THE HOLY TRINITY (PART 2) THE RULE BREAKERS OF THE SWISS WATCH INDUSTRY
RICHARD MILLE
FOUNDER, RICHARD MILLE * **
WATCH SALES (2017, IN CHF MILLION) 260
CHANGE (2017, COMPARED WITH 2016) +16%
WATCH SALES SHARE 100%
WORLDWIDE MARKET SHARE 0.7%
When God made Richard Mille he broke the mould. Because what Mille has achieved since founding his eponymous brand along with partner Dominique Guenat in 2001, was not so much to create the single most successful new watch brand in over a century (he did this, of course), but something much bigger…
He created an all-new strata, a hyper-luxury watch business that never existed before and in which he is the sole member. Of course, there are Patek complications and Audemars Piguet concept watches that enter into the Mille price category, but no brand on earth can come close to touching Mille’s over-200,000 Swiss franc aggregate price. What Mille did was to create a price category where rationality no longer plays a role, and where there are seemingly no limits. He says of his two-million-dollar sapphire RM056 watches, which trade in vast sums in excess of this on the aftermarket, “It is true — I am the only one in this price bracket, and even I am not sure where the limit is. Perhaps there is ultimately no limit.”
One day Harvard Business School and every great university on the planet will teach the rise of Richard Mille as a mandatory course. The only problem is, his achievements are impossible to replicate. Why? Because of three major factors.
Firstly, Mille is a design genius. You can say what you want about the pricing related to Mille’s watches — more on this later — but there is no hot-blooded man on the planet that you can put a Richard Mille in front of who won’t feel a sudden, all-consuming stirring in his loins. That is how viscerally thrilling, technically erotic and damnably pulse-quickening his watches are. Why? Well that’s just it. They are impossible to analyse and impossible to
