Zenith’s new Chronomaster Solo Sport rebelliously subtracts, not adds

CRANS-MONTANA – There is a particular kind of confession that slips out when a watchmaker forgets he is being interviewed.

High above the clouds at Chetzeron, the picturesque mountain hotel in the Swiss ski resort of Crans-Montana, Zenith chief products officer Romain Marietta admits something mildly heretical for a man who has spent 20 years obsessing over mechanical precision.

Tiny date windows, he says with a laugh, are becoming harder to read.

“Once you get past 30, it becomes a bit less easy to see,” the 44-year-old says, joking that he may soon have to start looking at watches with bigger date displays.

It is an amusing admission, not least because one of the four versions of the watch he is here to unveil to a group of international journalists does away with the date window altogether.

The moment sets the tone for a conversation that is less about specifications than restraint, honesty and the challenge of persuading people to buy something nobody strictly needs.

For Zenith, that challenge invariably begins with the El Primero.

Unveiled in January 1969, it was the world’s first automatic, fully integrated high-frequency chronograph movement, beating at a then-blistering 36,000 vibrations an hour, or 5 Hz. It almost disappeared during the quartz crisis of the 1970s, surviving only because Zenith watchmaker Charles Vermot defied orders to destroy the machinery needed to make it and secretly hid the tooling in the manufacture’s attic.

More than half a century later, that engineering legacy powers Zenith’s new Chronomaster Solo Sport. Except this time, the brand has done something that sounds almost sacrilegious: it has removed the chronograph.

Gone are the pushers and chronograph sub-dials. Inside the 40mm steel case instead sits the El Primero 3620, a three-hand movement derived from the calibre 3600. It still beats at the El Primero’s signature 5 Hz frequency and comes with a silicon escapement, star-shaped rotor and 60-hour power reserve.

In other words, Zenith has taken the movement that made its name as a chronograph specialist and asked a deceptively simple question: What happens when you take the chronograph away?

“We were missing this product in our line-up. That’s a fact,” Marietta says.

Zenith chief executive Benoît de Clerck, who joined the brand from Panerai and is also in Crans-Montana for the launch, is equally candid.

“The market and collectors have always told us that we do not have a three-hand piece in our collection. So that’s what we did.”

Simple as that sounds, it took the watchmaker two-and-a-half years to get there.

For Marietta, simply making ever more complicated chronographs was not the answer.

“If you stay only with chronographs, what do you do?” he asks. “A split-second chronograph, for example, is super hard to sell because nobody understands it. You have two hands, two chronographs in one, and I don’t even use the first one. So why should I have a second?”

So rather than add, Zenith subtracted.

For a watch defined by what has been taken away, a remarkable amount of work has gone into what remains.

Without chronograph counters cluttering the face, the dial gets more room to speak. Its ceramic surface is engraved with a repeating 45-degree Z motif designed to evoke the vibrations of the high-frequency movement beneath it.

A “shark tooth” minute track takes its cue from vintage Zenith watches, while a unidirectional ceramic bezel and 200m of water resistance underline the watch’s sporting credentials.

The brand has lavished attention on the bracelet too. Its new folding buckle, called the Zenclasp, allows the wearer to fine-tune the fit without tools. The seemingly simple mechanism took three years and some 1,800 hours to develop, and uses 10 tiny ceramic ball bearings.

The Chronomaster Solo Sport comes in four references and three colours: black, white and brown. The black model is the only one offered both with and without a date window.

The three date versions cost CHF 9,900 in Switzerland and $15,600 in Singapore, while the no-date black model is $14,000, making it the most affordable of the four.

And that price is important.

Zenith deliberately wanted the Solo Sport to slip below the psychologically significant CHF10,000 barrier. More interestingly, it knows exactly whom it hopes will notice.

“We’re targeting people from their late 20s onwards, because that’s when they start earning a decent salary,” de Clerck says.

Marietta points to one of Zenith’s biggest Geneva rivals to explain the thinking.

“Sub-10 is the logic and also the target, because sometimes that barrier is important,” he says, citing the Rolex Submariner. “Look at the Submariner without the date; it’s CHF9,000. With the date, it’s now CHF10,150. So there’s a thousand-franc gap for date versus no date. It’s a natural positioning.”

It is unusual candour in an industry where brands generally prefer to talk about themselves rather than the competition. But Marietta is equally clear eyed about Zenith’s place in the pecking order.

