Rick De La Croix: Genius At Building Brands
With over two decades in the luxury watch industry, Pieric “Rick” De La Croix is one of the major figures in the industry of luxury watches, working as the CEO of Ares Distributors. In that position, he works with numerous luxury watch brands across the US as well as Latin America. He’s also a founding distributor partner at Hublot, and he founded Bomberg Watches.
Based and long working out of Switzerland, his first watch job was working at Tag Heuer, a Swiss luxury watchmaker, and he’s been working in the industry ever since. He later moved to South America to oversee the Latin American distributions of both Gucci and Versace products. He also started working with the owner and the CEO of Hublot, Jean Claude Biver and Ricardo Guadalupe, to help them establish their brand in Latin America.
As the president and CEO of Ares Distributors, Rick De La Croix has been working to grow the presence of a number of different luxury watchmaking brands, such as Greubel Forsey, Bovet, MBF Hublot / Zenith as well as the brands which today he owns, Bomberg and the Unnamed society which he distributes globally.
While working with Hublot, De La Croix managed to create numerous partnerships for the brand with the likes of Diego Maradona, Dwane Wade, the World Boxing Council, and the Mexican Football Federation. De La Croix works on digital marketing and social media marketing. With the help of social media, which has managed to completely transform the way that brands and corporations interact with their consumers, De La Croix helped Hublot take the world by storm.
Instead of renewing the same ad placements in print and getting the same TV spots every year, De La Croix worked on turning every one of the ten Hublot boutiques into cultural destinations that everyone would want to visit.
For the Jamaica location, De La Croix partnered Hublot with the fastest man in the world and six-time Olympic gold medal winner Usain Bolt. For the location in Brazil, he partnered with Pelé. Meanwhile, De La Croix also worked on a partnership between Hublot and Jay Z, which resulted in the Shawn Carter Classic Fusion.
In the United States, he created collaborations with the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys and Miami Heat and he built very key relationships to help the brands he works with move forward.
According to De La Croix, the reason for his success with Hublot from the very beginning was his understanding of the industry and his special touch. Although the brand didn’t always have the financial capacity it does today, De La Croix worked with brand ambassadors for the watchmaker from the start. He organized events around the brand ambassador, launched personalized editions with them, and simply worked with their charities to create buzz around the watchmaker brand Hublot.
De La Croix himself embraces change, which helps him navigate the ever-shifting marketing industry and innovations. In this way, he helps brands and corporations stand out from the crowd. One of his key strategies is working on identifying industry leaders and aligning his clients with those leaders for the brands to get as much exposure and attention as possible.
He understands how the social media world can help brands connect with their target audiences and takes advantage of that fact perfectly. A watch today is a symbol of who you are – or who people perceive you to be. Rick De La Croix is one of the worlds leading watch marketers and distributors.
