Tag Archives: Tom Morris

Making The Wonderful Accessible

I’ve blogged a couple of times about one of my favorite companies, Frederique Constant, a remarkable maker of fine watches in Geneva, Switzerland. Their distinctiveness is what they call “Accessible Luxury” and their slogan is “Live Your Passion.” In discovering more about their history and brand, I came to realize that their distinctive approach to watches parallels my own approach to wisdom. Since I left a great university position nearly twenty years ago to spread ancient wisdom across the culture and globe, I’ve actually been focused on what you could call “Accessible Wisdom” – not wisdom that you need a PhD to understand, or years of study in distinguished libraries to acquire, but deep and practical insight of the highest order that applies to the challenges of everyday life, and answers the questions that we all inevitably ask.

Peter and Aletta Stas, the founders of Frederique Constant, were lovers of fine watches in their early years together, and wanted to find a way to put such a luxury within the reach of more people. They understood that luxury is not at its core about inaccessibility, or elitist cost, but rather that it essentially embodies such qualities as great beauty, excellence, high functionality, comfort, and ease. With the right focus and tremendous ingenuity, they’ve been able to live their passion and realize their dream of including more people within the realm of high end luxury, making it more widely accessible. And they’re having resounding success around the world, as a result.

Wisdom, also, is not about inaccessibility. The truth is that you don’t have to be a legendary guru, or a top scholar, in order to attain and benefit from the greatest insights available for living in this world. But too often, the deepest wisdom has been treated as exactly that – as if you have to be first inaugurated into an esoteric cult, or initiated into a gnostic order of insiders who study rare documents in arcane languages, or you have to learn to speak a technical jargon far beyond the comprehension of those who have not been trained in its use, or else, unfortunately, the best of human insight can’t be yours. And that, I’ve been determined to show for the past twenty years, is just not true.

It has indeed taken me years of formal training and decades of dedicated work, like a top Swiss watchmaker, to be able to separate truth from falsehood, and insight from illusion, in matters of human life and aspiration, where the differences can sometimes be subtle but crucial. What are our greatest insights? How can they best be applied? How do we separate mere appearance from reality? Part of the reason I’m so impressed with Frederique Constant is that they’re doing for watches what I’ve long sought to do for wisdom. And their passion has helped me to clarity mine. On the basis of all my own hard work and study, refining my sensibilities and logical acumen to the highest degree, I’m now able to offer people accessible wisdom that they can use and enjoy, and that can enhance their lives, as it does mine, every day.

The more we can make accessible to others what we’ve perhaps worked so hard to achieve ourselves, the more we make our distinctive mark on the world, and we can seek to serve from the riches and blessings of our own lives, bringing these riches and blessings to others.

What are you really good at? What can you make more accessible to others? How can you do and share with passion? These are questions always worth asking.

Ask them today.

Tom Morris: Live Your Passion

Over twenty five years ago, Peter Stas and his wife Aletta found themselves entranced by the high end Swiss watches they saw in retail shop windows when they were in the country for ski vacations. But, being young people on a tight budget, they couldn’t afford what they were seeing. And yet, it planted in them an idea. Why couldn’t they start their own business and create beautiful luxury watches that would be vastly more affordable than what they had been seeing? 
They had found their passion, and decided to live it. So, when they published a book on their corporate story, they entitled it “Live Your Passion.” From the inception of the company on, the “affordable luxury” watches of Frederique Constant have delighted people around the world. I’ve mentioned Peter before, a couple of months ago, in a blog post about luxury, but it’s this aspect of his story I’d like to highlight today. By living their passion, the good that Peter and Aletta have been able to do has gone far, and probably beyond their youthful dreams.
The power of passion, well directed, is astonishing.
A young attorney told me last week that when she was growing up and her dad loaded up the kids in their car to go anywhere, he’d pull into any used car lots that he might pass along the way, “just to look,” as he would explain to them. At a certain point, it became obvious to the children that their dad’s passion was cars, in all their variety. They encouraged him to change careers and set up his own used car lot, which he did, and truly found his passion at work – a passion that has helped him flourish in his new business throughout the years.
When his daughter was in law school, a man came onto the lot one day to ask the car guy if he would help him to sell his car. He didn’t usually work like that, but he liked the visitor right away, and they got into a great conversation. The man with the car to sell turned out to be a top attorney. And his firm ended up hiring the young lawyer, the car dealer’s daughter, at first as an intern, and then as a full time member of the firm where she is now truly living her own passion, thanks to her dad, who has been living his.
And that’s the way it works. What do you do with your free time? What do you love? How can you integrate that more into your business life? Or, are you one of the lucky ones who are already there? Wherever you may be in life, living your passion will benefit not only you, but many others as well – as the stories of Peter Stas and the young attorney’s father demonstrate.
Live your passion, indeed.

