For 16 years, Guy Sémon worked on some of the most technologically advanced wristwatches ever produced, including the TAG Heuer Mikrogirder and the Zenith Defy Inventor. But the horology world hasn’t heard from him for the last four years.
In a recent interview, he said that was because he had been developing his own brand, scheduled to debut next year, and specializing in watches that would be “the most original, the most precise and absolutely uncopyable.”
Mr. Sémon, 61, who was a French Navy pilot before completing his Ph.D in physics, began his career in military aeronautical engineering. He became involved with watches after a chance meeting in 2004 with Christoph Behling, the British designer commissioned by TAG Heuer to create a timepiece with a belt-driven movement.
“The watch didn’t work when it was first presented,” Mr. Behling said. “Guy came in to make it work in reality. He had a very different approach because he’s not a trained watchmaker honoring the past. He is a mathematician and a scientist, but he had a love for what watchmaking represents. He was interested in how far you can push something.”
The belt-driven watch was the Monaco V4, introduced as a concept piece in 2004. Mr. Sémon developed a functional version in 2006 and, two years later, became the head of the brand’s research and development division. From 2010 to 2012, he presented a series of chronographs, or stopwatches, that measured ever-smaller intervals by purely mechanical means, culminating in the Mikrogirder, a watch capable of splitting time to five 10,000ths of a second, a record that still stands.
He then went on to lead the LVMH Institute, a research center that provided high-tech movements to the LVMH watch brands TAG Heuer and Zenith, and left in 2020 when the institute was dissolved.
“I have been working for four years in the dark, totally in the shadows,” Mr. Sémon said. “Before beginning to talk about the project, I prefer to be sure that I have the content, that I am talking about innovation and not just marketing. It’s done.”
He said he had 15 innovations lined up, one per watch, for the first 15 designs of his as-yet-unnamed brand. And, thanks to their degree of technical complexity, he expects his watches to command six-figure prices.
Mr. Sémon now has a team of five people and has begun to establish a workshop at his home in the Doubs area of eastern France, near the Swiss border. “My project is to create a brand from my house in France, creating a new mechanical watchmaking,” he said. “It’s not a watch just to prove that I exist. If you want to create this kind of project, you have to master three things. The first is innovation, but there is no phone number ‘Please call to innovate.’ It’s very complicated, but fortunately it’s my job.
“Second, you have to master production — the machines, the workshop, et cetera — and then sales, because it’s very complicated, and, for retailers, it’s just impossible to understand.”
Mr. Sémon said he now had several patents on file with the European Patent Office. But he wouldn’t disclose the precise details of his technical developments, saying only that they draw on the kind of nanotechnology and electronics found in the aerospace industry, with advanced materials to match.
And he said every watch would be antimagnetic, a crucial quality since common magnets — such as those found on a handbag clasp or in a mobile phone — can impair the accuracy of a mechanical watch or even stop it from keeping time.
He also said he intended to operate as independently as possible, avoiding quality concerns and supply-chain delays. “This project is without subcontracting,” he said. “Everything is integrated in my factory. We can customize everything because we are capable of doing anything ourselves.”
Having used his own money for the brand’s development, Mr. Sémon has been fund-raising to continue work, saying he has secured two-thirds of his undisclosed target amount. “The simulations are achieved, but now I have to prototype, produce and assemble,” he said. “I have to hire engineers and I have to buy machines, and I need watchmakers to finish and decorate the watches.”
Despite the complexity of the watches, Mr. Sémon said, customers could receive orders less than two years after the start of production.
“It’s very tough because of the number of components,” he said. “But don’t forget: Swiss watchmaking is marketing; you have to break this picture. I come from aeronautics. We are capable of creating a new Airbus from the first drawing to the first takeoff in three to four years, and for a watch, it takes five years?”
In an industry that is not short of dreamers, Mr. Sémon’s plans may be viewed with skepticism. But he has believers.
“For me, he is a genius and one of the most talented people I have worked with,” Jean-Claude Biver, the former president of LVMH’s watch division who now has his own Biver brand, wrote in an email. “Although extremely talented, he has always remained very pragmatic and modest.”
Mr. Behling added: “I loved working with Guy, because he has the fascination and passion of a child, but he has a capacity mathematically that only a few people possess. He was not only ahead of his time, he hasn’t gotten the acknowledgment he deserves.”
Perhaps that may change.
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