Luxury watch retailer Jura was born as an economic storm gathered. But the company has flourished through a blend of innovation and independence

The credit crunch couldn't have come at a worse time for Jura Watches. The luxury retailer was launched in November 2007 with an avowed aim to shake up an industry that its founders believed had not kept up with changing times. Unfortunately, it coincided with the greatest economic cataclysm to beset the world for almost 80 years.

"Last year we expected the world to end," says co-founder Alastair Laidlaw. "But unbelievably it didn't happen. We saw strong growth."
Jura's trend-bucking performance can be attributed to an innovative approach that has created a business that sells 50 per cent of its product online in a sector which has traditionally been reliant on the "see, touch and feel" factor.

Laidlaw would have rather not had an outlet at all. "We didn't want to get involved in bricks and mortar, but the brands were simply not ready to give up the holy grail of the boutique experience, which allows the customer to engage with the brand in a way which they can't do online," he recalls.

And so Laidlaw and business partner Matthew Warren invested £350,000 in a store on Burlington Gardens in Mayfair, where they rub shoulders with the likes of Cartier and Patek Philippe. Mixing in such company comes at a price, of course. In this case, an annual rent of £125,000.

Not that the Jura store is a conventional watch emporium. Laidlaw hired an award-winning young architect to design a store with a contemporary feel, using black floor tiles and a white sculpted "mountain wall" feature to evoke the landscape of the Swiss canton from which the company takes its name. The outlet also boasts a 103in plasma screen-the biggest available- and 48in screens to display 360-degree images of its stock.

"In order to sell successfully online, we needed to set new benchmarks for the display of information on the Web," says Laidlaw. "Right from the start we offered ultra high-resolution watch images, provided full details of accessories, the watch box, technical specification, warranty and zero per cent finance options."

Jura's latest initiative is Virtual Watch, an innovation that allows browsers with webcams to "try on" watches on screen to see how they look in situ and to assess whether the size of a particular model suits their wrist.

Such a mould-breaking approach has not gone unnoticed by competitors. "Jura's impact on London watch retailing has been hard to overestimate," says James Gurney, editor of QP magazine, the fine-watch collector's bible.

"Where the established approach has been reliant on well-established, big-name brands, Jura has shown that innovation and independence can equally flourish. It would be only a small exaggeration to say that Jura has created a new watch market."

Over the past year, Laidlaw and Warren have gone two better. Last May, they spent £750,000 on The Watch Gallery, a store on Fulham Road, west London, that sells the superbrands of the business-Panerai, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Zenith and Girard-Perregaux-for prices ranging from £5,000 to £1m. This was followed six months later by the launch of The Watch Department, an online-only fashion and lifestyle watchseller offering names such as TW Steel and Armani and lifestyle brands such as Suunto and Wenger, makers of sports watches.

As Laidlaw says: "When you're operating in a mature market you need to be not only clearly different but seriously better."

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