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Richard Mille: The Watchmaker Who Says He Isn’t One

Richard Mille, in a 2015 portrait © Richard Bord/Getty Images

PARIS — “I am not an engineer, I am not a watchmaker and I am not a scientific guy,” Richard Mille said during an interview in his contemporary, rather clinical, offices in the heart of Paris’s luxury shopping district.

A list of all the things he is not may seem like a peculiar introduction, but it is useful precisely because Mr. Mille’s achievements of the last 16 years would lead you to define him as all of those things.

“I have always been obsessed with mechanical devices and I love to discover new universes,” said Mr. Mille, 67. “My passions are, equally, cars, watches and airplanes.”

A love of all things mechanical is what pushed the French-born Mr. Mille, then a luxury industry executive, to found his namesake Swiss watch brand in 1999. With a clear strategy, he has turned the company into one of the most successful independent watch brands, all but single-handedly reinventing watchmaking in the 21st century.

“I have stuck to three basic principles: a lot of innovation, a strong identity in design and no cost constraints,” he said.

Add to that an insatiable curiosity for science and engineering and a personal commitment to enjoying himself along the way, and one might begin to understand what drives Richard Mille, the man and the brand.

Mr. Mille was a late-blooming entrepreneur. Born in Draguignan, in southeastern France, he studied marketing and worked on the business side of the luxury industry, including at Seiko and the French jewelry house Mauboussin. Mr. Mille quit his job as chief executive of Mauboussin in 1999 and, at age 50, took a leap into the unknown.

The RM 50-03 Tourbillon Split Seconds Chronograph Ultralight McLaren F1, which weighs about 1.4 ounces.

“I had noticed that in the high-end sector, many watch brands were not open to categories like sports or women’s watches,” he said. “I saw my opportunity. I had to start my own brand. It was now or never.”

When introducing a new brand, many in the watch industry will put forth a bit of history — real or imagined — as a basis for legitimacy. Mr. Mille chose instead to be unapologetically modern. “I made up for my lack of legitimacy with a first watch that was sufficiently incredible to get me noticed,” he said.

His initial assessment had been that contemporary watchmakers were not using modern technology. “Most brands use modern tools to make what are essentially replicas of 19th-century watches,” Mr. Mille said. “That is like using today’s modern auto manufacturing tools to make Bugatti replicas.”

His first watch, the RM 001 tourbillon, presented in 2001, was made of titanium and carbon nano-fiber. It had a distinctive tonneau-shaped (or barrel-shaped) dial, a design that became his signature. Priced at $135,000, the watch was produced in an edition of 80.

“My objectives were weightlessness and shock resistance,” Mr. Mille said. “The idea was to be clinical in the design, and put nothing in the watch that was not absolutely necessary to meet those objectives.”

The success of the RM 001 gave the brand the means to go on. Since then, Mr. Mille has produced some 30,000 timepieces in his factory, in Les Breuleux, Switzerland.

He continues to experiment with high-tech materials. Last year, he signed a 10-year collaboration and product development deal with the Formula One racing team McLaren-Honda. In January, at the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie in Geneva, he presented the first fruit of that collaboration: the RM 50-03 Tourbillon Split Seconds Chronograph Ultralight McLaren F1.

At just a little more than 1.4 ounces, strap included, it is the world’s lightest mechanical chronograph, its maker says. The watch was made of graphene, a material new to watchmaking and said to be unparalleled in thinness and strength. It was first isolated in 2004 by two researchers at the University of Manchester, who were awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.

“Using graphene made sense for us to achieve resistance and weight reduction,” Mr. Mille said. “We can be creative and revolutionary in our choice of materials, but we are always serious and coherent.”

RM 35-02 (2016) (courtesy of RM)

Innovation often carries a hefty price. While the average retail price of a Richard Mille watch is about $180,000, the RM 50-03 is $980,000. The price is not only a factor of the extensive research, development and testing under extreme conditions, but also of 35 to 40 percent of the assembled products being rejected.

“I am not masochistic, but ours is risky work,” Mr. Mille said. “If the watch is not perfect, it goes to the bin.”

His distinctive watches are worn by world-class athletes like the tennis champion Rafael Nadal, the golfer Bubba Watson and Pablo Mac Donough, a professional polo player. Over the years, Mr. Mille has produced six different timepieces for Mr. Nadal, continuously tweaking the design and experimenting with materials and techniques.

“Rafa has broken five or six watches, actually exploded them while playing,” Mr. Mille said. “But that is how we test our products. It is normal product development.”

Despite his prices, Mr. Mille has cruised through uncertain times. His sales have grown steadily, just as the Swiss watch industry has seen its own growth figure shrink recently.

In 2015, Richard Mille produced 3,200 watches. Last year, that number increased to 3,500 timepieces, and the company expects to reach about 4,000 this year.

“Our exports last year from Switzerland were around $270 million,” Mr. Mille said. “We had over 20 percent growth. Just looking at last January’s figures, we had a 114 percent increase in sales compared to January 2016.”

His limited production also helps his timepieces retain their value on the secondary market.

“Richard Mille watches are considered among the world’s most innovative and advanced,” said Sabine Kegel, senior watch specialist at Christie’s. “Small production numbers and marketing with celebrities adds to their popularity. They perform very well at auction, usually selling close to retail prices.”

For a man who runs a brand with an undeniably masculine image, Mr. Mille is surprisingly most proud of his ladies’ watch line. Since 2005, he has produced a range of highly technical and jeweled mechanical watches for women in the same barrel-shaped case as the men’s but slightly elongated to fit a smaller wrist.

“I know there is a sticker on my back that says ‘technical macho man,’” Mr. Mille said. “But I love the intellectual exercise of designing a proper ladies’ watch.”

RM 19-02 Tourbillon Fleur (courtesy of RM)

Attracting a female clientele has been an important axis of development for Richard Mille. In May, the brand will sponsor for the third consecutive year the Rallye des Princesses, a women-only automobile rally from Paris to St.-Tropez, a platform for increased visibility and a way to share with female clients his appreciation of motor racing. Today, Richard Mille’s women’s lines represent nearly 25 percent of sales.

There was some talk that Mr. Mille would sell his company to Kering, which also owns Girard-Perregaux and Ulysse Nardin. But Mr. Mille is not ready.

“I am not interested in selling now,” he said. “We are a profitable company. We have a lot of fun. And we are not afraid of the battlefield.”

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