How To Succeed In Watches Without Being Rolex: Franck Muller Edition

A businessman carries an umbrella as he passes the window display of a Franck Muller Watchland SA watch store on the Place de Bel-Air in Geneva, Switzerland. Photographer: Valentin Flauraud/Bloomberg

Copyright 2012 Bloomberg Finance LP

In one of the most bizarre dinners I’ve ever attended, I found myself in a Santa Monica restaurant sitting with a Saudi Prince and his entourage of colorful characters. I was in Los Angeles scouting for potential celebrity brand ambassadors for Dubey & Schaldenbrand, the first client for my newly minted PR agency after leaving Tourneau, when a celebrity connection invited me. Those familiar with Dubey will understand how the watch I wore that night was mistaken for a Franck Muller, as two of the prince’s companions pointed out, flashing their own actual Franck Mullers.

This was the early aughts, where the man Franck Muller was feuding with his then business partner, Vartan Sirmakes, in an ugly bit of watch industry lore. Tourneau had stopped carrying the brand, so this was my first live encounter with a Franck Muller. The specimen was Crazy Hours, a watch challenging standard watchmaking convention by scrambling the hour numbers while still being able to tell accurate time. Clockwise, the markers read 1, 6, 11, 4, 9 and so on with no rhyme or reason. Crazy Hours was the sort of horological ingenuity that originally made me fall in love with watches. How could a battery-less timepiece tell time with such defiance to sequential logic?

Crazy Hours is also what first introduced Stephanie Soh, co-founder of female-focused watch community TickTockBelles, to Franck Muller. Over Zoom from Singapore, she told me, “It totally blew my mind because somebody thought about how to make a watch that is not digital tell time in such a crazy way. You know the person behind it must be quite a genius himself.”

That genius left the company two decades ago, but the brand never stopped releasing mind-bending contraptions. The Revolution 3 introduced the world’s first tri-axial tourbillon—a cage within a cage within a cage, each rotating independently to compensate for gravity in any wrist position. The 2019 Remember reads time backwards, with all hands moving counterclockwise around a dial numbered in reverse order. If Rolex represents the steady heartbeat of Swiss watchmaking, Franck Muller is the arrhythmic jazz improvisation. Rolex perfects the known; Muller ignores rules of what’s possible.

“Everyone’s first serious watch is a Rolex,” Soh said, echoing lessons from my Tourneau sales tenure. Rolex is horology’s gateway; the milestone buy whose allure fades as curiosity and knowledge deepens. Alas, Rolex is still Rolex, a commodity appreciating with time; “a fixed deposit,” as Soh put it, but not a “legacy to pass on to my next generation.”

Soh now owns three Franck Mullers: the Crazy Hours, a diamond-set Double Mystery gifted by her husband, and the recent #Fr2nck Muller Vanguard Beach. Her broader collection includes Patek Philippes, vintage Cartiers, independents like Armin Strom and Laurent Ferrier, and of course, Rolexes.

“In the 1990s to early 2000s, Franck Muller was very big. They were comparable to brands like even Patek Philippe,” Soh recalled. “In recent years, people kind of forget that Franck Muller is actually a serious watch brand.” Franck Muller produces the world’s fastest tourbillon, completing one full rotation every five seconds at 12 times faster than a standard tourbillon. And yet, the brand is rarely recognized.

“In 2019, Franck Muller showcased a watch that reads time backwards,” Soh continued, referencing the Remember. “This year, Cartier has one that is reversed, and everyone is making a big hoo-ha about it. I was telling them, ‘Actually, you did it, like, what, 2019? But why is nobody screaming about it?’”

Franck Muller’s low profile, it turns out, is by design.

Resurrecting Franck Muller After Franck Muller

“At Franck Muller, the star has always been the watches before anything else,” CEO Nicholas Rudaz told me over Zoom from Geneva. This became the company’s strategic direction after the founder’s very public, very ugly departure 20-some years ago.

In 2003, the Swatch Group wanted to acquire Franck Muller. Muller wanted the “quick money” and fast exit. Co-founder Sirmakes refused, echoing Giorgio Armani’s perpetual independence playbook, while arguing, “Why sell a good business? Why sell a profitable business?” The disagreement spiraled into a years-long feud documented in Geneva headlines. Nicolas Hayek allegedly tapped Jean-Claude Biver to mediate, according to Rudaz, unsuccessfully. Franck Muller (the company) decided strategic invisibility was best, reducing advertising and public appearances.

In the middle of this, Sirmakes convinced Rudaz, then a rising star at Geneva’s Hôtel La Réserve, to join the battle for Franck Muller’s future. What did Sirmakes see in a hotelier to suggest this was the guy to save a watch brand hemorrhaging credibility? “A great manager, a great diplomat, a great frontman,” Rudaz recalled. Just as with luxury real estate, luxury hotels and luxury watches operate on the same fundamental principle. “You are selling the dream. You’re selling perfection.”

Rudaz was tasked with rebuilding a brand whose identity was tied to a charismatic genius who wasn’t coming back. “The strategy after that was to double up in the creativity and the designs and the complications,” Rudaz determined. “And to make the product the star. We have a very strong team of creatives, wonderful designers and watchmakers, who manage the complications extremely well, and who are all very creative.”

As Swiss newspapers reported Muller and Sirmakes mudslinging, Watchland, Franck Muller’s Geneva facility, quietly created, “pushing the boundaries of watchmaking in design, in complications.” In turn, local partners kept selling, advocating, and building relationships with Franck Muller enthusiasts who appreciated the IYKYK brand status. This strategy ultimately saved the company.

