Astros and Astronauts Team Up For Exciting New Store Opening in The Woodlands — Breitling Orbits With the Stars

The new Breitling boutique watch shop in The Woodlands opened on Market Street with astronaut brand ambassador Scott Kelly and Astros all-star third baseman Alex Bregman and rookie pitcher phenom Hunter Brown joining Breiting USA president Thierry Prissert to do the ribbon cutting honors.

Prissert tells PaperCity The Woodlands that “not having a point of sale in such an affluent suburb of a major city was a miss. The developer here has done an amazing job putting together where we really like to be. A mixed use community where you have food, entertainment and shopping.

“For us, Market Street is the perfect environment.”

And The Woodlands is a great fit for his high-end watchmaker. “For Breitling, that is our strategy,” Prissert says. “We like to expand where our customers are.”

The Breitling customer-centric attitude served astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonaut Sergey Volkov well a few years ago while they were aboard the International Space Station. In 2016, Prissert and retired astronaut and now Arizona senator Mark Kelly were having dinner in New York when Mark’s phone rang. His brother Scott Kelly was calling from the ISS through a satellite phone.

While on the ISS, Volkov got the bracelet of his Breitling Cosmonaute watch hung up on a handrail. “And so he was ‘Hey, can you help me get this fixed’ because he knew my brother Mark,” Scott Kelly says. “He’d flown in space with my brother Mark. And he knew my brother Mark had been a Breitling ambassador and wanted to see if we can get the watch fixed.

“So I said ‘Let me see what I can do.’ So I called my brother, my brother asked Thierry (Prissert) and he said we’ll send this repair kit to Houston the day before someone left to go to Baikonur and someone gave it to the crew member on the Soyuz — Tim Kopra. And when Kopra arrived in January 2016 he had this repair kit.

“It happened all within like three days. Broken watch band, repair kit to Houston to Baikonur and then on the ISS. Talk about customer service.”

Breitling’s association with space started in 1962 when astronaut Scott Carpenter asked for an adaptation of an existing watch.

“Scott Carpenter said ‘I love that watch because it gives you a lot of calculation,” Prissert details. “But when you’re in space you don’t know if it’s midnight or noon. So could you make a 24 hour dial?”

Scott Kelly’s own association with Breitling dates to 2007.

“I actually bought one myself in 2007 getting ready to command STS-118 shuttle mission,” Kelly says. “I was also an F-14 Tomcat pilot and Breitling came out with this anniversary edition that had on its face some of the F-14 logos and I bought it to fly on the space shuttle.”

After Scott Kelly’s retirement from NASA in 2016, the association with Breitling as a brand ambassador turned into an easy fit.

“After flying four space missions, being on the ISS for a year, I think that’s what we should call an American Hero,” Prissert says. “He has a genuine love for the brand. And to be around such a persona is great for us and for our customer.”

A big part of the Breitling watch world is now sustainability.

“First of all, we do it because it’s the right thing to do,” Prissert says. “But also because being customer-centric, the customer really cares about this and wants to shop with brands that do things the right way. For us, one of the first ways we did this was to try to source materials in a more sustainable way.”

Luxury watch buyers often received large wooden boxes that came with the watch, but these boxes were expensive to ship and store. Breitling has created a new box, made from recycled materials that folds down completely and can be shipped and stored totally flat.

Sustainability extends to the watch itself too.

“We were the first significant watch brand in our price point to use lab grown diamonds,” Prissert says. “We use sustainable gold where we trace where the gold comes from. Small production, small mines and we know exactly how it’s mined and that’s very important for us at Breitling USA.”

Look for another new Breitling store to open later this year in Austin.