The Hyetis Affair: did everyone know?
At watchmaking events that focus on the suppliers, one often runs into some well-known secrets. Take Hyetis. Everyone says they might have known…
By Joel Grandjean
Editor-in-Chief
It is an open secret. Some troublesome news concerning the brand Hyetis was picked up by the popular press in Switzerland, but did not surprise too many people in the watchmaking sector. The source of the worry was the rumor that delivery of the brands watches might be held up because of production stoppages.Heavens! Why did all those who thought they knew remain silent?
Will the deadbeats be asked to pay up?
The industry has its defective parts, as it were. They are known, they can be heard from a great distance. But when they start making a lot of noise, there are those who distance themselves prudently, or look at them with a laughing eye, and at times forget to sound the alarm. That is a shame. Because this time round, it's not at all funny, since, at the end of the line, there may be a few gullible individuals who will be left with nothing but a handful of tears.And because it was not only members of the watchmaking supplier crowd that may have gotten hurt, but rather the end customer, maybe ignoring the affaire may not be such a good idea.Oh that shameful indifference that has the knack of letting us ignore what we feel is not our business...The appearance of the brand Hyetis and its CEO Arny Kapshitzer in the somewhat opaque crowdfunding scene – the web-based system of fundraising that involves at times pre-sales based on plans for the making of promising objects – should have raised the hackles of some suppliers.Some groaning might even have been emitted by brands themselves, whose bookkeeping still showed some unpaid invoices in connection with the same players.
Blowback
When you play too often according to media rules, you sometimes end up being at the wrong end of some well thrown punches. Upstanding entrepreneurs, who are occasionally criticized for lacking managerial skills, keep on having that experience. Sometimes they are taken to task for their authoritarianism, at other times for the risks they took, which turned out to be a flop, though, had they had success, they would have been considered visionaries. It's tough.Media life is a real jungle, too much exposure to the bright lights does result in sunburn occasionally. And whatever shines or sticks out from the run of the mill is so unloved, that it requires a corrector of faults, often a journo gushing with good intentions and ethical standards to come put his inky fingers on the sore spot. The target in question then gets battered, and the cycle goes on. And the blowback overwhelms with an intensity that matches the media exposure.It hurts, it takes your ego apart, it will shake up the most phlegmatic individual and will challenge your best breeding.
Luckily the blowback can be at times rather beneficial when it bags wheeler-dealers who, by conceptual bluffing or their communication skills, manage to get the media ink flowing, an ink that should have been reserved for beautiful stories, reasonable ones, in short, stories that are a lot less interesting. The scoop offered by Ariane Dayer in the Matin Dimanche paper were followed by substantiated information about the Hyetis adventure from the pen of Richard Etienne in the Tribune de Genève based on the testimony from unhappy investor-buyers convinced they would never see their subscription money, nor their watch as a matter of fact. And the supplier side of the watchmaking industry applauded. Because, right or wrong, the rumors were out there for some time, and suspicion of something afoot had grown into a kind of corporatist epidemic that was hopping from factory to factory. Apparently, not many were prepared to work for the project except on payment with the order, which in itself could explain the extent of the delays and then – here the snake is biting its own tail – the discontent of the investors.
Loosening the lips
In fact, the "affaire Hyetis" was investigated and judged at two hubs of lucidity, in the halls of the EPHJ-EPMT-SMT, the most important professional annual event in Switzerland for suppliers, with 800 exhibitors, and during the coffee breaks and lunch of the annual study day of the SSC, the Swiss Society of Chronometry. Not all journalists go to these places, and the watchmaking players who are present are not the ones who sit up in the executive marketing offices of the brands. And sometimes it is here that one comes across open secrets, secrets that are a lot more revealing than a simple crowdfunding thing that might have gone south. Secrets about new materials, for example, or about "who is doing what behind whose cover," goings-on beyond the slick facades and the lavish speeches about identity, secrets about … I cannot reveal them because anyway, everything will end up being known someday…
For the article in French in the Tribune de Genève of August 4, 2014.