of my Life. To Autobiography by Jack Heuer. TAG Heuer , La-Chaux-de-Fonds, 2014 (English, PDF).
  3. ↑ Florian Meyer: Never break - watch pioneer Jack Heuer visits ETH Zurich. ETH News, December 4, 2014. Retrieved June 18, 2017
  4. ↑ Markus Köchli: Marketing was a foreign word back then. Trade newspaper. April 11, 2007. Retrieved June 18, 2017
  5. ↑ Joe Breeze: How Jack Heuer invented the Carrera and wrote watch history. Classic Driver April 1, 2015. Retrieved June 18, 2017.
  6. ^ Thilo Komma-Pöllath: An interview with Jack Heuer. The right car also belongs to the right watch. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , November 1, 2013. Accessed June 18, 2017
  7. ^ Franz E. Aschinger: The new currency system. From Bretton Woods to the dollar crisis in 1977. F. Knapp, Frankfurt a. M., 1978, ISBN 3-7819-0191-2 , pp. 27-32
  8. ^ Mathias Morgenthaler: Jack Heuer - a pioneer resigns. Tages-Anzeiger, December 27, 2014. Accessed June 18, 2017
  9. ↑ Daniel Hug: What's going on here - suddenly everyone has Heuer watches on their wrists. NZZ Bellevue , May 8, 2017. Accessed June 18, 2017.
  10. ↑ Gisbert. L. Brunner: Late satisfaction for great pioneers. In: Handelszeitung No. 47/2017, Watches + Jewelry , page 11.
personal data
SURNAME This year, Jack
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Heuer, Jack William Edouard (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss entrepreneur in the watch industry
DATE OF BIRTH November 18, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Bern