26 Mar Interview with Jerome Dupres of PresentWatch.com
Jerome Dupres of luxury watch magazine PresentWatch.com has put aside some time for an interview with us. If you’re fans of luxury watches or want to learn about the online side of a luxury industry magazine, please read on!
Simon: Present Watch seems to be more encompassing than the average online magazine, with much more than just articles. Can you run through the basics features of your site for our readers?
Jerome Dupres
Jerome: Hello Simon, and thank you for coming to us. We try to bring to our readers a place where they can find daily updates and news from the world of watchmaking. They can register, create a list of their favourite contents, share, comment and participate. The website is organized as follows: Watches (Reviews), Videos, News (Interesting and selected information), Boutiques (Official resellers and shop owners can contact us to be included in this listing), Brands (To browse the website by brands or to access the brands’ histories), Vintage (A new section open to participation for people interested in vintage watches), Classifieds (A listing of classifieds, open to professionals and individuals, sales are made by private messages) and finally the Forum (Questions and answers space)
Simon: What’s your role in the company?
Jerome: Presentwatch is part of COMINOV, which is my web agency based in Prague. I handle many things – Design, Website integration, SEO, SMO and the promotion of the website – It makes my days pretty long as I also have to work for my clients.
Simon: Who are your other official contributors and their roles/specialties?
Jerome: I try to post as much as I can but it is not very regular as I have been busy with some major changes on the website during the past weeks. The main contributor for now is my friend Jose Sousa. We started to have regular talks on Facebook and as he liked Presentwatch a lot I offered him to join me. Jose has been working for the principal watch boutique in Porto and has more than 20 years experience in this business (He is deeply in love with watches, with a maniac preference for Zenith :). He is our watch specialist and also the editor in chief for the Portuguese version of PW.
Then we have another very good friend of mine, Ryan Clontz who is our high-tech watches specialist. The Croatian language version is in the hands of Lovre Trumbic, a multi skilled friend who also believes that there is a market to develop in this region. We plan to develop the visibility of PW in the Balkans within 6 months; we are working on partnerships right now. The last one but not the least is Johan Pelli, a watchmaker from Sweden who has a workshop in Trollhättan. He will post articles about watch repair sessions; we are very exited about it, as we don’t know any other watch website offering this kind of topic. Johan Pelli is a very nice person which I also met on Facebook (Yes you can! :). I am very happy that he will participate, and we are proud to give him a spot where he can share his beautiful work, sometimes even fascinating.
Ryan, Jose and Lovre
Simon: Can you share the story of how Present Watch was launched?
Jerome: I started Presentwatch in 2008 when I was working for Digital Publishing, a web agency based in Prague. I was offered to launch a personal project and I decided it would be a website about high-end timepieces, something I like and would be also a pleasure to work on. Unfortunately, during the first 2 years I was very busy working on other projects for some clients we had at this time. In 2010, I quit the company and set up my own web agency, COMINOV. It was really in early 2012 that I decided to bring PW to the next step. We seem to have a pretty good reputation on the social networks and the feedback from our readers is also very motivating.
Simon: So you’ve recently launched a new website design. What improvements are you most proud of?
Jerome: Well, I wanted to make the homepage and the category pages a bit more user friendly, with a short introduction text, and a better organization of the contents in it. Nothing big, just a little refresh. The main improvements were actually to have the website in several languages.
Simon: Checking out all your accounts, I see you’re pretty involved in social media. Can you share any management tips, strategies or successes?
Jerome: It is true, and I also handle a few other accounts for my clients. I have many tips I am using, and the top 5 is in the safe (:D). Well to be honest, our Facebook page is doing pretty well. It’s maybe because I enjoy doing it, and managing something you like will always bring better results. We share our passion about fine watchmaking, and even though we offer people the opportunity to post classifieds since November 2012 we are not a merchant website (not yet), so we are not here to sell anything and I think people appreciate that, we only want to build a place where they can discover, learn, participate and share their love for beautiful timepieces. Our community is made of good people and connoisseurs 🙂
Simon: You offer Portuguese and Croatian versions of your site, do you plan to offer it in any other languages?
Jerome: Yes, the next language is French but days are to short, so we have a delay. We initially planned to have it ready for April but it won’t be before summer I think. Russian should be coming end of 2013, and Czech version is on the way.
Simon: With 2013 already well on its way, what watch brand are you most excited for this year and why?
Jerome: Romain Gautier, I really like the logical one. Beautiful mechanism, the flat chain-and-fusee is simply a delight. But I am sure there will be many more exiting watches to come during 2013, and with the Baselworld opening its door in a month, things could change!
Simon: Can you share any future projects or plans in 2013 for Present Watch?
Jerome: Yes of course. We are planning to add an e-shop section because we received a bit more than 30 inquiries in 2012, (Aerowatch, Hublot, IWC, Panerai…) but we were not able to honour them. We are looking for partners on this project, as I will definitely have no room to add this part to my schedule.
Simon: Thanks for your time with us today Jerome!
Jerome: You are very welcome Simon, take good care and keep on the great work with Luxury Branded, Ryan Clark and the rest of the team!
If you love luxury watches and horology, make sure to connect with Jerome and the Present Watch Crew with the links below:
Present Watch http://www.presentwatch.com/
Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/watchpresent
Twitter – http://www.twitter.com/presentwatch
Pinterest – http://www.pinterest.com/presentwatch
Youtube – http://www.youtube.com/presentwatch
