Editors’ Note

Before Will and Rina Stein founded Philip Stein in 2002, Rina gained experience in watch design and the details of product development with a Swiss watch brand that she owned and operated. With Will’s background in marketing, Rina and Will combined their strengths to create a private label watch business in 1998. In 2002, they became aware of the concept and benefits of natural frequencies and launched the Philip Stein line of timepieces incorporating frequency-based technology. They sold their first watch in August 2003. This natural frequency technology has been incorporated into their new Prestige Collection line and other products ever since.

Company Brief

The Philip Stein Group (www.PhilipStein.com) has grown to be a leader in watches and other lifestyle products. From its flagship Philip Stein watch and accessory line to its recently debuted Philip Stein Sleep Bracelet, the company’s products all feature its Natural Frequency Technology.

Why was the timing right to reposition the brand and what is your vision going forward?

We started in 2003 as a watch brand with a wellbeing benefit, but over the years, we realized that we could use the technology in other applications, not only via watches – one example is our Sleep Bracelet. So we decided to evolve from being characterized as a watch brand to becoming a wellbeing technology brand.

Our Natural Frequency Technology is all about tuning, which means calibration for optimal performance. Our technology helps retune the body and mind to their natural best.

Being in tune means for us also being in harmony, having confidence, and experiencing life in a balanced way. That is the reason why we made Live in Tune our central idea and ethos for the brand.

How are you getting this new messaging out to the customer?

We always tried to come up with the simplest way of explaining the technology, especially for the salespeople in the stores.

So we have new messaging, but it’s the same message packaged in a different way. We live in an environment of frequencies, some that are manmade and others that are natural. Our technology acts like an antennae, which is fine-tuned to pick up only the natural frequencies that surround us and channels them to the body for our personal benefit.

That is a simple message because everybody understands what an antennae does.

As an innovator in this area, how important has it been to provide market research?

Our market research is based on what we hear from our customers whether it is design related or function related. We then brainstorm ideas internally and see which of those are most viable to further improve our products or the benefits thereof.

In addition we continuously do further research and development of our technology. For example we have recently completed a placebo controlled cell study to show the benefits of our Sleep bracelet.

The results were very promising and will be released toward the end of this year. However, the emotional connection between a customer and the product is as important, if not more. This is why we are focusing on our message Live in Tune, as it is inviting, positive, and inspiring.

Within Philip Stein, there are three areas: life, sleep, and beauty. Is life focused on the watches, sleep on the bracelet, and beauty on the fragrance?

Yes. We created three sub-brands: life is about our daytime accessories for overall wellbeing. At the moment we have watches and bracelets but we will come out with other products in that category.

Sleep is about the nighttime accessories for better sleep, so we have the Sleep Bracelet and we will come up with other products.

For beauty, we have the fragrance, which we haven’t sold yet in retail but we will start doing at the end of this year. We will also come out with other beauty products, be it lotions or cosmetics, but always with our natural frequency technology.

Even though we use the frequency technology for all of our products, each category has a different frequency recipe and it’s all about fine-tuning: how we tune the technology so that it takes up specific frequencies that are important for wellbeing or specific frequencies that are important for sleep. This is our proprietary technology.

With such a unique focus, do you genuinely compete with other timepiece brands or are you in a class of your own?

It’s very difficult to differentiate among watches from a design point of view so we differentiate in terms of technology, and we have created this niche in the market as the feel-good watch.

How do you bring on natural brand extensions without losing the essence of the brand?

We have to focus on accessories that you put on your body, be it watches, bracelets or pendants, because these are natural extensions for Philip Stein.

The fragrance is something we started to do as a gift with purchase but people liked it so we will expand on that as well.

But our core extension is accessories for the person. As we go along, we will see that we can also use the technology in other products, which are not accessories worn on the person. We will either handle these ourselves or license them.

When you have retailers that sell across the brand, how do you handle the training?

Training is critical for us. One of our goals for this new messaging was to create a coherent and consistent brand throughout the world.

Our distributors have trainers and a training team to train the salespeople. However, we make the most difference with retailers who wear Philip Stein watches and bracelets, who experience the difference in how they feel when they wear the watch and how they sleep at night with the bracelet, because it’s all about the testimonial.

In addition to their own stories, the salespeople are provided with simple and easy-to-understand verbiage to explain the technology.

Will new product launches stay within the Prestige, Signature, Extreme, and Active lines or will you be broadening collections as well?

We have the categories – Prestige, Signature, Extreme, Active – but we just created a new case, which is similar enough to the brand to show the DNA of Philip Stein but different enough to look like a new case in the showcase.

So we will always have extensions in watches and the Philip Stein DNA.

Is this an exciting time for the brand?

Yes, but it’s less about starting over. It’s not a rebrand so much as a new Philip Stein brand. I feel we have a cohesive and coherent brand, something we can build upon long term and which gives us many opportunities for extensions and expansion.•