Daniel Roth

Daniel Roth is the legendary master watchmaker widely considered among the founding fathers of independent watchmaking. In 1988 he founded the eponymous brand, making him one of the first watchmakers of the modern era to build a house under his own name. The brand that bears his name is a Swiss house he left in 2000, and it is no longer independent. It belongs to LVMH, which inherited it when it took control of Bulgari in 2011. Bulgari retired the name in 2015, and in 2023 LVMH relaunched it as a stand-alone house whose watches are made at La Fabrique du Temps, the manufacture behind Louis Vuitton's watches, with Jean Arnault, a son of LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault, as its sponsor. It is catalogued here because the Daniel Roth of the late 1980s and 1990s was one of the key names of the modern independent movement, alongside Franck Muller, Roger Dubuis and F.P. Journe, and because the man himself, now working under another name, remains one of its quiet masters.

Roth was born in Nice in 1946 (some sources say 1945) to a family of Swiss origin whose watchmaking roots ran back through his grandfather and great-grandfather to Neuchâtel. He learned the trade as a boy in his grandfather's repair workshop in Nice, completed a three-year watchmaking course there, and moved to Switzerland's Vallée de Joux in 1967. He worked briefly at Jaeger-LeCoultre in Le Sentier and then for about seven years at Audemars Piguet in Le Brassus, where he was the only watchmaker not from the village.

In 1975, according to Revolution, François Bodet, an executive of the Chaumet jewellery house, hired Roth away from Audemars Piguet (other accounts date his arrival as early as 1970). Chaumet had bought the dormant Breguet name in 1970 from the Brown family, which had owned it for about a century, and the house then made only about 100 watches a year. Working with the prototype maker Louis-Maurice Caillet, Roth spent roughly thirteen to fourteen years rebuilding Breguet's modern watchmaking and helping to define its design codes, as its headquarters moved from Paris to the Vallée de Joux. The references credited to that era include the ref. 3050 slim perpetual calendar on the Frédéric Piguet 71, the ref. 3237 two-register chronograph on the Lemania 2320, the ref. 3130, the ref. 3330 triple calendar and the ref. 3210 time-only watch, and in 1988 the ref. 3350, Breguet's first tourbillon wristwatch, with a one-minute tourbillon at six o'clock. He also developed movements for Lemania. Chaumet collapsed in 1987 with reported debts of about $300 million, Breguet passed to the Bahrain-based investment firm Investcorp, and Roth left in 1988. Breguet bought Lemania in 1992, and Swatch Group acquired Breguet and Lemania together in 1999.

Roth founded Daniel Roth in Le Sentier in 1988 (Collected Man dates the manufacture to 1989), with backing from the Zurich distribution group Siber Hegner. He began with his favourite complication, the tourbillon, in a case of his own design: a hybrid of round and rectangular forms with a stepped bezel and angular lugs, the elongated double ellipse that became the brand's signature, paired with sharply cut pinstripe guilloché dials. The first watch was the Double Face Tourbillon (ref. 187/2187). John Asprey of Asprey London commissioned a subscription series of 24 yellow-gold examples in the early 1990s with the Asprey name on the dial (the brand's own history says 25), which put the new name on the map, and his tourbillons were reportedly the only ones on the market then certified by COSC. Collected Man calls the earliest pieces among the most desirable, a playful take on Breguet's work with hand-finished cases and movements. The range grew to include the C147 chronograph (Lemania 2320), one of the best-sellers; a split-seconds chronograph built on new-old-stock Venus 179 movements; a monopusher chronograph on the Lemania 2220, limited to 52 across two metals; the C107 time-only watch on the automatic Frédéric Piguet 71 and the hand-wound C167 on the Frédéric Piguet 21, only 1.73 mm thick against the 71's 2.4 mm; the C127 retrograde-hour model, shown at Baselworld in 1991 and released in 1993 on a modified Lemania 27LN; and the C117 perpetual calendar, developed with Philippe Dufour and released in 1993 in semi-instantaneous and instantaneous versions on the Lemania 8810, then from the mid-1990s on a modified Girard-Perregaux calibre 3000. The C189 minute repeater of 1995 (Lemania 389) was built in just three examples, one in each colour of gold, and the Papillon of 1998, a jumping hour with retrograde minutes in 250 pieces across three metals, marked the brand's tenth anniversary.

Roth's independence did not last. In 1994, after Roth had lost Siber Hegner's support, The Hour Glass, the Singapore retailer, bought a majority stake (reported as 51%). The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s pushed the Hour Glass back toward retail; it combined Daniel Roth with Gérald Genta, which it also owned, into one company in 1999 (Revolution describes the deal simply as the sale of both brands), and in 2000 it sold both to Bulgari. Roth surrendered his remaining shares and left. Bulgari kept the brand running at low volume, then retired it in 2015; LVMH, which bought a majority of Bulgari in 2011, restarted it in 2023 with a Tourbillon Souscription in yellow gold, followed by a rose gold version in 2024, the Extra Plat Souscription in 2025 (a 35.5 mm double-ellipse case 7.7 mm thick, hand-wound DR002 calibre 3.1 mm thick, limited to 20), and further Extra Plat and platinum tourbillon editions through 2026.

After leaving, Roth built a second brand, Jean Daniel Nicolas, whose name joins those of his son Jean, his wife Nicole and himself. It debuted in 2003 with a two-minute tourbillon in a round case, and as of a 2023 Collected Man visit to his family home and workshop it made only two to four hand-finished watches a year (Revolution's 2023 profile, written when Roth was 76, gives two to three), with his wife, also a trained watchmaker, and his son, then an apprentice, beside him. The watches made while Roth still ran the company, from 1988 to 2000, are different objects from today's LVMH production, and this listing gives the brand's present ownership and 2020s output for completeness while keeping its focus on the man who built it.