Artime

Artime is a collective of six watchmaking veterans who left some of the most demanding positions in the Swiss industry to build something of their own in the Jura horloger — with humility, humor, and innovation at the centre of everything they make rather than glory, profit, or marketing. The group's story begins with Artime SA, a specialist movement decoration atelier founded in Les Brenets in 2014 by Manuel Thomas, an entreprenerial watchmaker and micro-mechanic trained at Audemars Piguet's Renaud & Papi. Stéphane Maturel — former head of the technical bureau and development services at Renaud & Papi, later an analyst-watchmaker at TAG Heuer — joined as general director in 2017. A machining division was added in 2020. Then, in 2023, Fabrice Deschanel arrived with a vision to complete the offer: Artime Créations SA, the creative entity charged with translating the team's combined expertise into a complete original watchmaking proposal. Together the three entities — decoration, machining, and creation — now operate from ateliers in Les Brenets and Le Locle, covering prototype production, hand and machine finishing, movement and case decoration, and the full design and development of new Haute Horlogerie creations.

The six associates bring a collective résumé that few independent projects anywhere in the world can match. Fabrice Deschanel served as Managing Director of Renaud & Papi (Audemars Piguet's complication division) for more than 25 years and held a seat on the Audemars Piguet board of directors for over a decade, before building the second half of his career as CEO of Greubel Forsey. Claude Emmenegger, the team's designer, twice served as Creative Director at Audemars Piguet and also led design and development at Movado and Gucci Timepieces; he founded his own La Chaux-de-Fonds agency in 2005 and has since collaborated with more than fifty watch brands. Didier Bretin, the team's watchmaker-constructor, started his career at Breguet before joining Audemars Piguet as a constructor; a period at Philippe Dufour's workshop deepened his finishing and craft skills, and his time at Greubel Forsey gave him the experience of building complete Garde-Temps from start to finish. Emmanuel Jutier brings commercial and narrative expertise developed across Swatch Group, F.P. Journe, and Greubel Forsey, where he contributed to each brand's international expansion. Manuel Thomas holds the industrial strategic vision; and Stéphane Maturel is the team's guarantor of technical execution and feasibility.

The inaugural creation, ART01, condenses four proprietary innovations into a single watch. The case itself is patented: a half-metal, half-sapphire construction in which the metal portion of the middle case also serves as the movement chassis, connected to the bezel and caseback by an elaborate system of tubes and pillars — creating a visual openness and architectural lightness rarely achieved in watchmaking. The function selector, described by the team as a mechanism particularly close to their hearts, modernises the ergonomics of complication switching through a column wheel operating two vertical clutches via rocker levers — robust, spectacular, and architecturally integrated. The tourbillon cage is an entirely original creation, designed without the pillar structure that typically connects its upper and lower bridges, with the cage instead forming a three-dimensional one-piece architecture whose three outward-splaying arms — each broadening like a stylised flower — are the signature visual element. Finally, the double spiral — two opposing hairsprings whose elastic imbalances cancel each other out — is offered as a radical alternative to the Breguet overcoil, developed in collaboration with the specialist 'Précision Engineering'. ART01 is offered in titanium (ART01-Ti) and 5N rose gold (ART01-5N); the ART03 follows in grey gold (ART03-Or Gris) and 3N yellow gold (ART03-3N).