Elegano.com

Swatch president Arlette-Elsa Emch wants men to open their wallets and buy Tiffany gifts. Photo: Sarah Lee.

Swatch, one of the world's largest watchmakers, is about to launch a range under the Tiffany brand, starting at about £2,000 a piece and heading up to £5,000. Who, one wonders, might be thinking of spending that kind of cash in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression?

In a thick Swiss-French accent, Arlette-Elsa Emch, a board director and president of the Swatch brand, has a stab at answering. "I think it is a feminine brand – it is something that is much more linked to jewellery. It will be a perfect gift from a man to a woman. It will be a pleasure to receive a Tiffany watch," she says, before pausing.

"And I think, urban, well educated, between 28 and 45, if you want this classical answer, which is really nothing," she waves her hands dismissively and affects a bored tone. "But it is much more about the pleasure to receive the watch. It will be the perfect gift, to a well-educated, beautiful woman, a perfect gift. So man, back to your wallet," she snaps.

Dressed in a black suit with wide trousers and beige snakeskin-patterned shoes, blonde hair sweeping her elegantly tailored shoulders, Emch, 60, sits for most of our meeting with legs crossed and her back straight, ending answers with a kittenish smile that spreads slowly across her face.

She wears a delicate pendant and a chunky grey and black Swatch watch, which you suspect she might swap for something a little more expensive when she isn't meeting the press. But, she enthuses, she loves big watches.

She talks about watches the way Nigella Lawson talks about food. "We live for beauty. Our life is beauty. We are selling beauty," she says breathlessly at one point.

More at: http://tinyurl.com/y993jrs