Emmanuel Bouchet

Born in 1963 in eastern France, Emmanuel Bouchet grew up in Charmauvillers — a village of fewer than 250 residents near the French-Swiss border, with 65 watch-assembling companies in the vicinity. His father was a watchmaker who won the Chronometrie Prize multiple times in the 1950s and later restored antique clocks for French national museums. At 14, Bouchet abandoned dreams of being a cyclist or pilot and decided to become a watchmaker. He trained in his father's workshop, earned his Poinçon de Maître, created jewellery, and maintained clocks for major French museums. In 1999 he moved to Switzerland to work with prestige manufactures on major complications (Jaeger-LeCoultre, Parmigiani, and others). In 2008 he co-founded Centagora, a watchmaking innovation consultancy. In 2012 he created the Harry Winston Opus 12. In 2014 he founded his own brand, based in the Neuchâtel mountains at Les Bayards.

Philosophy: 'Life is only a moment, an hour that passes, a day that slips away.' Bouchet designs complications that slow the wearer's perception of time — using a 18,000vph frequency so the escapement can be seen and understood. The Complication One (debut, 2014) places the escape wheel and anchor at the centre of the dial; the calibre EB-1963 has 283 parts, dual mainspring barrels, and a 55-hour power reserve. The Complication One Aleph (2025 relaunch) adds a philosophical level with dual synchronised sub-dials. Around 50 watches per year, exclusively Swiss-made in the Les Bayards workshop with a small dedicated team.

The Opus 12 that made his name remains one of the wildest entries in Harry Winston's storied series: 607 parts, 80 jewels, and 27 hands animating a display inspired by Copernicus's insight that the Earth spins on its axis as it orbits the Sun — a grand-complication-grade machine whose constantly moving indication was so power-hungry that twin barrels yielded only 32 hours of reserve. (Bouchet also contributed to the Parmigiani Bugatti among other landmark projects.) His own Complication One, GPHG-nominated in 2015, inverts the industry's priorities by making the escapement itself the spectacle — a giant, slow-beating Swiss lever escapement enthroned dial-side, with flipping indices adding pure mechanical theatre, originally priced at CHF 92,000. The 2025 rebirth has expanded the concept into a small constellation: the Aleph (rose gold, platinum, or titanium, with white, black onyx, or hand-lacquered dials, from CHF 127,000 in titanium to CHF 150,000 in gold), the Contrast with hardstone or ceramic dials in white or rose gold, platinum, or black ADLC titanium, and a forthcoming fully openworked Fusion revealing the mechanism of a time display that mysteriously slows every fifteen seconds. Bouchet formally relaunched the brand at Geneva Watch Days in September 2025 with the promise of a second, entirely different 'deconstruction of time' movement and another watch planned for 2026 — while running MaClef, a family watchmaking-services company named for his wife and children. His diagnosis of the modern condition doubles as his mission statement: chasing after time is a chronic illness, and learning to slow it down is the cure his watches prescribe.