 

Keep it simple

The Wallstreet Journal just published an article on simple automatic watches by Patek Philippe, Frederique Constant, Montblanc, Vacheron Constantin, and Tag Heuer. In Saturday’s Newspaper and Online.

Frederique-Constant-Patek-Philippe-Vacheron-Constantin-Tag-Heuer-in-the-wallstreet-journal-medium

Patek Philippe, Frederique Constant, Montblanc, Vacheron Constantin, and Tag Heuer in Wallstreet Journal

Complications: Not on my watch

After a decade of muscular dominance, feature-packed sports watches and complication-laden wrist trophies are being put aside in favor of simpler models. Think sleek and elegant timepieces that are smaller than a sundial, and can be operated without a Ph.D.

Elegant dress watches are at the moment coming through a very strong revival. You had a time until 2007, 2008, where a watch couldn’t be bigger. The bigger, the louder, the better. And now we are back to a lot of classic, refined and slim timepieces.

Watch-enthusiasts have been waving the flag of time-only simplicity for the past several months, and a Hondikee post about the Trésor De Ville prompted raves from its readers. “People are still freaking out over it,” said Benjamin Clymer, the site’s founder and executive editor. “They think it’s the most beautiful thing.”

As for the shift from complicated to simple, Mr. Clymer said, “It sort of goes along with the whole vintage revival, which, in many ways, is about the search for pure design.” Indeed, the quest for simplicity and elegance is partly retro-skewed. Certain popular dress watches are slightly tweaked versions of timepieces that were launched decades ago, like Patek Philippe’s Calatrava, based on a design from 1912.

Patek-Philippe-Vacheron-Constantin-Frederique-Constant-Tag-Heuer

Clockwise from top left: Patek Philippe,http://www.patek.com,Ref. 5227J Calatrava, $35,400, Patek Philippe at Tiffany & Co., http://www.tiffany.com, 212-605-4036; Antea 365 A10 Watch, $943, stowa.com; Star Classique Date Watch, $2,475, Montblanc, http://www.montblanc.com, 212-223-8888; Frederique Constant Slimline Automatic Watch, $2,495, http://www.frederique-constant.com ; Carrera Calibre 5 Automatic Watch, $2,900, http://www.www.tagheuer.com; Patrimony Platinum Watch, $33,700, Vacheron Constantin, http://www.vacheron-constantin.com, 877-701-1755 F. Martin Ramin/The Wall Street Journal

The Frederique Constant Slimline Range consists of some of the evergreens in our collection and is exemplary to our Accessible Luxury positioning. These timepieces include latest technology, while maintaining their same successful, stylish and clean designs. The Frederique Constant Slimline is also a tribute to fine Geneva Watchmaking with its uniting style, elegance and high quality.

In past, I have written about Frederique Constant as a Smart Buy View. Modern luxury culture fueled by commercialism seems to advocate purchases of luxury items at very high prices. Some people seem to focus only on how expensive an item is instead of focusing on its value. This unfortunate practice has eroded the true traditions of luxury where price was ultimately the function of the intrinsic value and quality of the item being purchased.

By definition accessible luxury refers to items of luxury which are available at an accessible price, however to some the idea of accessibility seems alien when the subject of luxury is discussed. Take for example the undiscerning buyer who might have the financial wherewithal to purchase an expensive product without understanding the finer details about its intrinsic qualities. This sort of person merely understands luxury products as expensive items which are largely unavailable to most. With this in mind, why should anyone want a luxury item which is available to a greater number of people at an accessible price?

