Austrian native Matthias Breschan, brand president of Rado, had jobs at Alcatel Mobile Phones and Texas Instruments before starting to work at the Swiss-based Swatch Group some 20 years ago. His career trajectory has thoroughly immersed him in two fields—telecommunications and high-end watchmaking—that are more closely allied than the casual observer might think.

After all, in the mid-1990s, Swatch sold popular watches that could grant a skier admittance to a desirable slope, Breschan recalls. “There was an integrated chip inside the watch not just for ski passes but it could be used as an access control for many other purposes,” he says. And today the Swatch Group produces many connected timepieces, he points out.

Now with smartwatches so pervasive, “people … are ready to pay for hardware,” Breschan asserts during a recent interview. “They are again ready to pay for services. They are … ready to accept that not everything on the Internet is discounted or for free.”

Breschan arrived at the firm in the mid-1990s, a time when management “wanted to diversify Swatch and really open it up for telecommunication products,” he says. The company already sold a cordless phone and had created prototypes of GSM phones, including ones integrated with a watch.

Today the Swatch Group sells 18 brands of watches as well as jewelry and movements and electronics related to timepieces. Breschan’s current duties include overseeing the Rado brand and the Swatch Group in Mexico and Austria. (A graduate of the Vienna School of Economics, Breschan did take a few years off from his Swatch career to work as a managing director for the Aldi supermarket company.)

Two experiences at Swatch “super impressed” Breschan, he says. Early on while attending a class at a Swatch movement manufacturing company, he “learned about all the differences in the movements but also about functions and the complications.” Then he received a pocket watch, whose movement he had to disassemble and then reassemble. “From this day, my whole perception of watchmakers, watchmaking and micromechanics changed.”

Another time after visiting Rado’s manufacturing operations, Breschan came to appreciate the sheer complexity of the high-tech ceramic his company introduced to the watch industry in 1986. “The big, big, know-how is in manufacturing the mold,” says Breschan, citing its small scale, its tolerance of high pressure and the requirement that the resulting links of the watch bracelet be the same size (within a one-hundredth of a millimeter or so). Fabricated with ultra-fine zirconium oxide powder, high-tech ceramic is now used in the watch cases of several Swatch brands for its lightness and scratch resistance. Pigments are added to the zirconium powder to create the desired color. The mixture is melted then injected under 1,000-bar pressure into a precision mold, designed so that the ceramic piece has the right shape and size after sintering.

“The substance of what is inside the watch corresponds to the price level that you are asking for,” Breschan says, wearing a Rado automatic chronograph equipped with a tachymeter containing Super-LumiNova, aiding its visibility in the dark. “What is important long term for a brand is just that it’s authentic.”— Hyla Bauer