Interview with Anthony Lim

That’s right. For 16 years I worked at a local watch retailer called Nanyang Watch Company. I was introduced by a friend as they had just opened in 1956 and were looking for staff. It was located near High Street and we worked out of an office selling watches to businessmen through direct sales. They would call the company to ask if we had a particular model and a salesperson would go down to their office and show the watches to them. If they liked it, then they would buy it on the spot.

I started out running errands for my boss and became a salesperson. There were a few of us at the time and they would ask us to go out and deliver watches to the customers and some of them were not comfortable doing that because we had to go out and travel around. I was willing to do so, but I wasn’t English educated and I quickly realised that I needed to speak the language more fluently if I wanted to do well. So for two years I spent my nights after work at night school at Gan Eng Seng learning English.

As I improved, I started to do more sales. The customers would get accustomed to me and so they would call the company and ask me out to bring the watch to them. Sometimes it might be by taxi or we might take public transport, which was the bus service. Usually we’d simply be out on a bicycle, carrying a case with the watches and we would go around the Central Business District area to the offices. Cycling was the most efficient mode of transport — our customers were located within 5 minutes of where we were. It was different then because the business district was a lot smaller, and we didn’t have the train system yet. The shopping district of Orchard Road didn’t exist; people didn’t have places to go and buy luxury products. So we went to them instead.

Omega was a brand that was very successful at the time. Seiko was another bestseller. We also offered other brands that aren’t really known anymore like Titoni and Titus.

I saw that our customers were gaining interest and knowledge about fine watchmaking and starting to ask for more different types of mechanical watches. I was quite sure that this was something that would continue to develop. And in 1971, the first shopping mall in Singapore opened and that was at Colombo Court. I knew the mall management and thought that this would be an opportunity to start my own watch retail and that’s how it began. I convinced two other partners to pool our resources and take up a store space in the shopping centre. Both of them owned canteens and one of them used to own a department store.

We didn’t know what to call our company at the time, and the department store was called “高登百货公司” in Chinese, so we decided to register the same name but change it from “Department Store” to “Watch Centre” so we didn’t violate their intellectual property. We actually made up the English version of that based on a popular car model at the time, the Ford Cortina. It was a memorable name, there was a beauty to how it sounded, which was like the Anglicised version of our company name.

It was a very tiny store, between 400 or 500 square feet. We started to renovate the store in 1971 and the company started operation in 1972. We didn’t need a lot of space, it was really just where we kept our stock and it was a location where customers could come to the store to buy or see a watch. But the retail environment in Singapore at the time was still in its youth — people were not used to coming out to shop. Our business came from people calling up to ask for timepieces and we would bring it to them. Many of them were located at offices in Telok Ayer, Cecil Street, Hong Kong Street, et cetera. Because of this, you would develop a very close relationship with your customers, and often they would call me up to ask me for particular watches to bring to them.

As a result, many of my customers then followed me when I established Cortina Watch and they were what gave me confidence that I could succeed. This was what I continued to do after we had opened the store. In fact, this is something that we continue to foster at Cortina — a personal relationship with our clients, although it’s a little different today than the one-to-one interactions we had in the past. At the start, it was just me running and operating the business, and later we hired a director to help run the business as we expanded.

We had hired 3 staff to help. We had a starting capital of around S$200,000 and that gave us enough to acquire some stock, and then it was really a matter of selling and re-investing the profits from the company back into the business. To raise my share, I had to mortgage a family home which was a terraced house and it was really used to store goods. It was around Phillips Avenue [in Hougang, now Kovan]. I needed to raise S$80,000 so I mortgaged it to the bank in order to raise the funds.

But business wasn’t smooth-sailing throughout. There were social and political upheavals as well as ups and downs in the economy which affected all businesses. We had to very carefully manage our finances and invest in new storefronts when we saw potential and opportunity to grow. When Orchard Road began to develop, we decided to take a store in Orchard Towers. Then later when Metro set up along Scotts Road, we had a watch display counter within the department store. We also opened stores in Lucky Plaza and Far East Plaza, but closed the latter a few years later because the store location wasn’t ideal — we were on the third floor, and the footfall in that mall did not drive business our way. Colombo Court was still our flagship — our customers were business owners with offices located nearby and it was both convenient and established as a retail location then.