“If we can take 0.1 per cent of the sales from the others, we would be happy,” he says. “The expectation isn’t to sell 10,000 of these. That’s not the goal.”

Nor does he pretend Zenith can compete with Rolex on sheer brand recognition.

“Most probably 98 per cent of people will walk out of the shop with a Rolex if they can get one,” he says.

Choosing a Zenith, he argues, is a rather different proposition.

“It’s already a purchase for an expert, someone who’s genuinely passionate,” says Marietta.

De Clerck adds: “We have 161 years of history and that gives us a lot of credibility. You cannot make history and, because of that, it gives us a lot of authencity as well.

“We make a lot of brands envious. There are many new brands, wannabe new brands and wannabe old brands who wish to have the history that we have.”

He adds: “We are not Rolex, we have no intention to become Rolex.”

Instead, with the Solo Sport, the brand is betting that there are enough younger buyers who want something less obvious: a relatively accessible mechanical watch with serious horological pedigree but without the complications – or ubiquity – of the names everyone else already knows.

Ask Marietta whether a celebrity face might make that uphill climb easier and he doesn’t hesitate.

“No. We will never associate ourselves – or this watch particularly – with famous ambassadors just for the sake of trying to sell it.”

The alternative, he insists, is slower and harder: training every salesperson, in every market, to actually explain what’s inside the case.

“It’s not going to be an easy task. Storytelling is super important to us and it has to be authentic, true to ourselves. We’re not trying to bullshit everyone with fake stories.”

Marietta has had plenty of time to watch Zenith learn the virtues of restraint.

He joined the company in 2006, during what he calls, with a small laugh, the “Thierry era”, a reference to then chief executive Thierry Nataf, when Zenith’s catalogue had ballooned to more than 800 references.

Today, the picture is very different. Marietta says Zenith has whittled its offering down to fewer than 100 references and around 450 points of sale worldwide.

De Clerck, who took over as chief executive in January 2024, has brought much the same philosophy to production.

“When I came on board, I decided we will cull and sell what we produce,” he says.

In practice, that means resisting the temptation to make more watches simply to boost sales. Instead, Zenith has deliberately kept production close to actual consumer demand, trying to ensure that the number of watches shipped to retailers broadly matches the number eventually bought by customers.

For Marietta, scarcity is not simply a sales tactic. It is part of what makes a luxury object desirable in the first place.

He sees little reason to significantly increase annual production, although he asks that the current figure remains off the record. The aim is not to be everywhere, nor to make something for everyone. It is to remain desirable enough that owning a Zenith still feels like a choice rather than an inevitability.

If the Solo Sport is Zenith’s attempt to broaden its appeal, another recent project has taken the brand in precisely the opposite direction.

The G.F.J. collection sits at the rarefied end of the market. Built around Zenith’s historic Calibre 135, which won 235 prizes for precision, it has spawned limited “double-signature” collaborations with independent watchmakers, with prices starting at around CHF50,000.

De Clerck describes the project as a “calculated risk”, one that paid off quickly.

“We had the Calibre 135, which is one of the most decorated movements, and the watches were sold out because they were so beautiful,” he says. Subsequent versions sold out too.

The success gave Zenith confidence that there was an appetite for something beyond the chronographs for which it is best known. If collectors would embrace a simple three-hand Zenith at the very top of the market, why not offer the same idea at a more accessible price?

Marietta believes the G.F.J. has also changed the way serious collectors see the brand.

“The G.F.J. positioning is almost an independent brand within the brand,” he says.

In that rarefied corner of watch collecting, he argues, Zenith can offer an alternative to small independent makers whose most sought-after watches can come with waiting lists stretching several years.

Collectors accustomed to buying from the most prestigious names, he says, are suddenly looking at Zenith differently.

“They see us doing this and think, ‘Wow, the calibre is super cool, super uncommon’. Nobody else has a movement that looks like it’s from the 1940s still in production.”

And Marietta hopes some of that prestige will eventually trickle down to the Solo Sport.

“These wealthy clients, maybe one day they’ll advise their son or nephew, ‘Buy the Solo Sport. It’s a great watch’.”

He smiles. “It works like that a bit.”

It is an intriguing two-pronged strategy: use a rare, expensive watch to make Zenith more desirable at the top, then harness some of that desirability to attract a new generation at the other end of the collection.

He smiles, adjusting the Solo Sport on his wrist. 

“You don’t buy a mechanical watch because you need it. You buy it because you desire the story, the integrity and the human hands behind it.”