The creation of an academy to pass on watchmaking skills is a goal of a new foundation that Dominique Renaud, the co-founder of the complications giant Renaud & Papi, announced Sept. 1.
“It’s time to give back,” Mr. Renaud, 66, said in a recent interview.
He recalled that in 1986, when he and Giulio Papi wanted to start a complications business, “our colleagues said it was impossible. But one man, Günter Blümlein” — then the managing director of Les Manufactures Horlogères, a group of watch companies —“believed in us, that we could do it.” When their business was sold to Audemars Piguet in 1992, Mr. Renaud formed his own namesake company, continuing to invent complications and creating a million-dollar watch, the DR01.
Mr. Renaud has inspired, mentored or collaborated with many watchmakers and watch brands, including Greubel Forsey, Speake-Marin, Furlan Marri and, most recently with Julien Tixier, as Renaud Tixier.
The watchmaker says he wanted his school to provide that kind of support. “The academy will focus on the innovative spirit, to find inspiration outside the world of watches, to shake the tree of the watchmaking culture,” he said. Details such as the academy’s name, location and curriculum are still being planned, representatives said, but that Mr. Renaud wanted it to open within two years.
The Dominique Renaud Foundation held its debut program last week during Geneva Watch Days, the first in a continuing series of what Mr. Renaud called “thematic lunches” that will be hosted by other organizations.
The session was “called ‘Time Lived, Time Written’ — guest authors, headlined by French author Sylvain Tesson, talked about how they materialize time in fiction,” Mr. Renaud said. “This ties in with the mission of the foundation to push creativity in the field of mechanical watchmaking, to inspire professionals from the industry to think about watch creation and storytelling differently.”
He said the foundation was also creating a digital database, which he intends to be online by the end of the year, that will detail the watchmaking history of Mr. Renaud’s family, his own career and his technical inventions. “Think of it as open science, or a free library of ideas,” he said. “It will be available not just in Switzerland, but around the world.”
Jean-Frédéric Jauslin, a former Swiss ambassador to UNESCO, said in an email that he signed on as the foundation’s president because “the idea of preserving the knowledge of a top-quality watchmaker in the person of Dominique Renaud is an exciting new step.
“I’m enthusiastically looking forward to developing an area which I’m sure will prove vital to the reputation, development and recognition of Swiss watchmaking.”
Mr. Renaud’s foundation is not the only one associated with Switzerland’s best-known independent watchmakers, with the Philippe & Elisabeth Dufour Foundation marking its second anniversary on Sept. 11.
“All the world needs help,” Mr. Dufour, 77, said recently as he sat in his workshop in the Swiss village of Le Solliat, in the watchmaking Vallée de Joux region.
He announced the foundation’s establishment in 2023, although it was his wife who had come up with the idea after seeing TV news coverage of conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Mrs. Dufour grew up in Cameroon and, as the eldest daughter, she had to look after her 17 brothers and two sisters when their mother deserted them, even though she was only 11 at the time. “Helping children is always important to me,” she said.
The foundation has already raised more than two million Swiss francs ($2.5 million) by auctioning a total of 12 watches created by Mr. Dufour and fellow watchmakers. It is planning to hold fund-raising auctions every two years, with the next in 2027.
This initial $2.5 million donation helped defray the cost of an ultrasound scanner for the hospital that serves the Vallée de Joux, “the hospital where I was born,” Mr. Dufour said.
Other donations have helped buy prosthetics for those in need in Sri Lanka and other countries and will next year help start construction on houses for impoverished families in Madagascar.
Once they have homes, “the children and their parents can lead normal lives,” Mrs. Dufour said. “We will be doing what I would have wished people around me did for me.”
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