It is also what was picked-up by Tom Moris in his comment:

Tom Morris
April 28, 2012 at 6:20 PM

Peter: I admire so much what you all are doing at FC. With your rare and admirable attitude toward luxury and pricing, you are both returning to and reinventing the great tradition of true luxury. Your perspective captures the ancient and noble approach that luxury is about intrinsic quality and the owner’s experience of use. The contemporary redefinition of luxury in terms of exclusivity through inaccessibly high pricing is just a sad departure from the essence of what luxury is really all about. Your business philosophy is so refreshing. It’s also a return to purity, in my view. I own several watches from makers like Patek, Breguet, and JLC. I always make selections based on aesthetics and functionality and never on the exclusivity criterion. People who chase the highest price models just to set themselves apart are looking in the wrong places for their own self esteem. True self worth is manifested by the pursuit of quality that finds issues of inaccessibility to be utterly irrelevant. I look forward to my first opportunity to wear and enjoy a Frederique Constant. As an author and public philosopher, I appreciate immensely what you are doing, as I view it from afar. Good Wishes, Tom Morris

Sophisticated Ideas. With Power.

Tom at Desk Smile

 

Repost by Tom Morris, Ph.D. (Yale University)
See Tom’s blog article at TomVMorris

 

A Simple Luxury: Everyday Beauty

Every morning, we get these push notifications from social media – this person has requested or accepted a LinkedIn connection, that person has endorsed you, there is a new comment on your post, and you have new followers on Twitter. Going through the first run of emails for the day, I usually brush by these quickly. But today, a name caught my eye. I have a new Twitter follower who is the founder and CEO of one of the world’s most interesting companies, and one that I especially admire.

In 1988, Peter Stas and his wife Aletta Bax launched the Swiss watchmaking firm of Frederique Constant. Their vision was simple and brilliant: craft beautiful, elegant watches that would be useful works of art, and accessible to more people than the already existing high-end timepieces for which Switzerland had long been known.

If you are fortunate enough to have artwork in your home that you love – paintings, drawings, sculpture, beautiful rugs, china, or pottery – I hope you enjoy each piece nearly every time you pass it, or sit near it. And if you have easy access to a great museum, or gallery, you can visit to enjoy whatever is on display, sometimes created by the most talented of artists in history, or perhaps in your region of the world. But what about the rest of your time? Are you in touch with beauty in an ongoing way? I’ve come to believe quite firmly that there is a deep aesthetic dimension to our experience of the world, every day, and that we need frequent contact with beauty, in many of its various forms, in order to be our best, feel our best, and flourish in the most complete ways.

A beautiful watch is a small work of art, inside and out, that can go with you nearly everywhere, available throughout the day to add just a spark of the aesthetic to your experience. But the most beautiful watches, for the past half century, have become exorbitantly expensive, and have, in many circles, turned into rare luxuries whose value has subtly shifted, from intrinsically valuable works of art, to often primarily social signifiers – signs that set their wearers apart as members of the cultural elite, the “one percenters” with power, money, and status. Too many people who purchase such amazing, small handmade machines of intricate elegance that sit on the wrist and provide some of the most important information we can gain, do so these days primarily for show, to prove something, to indicate their level of financial attainment and membership in a rarified club of peers. Luxury, in step with this, has become almost synonymous with inaccessibility, the unaffordable and out of reach for the majority of people who could genuinely enjoy that experience of using the goods and services typically thought of as luxuries.

Peter rightly saw that this has gotten all out of joint. Luxury, at its heart, is meant to be primarily about ease and enjoyment, not social display and status achievement. So he and Aletta set out to create beautiful watches, useful works of art that could travel with you throughout your day, and be accessible luxuries, valued primarily for their mastery of craftsmanship and aesthetic qualities, not simply for their brand symbolism, flash, or bling. But of course, beauty has its own flash and bling. And now their brand, Frederique Constant, has become known for its purity of concern with luxury in its original sense, providing ease and enjoyment, which, of course, for most of us must involve reliability, something else they view as of peak importance. They significantly underprice their competition, not by cutting corners on quality, but by focusing on what really matters, and on what they most want to accomplish. And they provide beauty to more of the world, as a result.

Welcome to my little philosophy family, Peter! You believe in the right things!

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