Tanguy Huret

Tanguy Huret is a French watchmaker based in Morteau whose path into horology was anything but conventional: he began with a Licence in computer science and digital media at La Rochelle Université before setting that direction aside entirely to train as a watchmaker from the ground up, working through a CAP, then a BMA (earning the regional 2nd Prize and INMA's Prix Avenir Métiers d'Art along the way), and finally the Diplôme des Métiers d'Art in horology at the Lycée Edgar Faure in Morteau — the same celebrated Jura watchmaking school that has produced other names now active in independent watchmaking — graduating in 2017 with the mention Très Bien. His training was punctuated by a string of formative internships across very different corners of the trade: complication prototyping and finishing with Luc Monnet Horlogerie & Prototypes, hand-guilloché and restoration work at RGM Watches in Pennsylvania, servicing TAG Heuer and Bulgari movements at Huguet Horlogerie in Nantes, and mechanical and automatic watch revision at Au Fil du Temps.

In 2016, at the age of 25 and still completing his DMA, Huret entered the seventh edition of the F. A. Lange Watchmaker Excellence Award, a biennial international competition run by A. Lange & Söhne for students still in training, open that year to eight young watchmakers from France, Sweden, Finland, the USA, Japan, and Germany. Competitors spent an intensive preparatory week at A. Lange & Söhne's workshops in Dresden and Glashütte in early May before being given six months to independently design and construct their submitted piece, working through both the underlying horological theory and the practical execution alone. That year's assignment was to construct a full calendar complication from scratch. Huret's entry, judged that November by a jury including Lange company founder Walter Lange, product development director Anthony de Haas, watch journalists Gisbert L. Brunner and Peter Braun, and Dr Peter Plaßmeyer, Director of Dresden's Royal Cabinet of Mathematical and Physical Instruments, won unanimously — the jury going so far as to call it the best work ever submitted in the Award's history.

Rather than simply meeting the brief, Huret exceeded it: he built his full calendar as a true annual calendar, correctly accounting for the varying lengths of all twelve months rather than requiring manual correction, and executed it through a technically sophisticated construction of three overlapping dials that produced a genuinely unique visual and mechanical effect, judged to fulfil all four competition criteria — originality, technical functionality, craftsmanship, and aesthetic execution — at the highest level the jury had seen. At an international press event in Glashütte on 7 December 2016, Walter Lange and CEO Wilhelm Schmid presented the 25-year-old Huret with the winner's certificate and a €10,000 scholarship.

That recognition marked the beginning, not the peak, of Huret's career. In December 2017 he joined Greubel Forsey — the Swiss haute horlogerie house co-founded by Robert Greubel and Stephen Forsey, renowned for some of the most technically extreme tourbillon and complication work in contemporary watchmaking — first as Horloger sur complications, and from October 2022 as Horloger Prototypiste, a role focused on building and refining prototype movements at the very earliest stage of a new calibre's development. He has now spent more than eight and a half years at Greubel Forsey, applying the same complication-focused precision that won him the Lange award to the development of some of the industry's most ambitious mechanical work.