JWM MAGAZINE 92
JWMARRIOTT.COM
MY PASSION
Ron Stoll
A watchmaker who lives his passion
every day and believes in beauty and
quality above quantity.
“I FEEL LIKE
I’VE NEVER
WORKED A DAY
IN MY LIFE.
I LOVE WHAT
I DO.”
RON STOLL CAN’T SAY EXACTLY WHY HE
went to watchmaking school. “I was going to uni-
versity, and out of the blue I decided to become
a watchmaker. It just seemed interesting. I didn’t
know anything about it.” But after he finished his
training, he discovered that watchmaking was not
well-regarded as a profession. At the time, watch-
makers in the United States were mostly doing
watch repair, and barely scraping by. If he was going
to make it in the watch business, he decided, “I
[would] figure out a way to do it differently. And I
started working like a crazy man.”
That was 35 years ago, and since then Stoll has
enjoyed tremendous success —first with his own
company, and now as the North American president
of Carl F. Bucherer watches. More importantly, he
says, “I feel like I’ve never worked a day in my life.
I love what I do.”
When the opportunity arose to work with the
esteemed 126-year-old Swiss company, Stoll didn’t
hesitate. “It’s an honor to be able to associate my life
with the CFB name,” he says. Though the watches
of the Bucherer line are beautiful, says Stoll, it’s the
quality of the craftsmanship that sets them apart.
“Every detail is thought of before they’re manufac-
tured. The layout of the dials, their functionality;
the way the hands are designed; the flow of the
activation and deactivation of the chronograph
mechanisms. Everything is engineered to come
together.” In addition, each watch is hand-assembled
with old-world precision. “Mr. Bucherer believes
we should build watches the way his grandfather
and his father did. The quality of the product that
we create is more important to us than the quantity
that we manufacture.”
One of the best aspects of his job, according to
Stoll, is traveling the country for store events. “I
love interacting with the customer. I meet people
who come to events wearing their Bucherer watches,
and they say, ‘This is the watch I wear all the time.
It’s my favorite watch.’ How many things in life
have you purchased and a year or two years later
you were just as excited about it as the day that you
purchased it? Not many. People regard our watches as
something very special. They’re works of art, really.”
35 years after embarking on a fairly risky career,
Stoll’s love for his work is still going strong. “I
feel like a fish out of water if I’m not trying to
sell or explain a new watch, or [unless] I have a
broken watch in my hand. Watches,” he says, “are my
comfort zone.” p