In the 1950s, Patek Philippe had a sole distributor in Singapore and that was H Sena. They were located in High Street and because I was doing door-to-door and outdoor sales primarily at the time, when customers wanted a Patek Philippe, I would go to see them and buy a few pieces from them and we would then display them in our store. They didn’t have official retailers in Asia at the time; it was simply us buying the stock and then selling them to customers. And the late Mr. Henri Stern at the time was in charge of the brand’s retail operations in Asia, so he would come for market visits and we would speak briefly. Later when Mr. Philippe Stern joined the business and he started to visit our markets, I was able to discuss opportunities with him and so we applied to be an official retailer in 1978, even though we were already in business with each other since 1972.

I took a calculated risk. I had customers who promised to continue to support me when I set up my own business. I knew the trade and industry partners well from my 16 years working in watch retail. I told my business partners from the start that I was sure we would make some money from setting up our own watch retail. Whether this would be hugely profitable or not, that remained to be seen. But I was also spotting a trend that people were paying more attention to what they wore, how they dressed, and where women wore jewellery, men wore watches. So I knew that as long as we were prudent and observed the trends shaping what people preferred to wear, we would not fail.

People were paying interest and attention to Swiss watchmaking, so that’s what we retailed. We also sold Seiko watches, but there were really just two Japanese brands that were popular at the time — Citizen and Seiko. We didn’t carry Citizen, but we did carry Seiko models. In fact, during the early years of our business, I would bring by hand some Swiss watches and make regular trips to Japan, and I would sell the watches we brought there to our Japanese customers and use the cash to buy stocks of digital Seiko watches that we would pack and bring back to Singapore. At the time, the Japanese economy was very strong. My wife would watch the store during those times. I’d be going to Japan once a week and I had to carry boxes of watches, which were bulky, off the plane by hand. We couldn’t air freight it because the costs and the insurance were too expensive for us to do so.

They were mostly Singaporean businessmen. Many of them were in the import and export line and they would have visitors from other parts of Southeast Asia like Indonesia. They would be in their offices and there was not a lot of shopping options at the time, so if they or their customers wanted to buy a watch, they would call us and ask us to bring some pieces to their office. We’d put a selection in a briefcase and bring it to them. And since this was a very personal exchange, we’d know what they and their customers liked in terms of style or design, so we could present the right models to them. Omega was a big brand at the time and very popular. Loyalty to my customers and their trust in Cortina was what brought about our success. When we were in their offices, we would talk, discuss things and ideas, and the interaction brought familiarity. Through these visits I had the opportunity to meet and know people across all walks of life who shared an interest in fine watchmaking. It’s a very special exchange and experience.

I had a friend who was starting his own business in Malaysia and he suggested that we should consider going into the market as well. That was what prompted us to consider the move. We started our first outlet in Sungei Wang, which was a very popular location at the time. It wasn’t so prestigious, and we offered watches that we felt would suit the market and slowly built up step by step to expand Cortina’s presence. The idea was that we would be able to steadily penetrate the Southeast and East Asia region, once we had our foundations in Singapore firmly established. We developed a partnership in Bangkok, and later we ventured into Hong Kong and Taiwan. Taiwan was a development born from many timely coincidences: Taipei 101 was opening and we had a strong relationship with Patek Philippe, so we proposed opening a flagship boutique for the brand there. It’s still the largest Patek Philippe store in the region outside of China today.

At the time when we expanded into Malaysia, Raymond [Lim, CEO of Cortina Holdings] had joined the company already. I wanted him to have an intimate understanding of how I envisioned the company from the start. Jeremy [Lim, CEO of Cortina Watch], joined Cortina later. He was studying in Australia but I told him he shouldn’t join the company yet. I thought it would be good for him to have some experience working in a different environment. I wanted them to be in the right positions to better direct the company in the future, so after 3 years, when he had left his job, we agreed it was the right time to join Cortina.

