“Day & Night” caught up with Nicola Andreatta, CEO of Roger Dubuis, when he was in town recently and chatted with him on his views of Watches & Wonders, luminescence, and the behind-the-scenes work at the Roger Dubuis manufacture…
We are honoured to have you here in Dubai; can you tell us the reason for your visit?
It has been quite some time since I have travelled and it has come to the point that we have opened our boutique at The Dubai Mall, and I have never seen it in person. It was important for me to come here as soon as I could travel. Dubai is one of those markets where we see the action, it is almost back to normality, and it is very important to us.
What is your opinion of the digital edition of Watches & Wonders 2021? Do you think the 2022 edition will also be digital?
I can tell you that 2022 will not only be a digital edition; hopefully, it will also be a physical one. 2021 was a tremendous success for the way it was organised; the reach was definitely impressive and very well organised, but we will never replace the physical interaction. Especially because it is not only a moment for us to show what we do but also a moment to meet. We have so little opportunities to meet with the industry in general; earlier there were plenty of fairs around the world – Basel and so on. Now, Watches & Wonders is the only big one, unless someone is going to organise something else. But it will still not be as big and, it is a key moment for us to meet people who we see only once in a while, and to touch and feel watches. Especially, when you have creations like we have in Roger Dubuis.
Sometimes, we have unique creations or very limited editions that you cannot see everywhere, so it is at such places that you come to discover these incredible novelties that a brand like Roger Dubuis is introducing in the market. So, we are looking forward to 2022, but it will be a phygital event – a part of the event will be physical, while another will be digital, and I think that is the best possible way to do it, and is something matching our time. Because whatever we think about, it will have a digital part in the future – in the way we think, interact, the digital world will be there. Everyone talks about the fourth industrial revolution; we are really observing something incredible. Those who will win in the future are those who are able to connect in the best possible way and with consistency, the digital space with the physical one.
In regard to the Excalibur Glow Me Up; what was your reaction when you were first approached with the idea?
It has been a long journey and we started pretty soon after I came from my previous experience; we were talking about luminescence in general, and there was this point that diamonds shine only with light. So, we asked yourselves, how could we change this perspective completely and provide light to diamonds. We started thinking about putting a battery in a watch, lights in a watch; in the end, we ended up combining – and I was part of the thinking process of the watch – our experience that we had developed in the past few years with the Blacklight watches, with this kind of nanotools treated with SuperLumiNova materials and then the way we have been cutting the stones. We thought that the groove around the baguette stone can be filled with something; suddenly, we came up with the idea of putting SuperLumiNova inside the groove, and that was it.
It was stunning to see that suddenly it had a completely different look; something that looks refined, clean and classy during the day, and then something a bit crazy during the night, which is exactly what we are at Roger Dubuis. The duality of human nature and the duality of product fits exactly what we are. All in all, I was quite amazed, and we ended up having the sample one week before Watches & Wonders, because we had been working on it for a while and the intensity of the light was not good or the cut of the diamond was not perfect or the refraction was not good. The one that everybody saw was a prototype, and I was quite excited. We manufactured eight pieces only and they all sold out less than a week.
As you have the process being patented, I am sure there will be future versions with luminescence in the diamonds – where do you think this will lead to in the future?
At Roger Dubuis, we really value the aesthetics of our timepieces and we have this idea that we are shaping the future of watchmaking and changing the rules of the game. With this in mind, I think we will continue pushing the boundaries of watchmaking not only from a technical standpoint but giving a beautiful look to watchmaking. And this is where we are going to use more and more luminescence as we did in the past, introducing aesthetic elements into the calibre themselves; something that classic traditional watchmaking brands are not doing because they don’t touch their calibres. We have so much space given the fact that we skeletonise every single calibre that we can play a little bit with what is inside. We started with the Excalibur Twofold, playing with SuperLumiNova on the bridges of the movement. I already mentioned Excalibur Blacklight, the Glow Me Up is the next one and we are already working on some new developments in the same direction – putting techniques at the service of aesthetics.
With your partnership with the Tribe, you have three artists – one specialising in graffiti, one in tattoos, and one in general media – but the watches don’t reflect the partnership. Will the technology of the Glow Me Up, for instance, be used with graffiti or something like that in the future?
It is a good question, but the answer is ‘I don’t know!’. Because we started the creative process with the Urban Tribe, as we call them, and the funny thing is that we didn’t come with an idea. We loved the way they see the world; we like their vision, we like their perspective because they are close to the values of Roger Dubuis. They opened their workshops, we started meeting and showing them what we do, and talking about what they do, and we are going to find a connection, a certain moment. We have planned that within the next year or so, there will be some co-creations, but we don’t know yet what it is. I know that Gregory Bruttin, our Product Strategy Director, is talking to them on a regular basis, almost weekly, in a process that is really a co-creation. We will mix up his ideas and their ideas, and will come up with something, which is the way art should be. You get a final result but after thinking a lot, experiencing and expressing a lot.
