That attitude was common among carriage trade jewelers. "Tiffany, Cartier, they all told me watches are a pain in the neck. It's 1%, 2% of the business."Grinberg convinced Arpels that he should give his movado bold a chance. He let Grinberg put them in the store window and do some advertising. Van Cleef prepared the ad, highlighting the colored stone dials with a palette of colors. "That put Piaget on the map," Grinberg says. "Sales went from $205,000 to $433,000 in one year.""In New York, I didn't have any customers. Nobody." Every sale was a victory. "One day Pilet and I went to see C.D. Peacock in Chicago and they bought three Piagets at $1,000 each. Pilet and I had a party!"Two turning points altered Piaget's and Grinberg's fortunes. One was advertising. Grinberg managed to convince The New Yorker that his watch was worthy of a small ad. What happened next didn't seem like a great moment in watch advertising at the time. But it was."The guy who was preparing my little ad asked, 'What copy do we put?'" Grinberg recalls. He answered, "Everybody tells me it's the most expensive watch in the world. Put that."The other turning point was Claude Arpels, head of Van Cleef & Arpels. At the suggestion of an American jeweler who specialized in colored stones, Piaget developed a collection of watches with colored stone dials. When Grinberg saw the watches, he knew he had hit pay dirt. He had something that might interest Van Cleef & Arpels. He called on the firm and by sheer good fortune was taken to see Claude Arpels himself. As it happened, Arpels wanted to learn how to speak Spanish, took a shine to the young Cuban, and took him to lunch. "I was so impressed," Grinberg remembers. "He is Mr. Arpels and I am nobody from Cuba. He was very nice, very polite. He told me, 'Why do I need watches? I have to fix watches. Jewelry I don't have to fix.'""At that time, Mr. Rockefeller was wearing an $18 Timex. The 1960s was a time of polyester suits for $40 and watches for $18. Timex controlled the market. Omega was an expensive watch at a couple of hundred dollars! Werner Sonn, the head of Patek Philippe at that time, will tell you if he sold 20 watches a year, it was a lot. It was horrible, selling one watch at a time. Patek was respected because it was in Tiffany. I was not respected at that time."That point was driven home painfully when Grinberg tried to place an watches 2011ad in The New Yorker. The magazine wouldn't take it. "They told me I am not good enough for The New Yorker," he remembers.
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