It was a Sunday morning in May when the message that Benoît Mintiens thought might never arrive popped up on his phone. In it were photographs of three beaten-up watches, one with a smashed crystal that had been crudely patched with tape, another with a badly faded dial.
But in Mr. Mintiens’s mind, there was no doubt. These were three of the Ressence prototypes that had been stolen in 2014 from his home in Antwerp, Belgium, watches that he had thought he might never see again.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Mintiens, 52, said recently. “I knew immediately they were my watches. They were my babies.”
The message was from Justin Hast, a watch expert and consultant who had been working with Mr. Mintiens on “Ressence Catalogue Raisonné 2010-2023,” a retrospective of the brand’s years as an independent maker.
Mr. Hast had been sent the pictures by Toby Sutton of Watches of Knightsbridge, a London auction house; Mr. Sutton had seen the watches during a visit to Hudood al Bawadi, a watch dealership in Dubai’s Gold Souk, the labyrinthine jewelry market. The watches had not been working but the store owner, who said he did not know what they were, had valued them collectively at $12,000.
Mr. Sutton did not know Mr. Mintiens and was not aware of the robbery, but he did know Ressence and the name was on the case backs. He told the dealer he was interested, took some photographs and left, saying he would think about the purchase.
“I was keen to buy them,” Mr. Sutton said recently. “But the seller told me the watches had come from the factory, which hadn’t reassured me. My first instinct was to get them checked, so I sent the pictures to Justin,” who he knew was working with the brand.
Mr. Hast did know the story of the stolen watches. “All the hairs stood up on the back of my neck,” he said. “The dials were so discolored and degraded, but I thought they might be the watches Benoît was looking for.”
Ressence began in 2009, when Mr. Mintiens, then an industrial design consultant, took his idea for a watch to the now-defunct Baselworld watch and jewelry trade show in Switzerland. He visited the show’s Palace tent, where some of the industry’s most maverick independent brands were exhibiting and, he said recently, became convinced that his concept just might work.
“I had some savings, 30,000 euros,” Mr. Mintiens said, referring to a sum that now would be $33,485. “In 2009, that was enough to buy a Porsche 911 from my year of birth, but I thought, ‘I’m not going to buy this car, I’m going to start a watch brand. At least I will have tried. Better sorry than safe.’”
He set about making a watch that replaces the conventional watch dial and hands with his novel orbital rotating disc design. He reserved a spot in the 2010 edition of Baselworld, spending 9,250 Swiss francs, now $10,960. It was an investment that had felt crippling, he said, although it did include accommodation on a boat moored on the Rhine River, which runs through Basel.
As the event approached, he found he was running short on cash as well as on time.
To finish his prototype, he needed a series of custom axles that would cost 12,000 Swiss francs, money he didn’t have. So he improvised, fashioning axles from sewing needles and medical-grade syringes.
“I finished the first watch at 6 o’clock in the morning on Day 1 of the show,” Mr. Mintiens said. “And then every evening after the show, I would go back to my boat room and finish another one. So the first day, I had one watch; the second day, I had two watches; and the third day, I had three.”
The prototypes were a hit, he said, encouraging him to commission a 50-piece run of what he called the Type Zero model. It sold out.
Since then, he said, Ressence has made almost 5,000 watches. This year, it will make 750 watches, he added, with projected revenues of about €8 million.
But the dark cloud created by the robbery has continued to hang over him: He and his family had been away from home, and returned to find their dog, which had been drugged by the robbers, groggy and in the garage.
Fourteen watches were stolen that day: the three prototypes, a pair of Type 3 prototypes (an oil-filled watch that won the Horological Revelation prize at the 2013 Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, the annual industry awards event) and nine new pieces. Mr. Mintiens said the new watches alone had a street value of about €150,000.
Some of the watches had been recovered previously: Two of the new watches appeared in an Antiquorum auction catalog in 2016, and one of the prototypes turned up on Instagram in 2018 and was recovered in Istanbul.
The third prototype of 2010 and the two Type 3 prototypes were the ones recovered in Dubai. “They were emotionally very high value for me,” Mr. Mintiens said. “I made them myself, and in that very particular way, because my budget was very low.”
The retrieval began with Mr. Hast introducing Mr. Sutton to Mr. Mintiens, who convinced him to return to the souk. An $8,500 deal was struck, and Mr. Mintiens picked them up in Dubai at the end of May. (He gave Mr. Sutton a watch to thank him for his part in the process.)
“It’s amazing that after 10 years these watches were still together,” Mr. Mintiens said, adding that he has not tried to find out how the watches ended up in Dubai. But he said that he intended to put them in a Ressence museum someday: “They are the Big Bang of the brand.”
The recovery story isn’t over yet. “The first prototype is still missing,” Mr. Mintiens said, referring to the initial watch that he assembled on the boat in Basel. “I hope one day I will get it back.”
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