Issue 199: Visiting Dominique Renaud
Inside the brand new atelier, complete with swimming pool, for insights both mechanical and corporate. Might this be the best way to run an indie watch brand today?
Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that stands on the cusp of its double century. What a moment! It is in fact much like all other moments, i.e. I am too busy panicking about work life and family life (deadlines and dadlines?) to think about it. But I do enjoy the fact that I will pass the 200-issue milestone at Watches & Wonders1.
What I’m going to do for you is this. There will be a newsletter at the end of Watches & Wonders - probably on the Saturday morning, as I’ll still be in Geneva on Friday. I’ll put my most immediate reactions on Instagram, but I’m going to revive the somewhat dormant Substack chat for more detailed conversation around new launches. Then there will be a special Ask Me Anything for Issue 201, where I will answer all your W&W related questions - and anything else besides, but I expect our minds will be focussed on what’s new. If I get time, there might be a podcast, but looking at my calendar I would have to record it in the middle of the night at this rate.
If you will be in Geneva next week, send me a message. I can’t promise anything - right now I’m seeing more than 60 brands in five days across a stupid number of locations - but I’m always up for saying hello. Until I become too self-conscious, I’ll probably be wearing one of my delightful baseball caps, so you can flag me down :-)
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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:
The Renaud Formula
Last week, before Corum’s relaunch - see Issue 198 - and a short visit to Greubel Forsey for the announcement of Naissance d’un Montre 4 / Bonniksen - see News of the Week this week, link below - I went to visit Dominique Renaud.
The visit was arranged a while ago, and unbeknownst to me the timing was auspicious, as a couple of weeks before I arrived, news broke of a new brand - or set of brands, or corporate structure - all geared around Dominique himself. I talked about this on the podcast at the time, and couldn’t really make head or tail of it. You’ve got something called DR Group, a new entity called HHDR (Haute Horlogerie Dominique Renaud) and on an actual brand level, both Dominique Renaud and Renaud Tixier. To confuse things further, DR Group also revealed that it holds a minority stake in Niton, the indie brand launched earlier in the year by Leopoldo Celi (who also works for DR Group, and was my host last week). From now on I’ll refer to Dominique Renaud the brand as DR, Renaud Tixier as RT, just for simplicity.
Edit: About an hour before publication, a new press release announced “the creation of HHDR Group” so from now on I think that is the parent company, not DR Group.
What exactly that was all about is something I got to grips with after sitting down for nearly an hour with HHDR Group CEO Michel Nieto, and I’ll come back to it presently. It does actually make sense, and furthermore might actually be something a lot of other indie brands could learn from.
That news was all quite rightly overshadowed by the announcement of the Pulse60, the first - well, not really, but again we will come to that - watch from DR (the brand). It’s another time-only indie watch with a vaguely contemporary appearance that costs around fifty grand - so why should we pay attention?
To answer that, we are going to end up talking about some quite technical aspects of watchmaking, but it’s worth starting with a bit of context about who Dominique Renaud is - because although the Pulse60 would be impressive regardless, a sizeable percentage of interest in it stems from its maker’s reputation; equally, not everyone could have come up with it in the first place - and what kind of setup he is operating these days.