Watchmaking, and to a large extent, any sort of retail, has to follow the trends and evolution of each era, each generation. We have to observe retail interest in brands and how they change over time. So when it comes to developing new ideas and concepts, we’d discuss what was right and what was possible, always with the interest of accommodating what the customer wants and expects from us. This applies to everything from the retail experience to the product range we offer. Seiko was preferred by customers during the ’70s. Cartier was a brand that gained popularity in the ’80s. We simply followed the desires of our audience. Brands like Patek Philippe and Piaget were known to a small group of watch aficionados and serious collectors that has since grown.

We had good relationships with the brand distributors and the brands themselves when they came to visit the market. Most of them had offices around the High Street area, and as we went about our own retail, we would encounter them. There were fewer players at the time, so we exchanged information with each other and customers as well. That agility helped us to weather rapid changes in the industry and build enduring relationships with brands.

[The mall] represented a change in the way customers were shopping, away from the High Street area towards North Bridge Road. And then Orchard Road emerged as a new district for retail and we followed the flow of business to establish new outlets there. Ngee Ann City was still being completed and Paragon Shopping Centre in its early days was really a mall for automobile showrooms. You could see differences in the customer profiles across different parts of Singapore as well; at Raffles City, our customers were mostly locals, but along Orchard Road, there were more tourists visiting our stores to buy watches.

Because of its excellent location, we were also able to bring in more brands into our portfolio. CEOs of various watch brands, when they would visit the Singapore market, would be impressed by our setup at Raffles City and it gave them the confidence to have us as an official retailer. There are people who believe that competition is difficult, but in a growing market like Singapore, competition breeds excellence, innovation and success.

When it comes to our overseas expansion, there have always been challenges in the past. After all, Cortina isn’t a brand that’s universally known across different parts of Southeast Asia.

Our expansion overseas was very organic, and grew naturally as we saw demand in other parts of Southeast Asia. There was never a big plan to have a Cortina Watch store in every country. Malaysia was a natural development given the close ties the two countries have. You have to remember that watches are an expensive luxury product and we were a small company. We didn’t have a lot of capital or spare cash to keep expanding non-stop. It was difficult to get a loan from a bank in our early years. They wanted guarantors, collateral, et cetera. We sought a loan because we wanted to acquire several stores in Lucky Plaza when it first opened — it was prime real estate. But we faced challenges accessing financing at the time, since we were a new business. So we had to develop the business very prudently. After we were listed, that changed, which opened up more access to capital and gave us a chance to explore new opportunities when they arose in the region.

In Bangkok, we saw that the market was steadily maturing and there was a new generation of wealth emerging. We believed it had great potential. But one of the challenges we faced was brand recognition. The Cortina name wasn’t very well known there, even though we had Thai customers who bought their timepieces from us in Singapore. We were not familiar with the market, so we discussed a joint partnership with two local partners. Through this experience, we learnt to dedicate our expansion resources to markets where our name and brand equity are already strong.

We’re always very careful to consider our customer base in each market as well. Cortina was built on local customers, and we’ve always made a lot of effort to groom and grow the local audience in each market that we’re present in. Having a big tourist base is a substantive addition to our business but we rely on local clients wherever we are. It’s one reason we were able to weather the last two years smoothly and continue to expand despite the economic challenges we’ve seen globally. In markets where we are not strong, we rely on our partners who have a strong local connection to guide us in our growth.

We all offer our opinions. I’m at the office daily, and we have regular meetings to discuss everything from business development to potential opportunities. Every one has the opportunity to voice out their ideas, concerns. Very often, Raymond and Jeremy make suggestions on what’s next and they are both veterans in the industry, so their experience mitigates the amount of risk with each venture. They know their business and they’re well versed on how to deal with various crises since they’ve seen so many in their leadership of the company. When it comes to brands, we need to have their confidence as well so we can keep ahead of trends and curves. Take Taiwan for example. It was a bit of a risk to take such a huge store space, but Raymond (who was leading this project) broke down the risks and minimised any potential impact. It was clear that it would be a good investment.

There are many different challenges. As brands today want to share their heritage and storytelling in a more engaging manner, multi-brand retailers like us need to find new ways of achieving this within a multi-brand store. That’s why we’re creating bigger retail spaces, but curating the brands within each store so that we can develop the right brand experience in our stores for each brand. In our online and offline marketing, we also spend more efforts developing unique experiences and opportunities for customers to fully appreciate the brands we carry, through monobrand boutiques to virtual seminars and more.