Christophe Claret

Born in Lyon, France in 1962. A chance visit to a watch restorer at age 14 sparked an obsession; by 19 he had graduated from the Geneva Watchmaking School — one of the youngest ever — and spent a formative year with master watchmaker Roger Dubuis. He set up a restoration workshop in Lyon, then in 1987 walked into Baselworld for the first time and encountered Rolf Schnyder, who had just bought Ulysse Nardin. Schnyder ordered 20 minute repeater movements with automata. That commission launched one of the most extraordinary careers in independent watchmaking. By 1989 Manufacture Claret was established in Le Locle (later in a 19th-century castle, Soleil d'Or, on the heights above Le Locle). Within a decade his name was a benchmark: the most prestigious houses in the world — Ulysse Nardin, Breguet, Cartier, Chopard, Vacheron Constantin, Patek Philippe, Rolex, Greubel Forsey, Frederique Constant, and Audemars Piguet — all turned to Claret for their most complex timepieces. He simultaneously works on approximately 40 different movements for 16 different Maisons, creating about 5 new movements per year, totalling 400 in production at any time — each assembled start-to-finish by a single watchmaker. He also designs his own machines to machine parts to tolerances of one micron.

In 2009 he launched the Christophe Claret brand publicly with the DualTow (GPHG nominated 2009). His own brand is defined by fearless innovation and theatrical complications: the X-Trem-1 (uses magnets — traditionally the enemy of watchmaking — to display the time via a floating ball); the Margot (simulates 'he loves me, he loves me not' by plucking a daisy — GPHG Ladies Grand Complication 2014); the Blackjack (plays actual blackjack); Poker (Texas Hold'em); Roulette (spins a real wheel). Also: striking mechanisms of extraordinary complexity, minute repeaters, tourbillons, and the Legend collection (Westminster repeater + tourbillon + Jacquemart automata + miniature paintings). Trained John McGonigle (of McGonigle Watches) and other renowned watchmakers.

A fuller accounting of Claret's reach includes chapters that even many collectors miss. In 2003 he co-founded the revivalist manufacture Jean Dunand with Thierry Oulevay (formerly of Piaget and Bovet), building some of that brand's wildest complications, and his client roster over the decades has also included Harry Winston, Corum, de Grisogono, Franck Muller, Girard-Perregaux, and Parmigiani — houses with movement workshops of their own that nonetheless turned to Claret when a chiming mechanism was beyond them. For the tenth anniversary of his own brand (and the thirtieth of the manufacture) in 2019, he unveiled perhaps his most horologically serious statement: the Angelico, which pairs a tourbillon with a long detent escapement — the marine chronometer's escapement, notoriously fragile on the wrist — and a miniature cable-and-fusée transmission; making the detent resistant to shocks and lateral impacts took seven years of development, and marrying it to the tourbillon two more, with the result priced at $238,000. The playful side of the catalogue has aged into collectibility: a Blackjack 21 achieved HKD 725,000 at Phillips Hong Kong in 2016, the X-Trem-1 has been reissued in layered Damascus steel, and the Margot and Marguerite have become modern classics of poetic ladies' complications. There are also pieces of pure sentiment, like the Espoir & Paix, with an emerald magnified by a mirascope at the dial's centre and a caseback honouring the Nobel Peace Prize laureates. From his castle manufacture above Le Locle, Claret remains what he has been for nearly four decades: the industry's great hidden engine of complication, and — under his own name — one of its most fearless showmen.