“We’ve always worked hand-in-hand with our local partners,” Rudaz shared. “It’s not one person in Geneva who decides what happens in Mexico, New York, Frankfurt, Vietnam. We listen to the local markets.”

Franck Muller’s Japan Strategy: Weddings, Furniture, And Bushido

From Franck Muller’s earliest days, distributor Mr. Saito, who built TAG Heuer’s Japan success in the 1970s and ‘80s, knew exactly how to position a Swiss outsider for Japanese collectors. His instincts embedded Franck Muller deeply into the culture and became a social signal.

The most vivid example is the Franck Muller Wedding. Each year, five to seven couples marry under the brand’s auspices, with glasses, tableware, and even the cake decorated in the maison’s signature numerals. The bride and groom leave with his-and-hers watches, forever tying the brand to their anniversary. “In Japan, when you do such a branded wedding, it’s extremely well perceived socially,” Rudaz explained. Even Hermès doesn’t attempt such a claim on life’s milestones.

Only in Japan does Franck Muller produce furniture echoing its signature Cintrée Curvex™ tonneau case shape, along with curtains and lifestyle products designed for Japanese interiors. Then there’s the Geneva headquarters itself—a mansion where Japanese diplomat Inazo Nitobe once lived as Under-Secretary-General of the League of Nations. Nitobe wrote Bushido: The Soul of Japan, laying an intellectual framework contributing to an eventual United Nations. “This house has a very strong meaning for a lot of Japanese,” Rudaz said. Japanese students visit annually to tour the mansion. “They’re even more surprised to see Franck Muller, because everyone in Japan knows Franck Muller.”

This cultural integration begot a 2023 collaboration with Japanese streetwear brand FR2 (“Fxxking Rabbits”) to produce the monochromatic Franck Muller x #FR2 Vanguard. FR2’s titular rabbits appear on the dial of the carbon case watch with printed canvas straps. Limited to 800 pieces across Southeast Asia and Australia, it sold out immediately.

A sequel followed this year: the #Fr2nck Muller Vanguard Beach with beach-themed variants in blue, red, and green, and the recognized rabbits doing their thing while surfing or lounging under coconut trees or beach umbrellas. “I kind of like the energy, the synergy behind it,” Soh mused of her third Franck Muller. “You are mixing a watch known for complications with something fashionable.” She added, “It makes the brand very young and very fashionable.”

“When you wear a Franck Muller, you want to show that you are different,” Rudaz stated. “Someone who wears a Franck Muller compared to someone wearing a Rolex is going to be immediately perceived as a different trendsetter.”

For Soh, the FR2 collaborations prove the point. “They’re going in the right direction,” she said. “There are watches that I keep for value, and there are also watches that I keep because I appreciate the craftsmanship.”

Franck Muller’s Middle East Strategy: Royal Ties and High-Tech Innovation

Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud wore Franck Muller watches in the 1990s, making the region fertile soil. The brand has sustained a 32-year partnership with Qatar’s Alfardan Group, who Rudaz credits with “doing an incredibly good job for the brand, and even more so over the last few years.”

There’s a manufacturer-owned team in Dubai where bold innovations like the Vanguard Encrypto are produced. Hailed as the world’s first functional Bitcoin watch, it was limited to just 1,111 pieces for collectors whose passionate pursuit of luxury requires easy access to their crypto wallets.

“The fact that we don’t depend on other shareholders gives us that liberty, that freedom to create,” Rudaz explained. “That’s very different to a lot of other brands.”

Which brings us back to my 2006 Santa Monica dinner with Saudi royalty. The Crazy Hours was released in 2003, just as the kerfuffle was kicking off between Muller and Sirmakes. I may have encountered the first specimens to touch American soil when Franck Muller’s future—both brand and man—remained unknown, particularly since the U.S. still only accounts for about ten percent of distribution.

This made for an even more serendipitous conversation with Rudaz. Gary Girdvainis, the mutual friend who introduced me to Rudaz, was himself introduced to me by Dubey & Schaldenbrand’s former distributor.

What CMOs Can Learn From Franck Muller’s Revival

Rudaz’s navigation from near-collapse to stability offers lessons on succession planning when a company’s identity is tied to an executive who won’t abdicate power. For CMOs triangulating a succession communications crisis, here’s Rudaz’s formula for recovery:

1. Make the product the protagonist. When a celebrity founder departs, charisma can’t be replaced with more charisma. Innovation speaks louder than personality. Franck Muller’s shift to product-centricity proved more sustainable than personality-driven marketing.

2. Cultural customization beats global campaigns. Franck Muller weddings work in Japan but would fail in France. The Bushido connection resonates with Japanese visitors but means little elsewhere. Invest in deep cultural integration by letting local distributors guide territory marketing.

3. Strategic independence preserves creative freedom. Refusing Swatch Group’s acquisition meant slower growth, but bold successes with the #Fr2nck Muller Vanguard Beach and the Vanguard Encrypto. Shareholders would never approve of ultra-low production volumes, but independence precedes innovation.

4. Bridge tradition and trend without apology. However unconventional, the FR2 collaboration brought a younger, fashion-forward audience into the fold without alienating connoisseurs. Legacy brands must embrace culture on its own terms. Playing it safe creates distance from your growth potential.

The watch world has always been about smoke and mirrors, with carefully constructed chronicles on heritage and value while disregarding the emotional nature of watch collecting. Once you exit the Rolex narrative, however, true connoisseurs understand the sheer complexity of making the world’s first tri-axial tourbillon or watches reading time backwards or in jumbled numeric order. Franck Muller persists today because its only ever cared about making the audience ask, “how did they do that?” This is how the company has succeeded without being Rolex.