iistanbul time company

Businessman, watch designer and innovator, Tarık Hatiboğlu’s journey began with a chance encounter in the summer of 1985 in Antalya where he took a break from his studies at the Bosphorus University. In a jewellery shop he entered accidentally while helping some tourists, Tarık met the owner of the shop, Ahmet Şapçı, who was to eventually become one of his best friends. Looking for qualified staff to help with the sales and having witnessed Tarık’s good command over the English and German languages, Ahmet recruited Tarık. Next season, they had become business partners.

Thanks to the booming tourism, business was flourishing in Turkey. Within a couple of years Tarık had already started opening his own jewellery stores, first in the Mediterranean area, and later, in Germany and İstanbul. He got married in 1992 and began to live mostly in İstanbul and focused on his businesses in the area. After the fall of the Berlin wall and the dissolution of the Soviet empire, very interesting things started to happen in the jewellery market. Almost like all other jewellery shops in Turkey, Tarık’s shops used to sell gold watches which were copies of known brands. All of a sudden, tourists coming from former Soviet countries began to mock the copies on display, while exposing with boastful pride the original brand of watches they were wearing. Luxury jewellery and watch manufacturers in the world were coming into their golden age. The two industries, which have remained almost non-existent until then, suddenly revived. Prominent companies in the sector began making billions of dollars’ worth of turnovers, bought other small but promising brands, and most importantly, conducted big media campaigns with huge budgets for publicizing the sparkly things they produced.

Tarık had begun to understand how the concepts of luxury and branding were now becoming an inseparable pair. Hence, he promptly decided that the future of jewellery held promise not in nameless copies but in genuine, branded design; and from the early 90s, began selling famous Italian jewellery brands in Turkey. He opened a large store in 1997; the store was so big, Tarık recalls, that it was not possible to fill it up with jewels, so he was very glad when he met Shelly Ovadia in a fair and got the chance to sell the watch brands she represented. She represented some of the world's leading watch brands in Turkey, and Tarık remembers her pleasantly surprised remark upon his proposition, "I never imagined there could be a franchise system outside of our own stores," she said.

In 1998 Basel fair, where Tarık went annually to give his jewellery orders for the coming year, he chanced upon Gerd R. Lang. The famous watch designer Lang had achieved great success worldwide with his watch brand Chronoswiss. The watches were so beautiful, Tarık recalls, it was like love at first sight. Tarık and Lang agreed on the terms for the Turkish market, first orders were delivered, and within a short period of three months, Tarık’s intuition proved right: Chronoswiss watches had become much sought-after items of luxury in Turkey.

Once entered into the magical world of watches, after a no end series of meeting interesting people and notable masters, Tarık also made the acquaintance of Gerald Genta, world's greatest living watchmaker at the time. He also took the representation of the Gerald Genta brand. Watch business was going really well, so Tarık set his sights higher. In the early 2000s, he began negotiations with the Richemont Group. In line with global developments, the group also wished to change their representatives in many countries. Soon, the group representatives established contact with Tarık, telling him of his potential candidate for the representation of IWC and Jaeger-LeCoultre brands in Turkey. Tarık was walking on air with joy.

Tarık told his partners in jewellery that they could no longer work together, took his jacket and left. Soon after, he had put together his new team and established a new company; CHRONOS Istanbul. Costumers loved the new concept at once and CHRONOS started gaining in momentum towards becoming ‘the star brand of Turkey’, as it would later be acclaimed by the Turkish media.

One month after the conception of CHRONOS, Tarık was contacted again by the Richemont Group and given the good news that he would represent the IWC brand in Turkey. One year later, the representation of two other major watch brands of the group, Jaeger-LeCoultre and Piaget, was also passed on to him. Until year 2010, CHRONOS Istanbul team achieved great success with the representation of these brands in Turkey. They were so successful in fact that Tarık had no way of knowing what was just around the corner.

There was no drama, just thriving business until Tarık’s professional life took a dramatic turn when chaos suddenly showed up at his doorstep: The CEO of IWC had turned up in Tarık’s Istanbul headquarters to thank him for the great success so far attained and dismiss his services on the account that the Richemont Group was planning to launch its own private boutiques in Turkey.

Conversely, less than a year ago, Tarık had already launched three new private watch boutiques in the name of IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre and Piaget in Istanbul, and has been conducting big media campaigns with huge budgets to inaugurate and propagate them. Nearly all his accumulation was linked with investments that carried the represented brands beyond recognition and transformed them into objects of desire in the eyes of the target market as well as the media. They were doing so well in fact that Tarık was totally unprepared for his partners’ sudden change of heart.

50 years old at the time, Tarık had invested most resources at his disposal, along with all his determination and energy into propagating the Richemont brands he represented in Turkey. So, he thought sarcastically, the group had been the making and the unmaking of him. Also shaken by divorce, he found himself standing empty handed at the advent of a bleak horizon, unaware at the time that the current state of affairs was in fact a great blessing in disguise.

While dealing with chaos, realization dawned on Tarık: He was meant to design his own brand of watches. Why had he not thought of it before! All his carrier choices and professional experiences up to this point, including his connoisseur involvement with timepieces and incessant fascination with mechanics, had culminated in a breakthrough towards a novel direction: He was to pioneer the first state-of-the-art mechanical watches to be made entirely in Turkey. If it were not for the exceptional circumstances he found himself in, and all that he went through, this idea would not have been born. Sometimes war comes to a man out of nothing, and on that day, he either gets up and fights, or gets diminished. So Tarık got up and continued on his way with renewed faith and energy.

Numerous new watch brands entered the fast growing market in the late 80s, but very few of them actually survived to date. Although Tarık no longer had extensive resources with which to invest, he had one other priceless accumulation, his know-how, vast experience and expertise in the field of Haute Horlogerie, which uniquely qualified him in Turkey to proceed in the right way.

Once he found out what it was that he needed to do, that is, creating from scratch the first mechanical watch brand of Turkey, he also realized that he knew exactly how to do it. He had already done it in the past for the international brands he launched in Turkey. Most importantly, he found out that the qualified expert position he attained in the world of watches over the years, also equipped him with a unique sense of aesthetics.

Sometimes, unusual circumstances lead to new inspiration, and sometimes, life shattering experiences lead to genuine breakthroughs. For only when we let go of what we feel to be correct, can we attempt a new way of thinking. Tarık’s breakthrough came in the form of Istanbul Time Company which constituted the essential next step in his personal evolution as well as professional advancement.

If we strive to do the best we can with whatever hand we are dealt by fate, we can expect a certain amount of success to follow, but never had he imagined such swift progress coupled with exceptional outcome. All as if to prove right what Tarık has always believed in: When people work with dedication on what they love to do, success will surely come.