Richard Mille: A Designer Luxury Watch Brand Profile

Richard Mille is legendary in the luxury watch world—for creating ultra-high-end sports watches that answer performance problems you never even knew you had. For utilising the unique talents of his friends and ambassadors when field-testing his watches. And for proving something that not even the most established of luxury watch manufacturers had dared to dream, in the 21st century: if you create something so outlandish, so over-the-top, and so niche that its materials alone cost thousands, a very limited number of people will buy it. But those people will keep on buying it. And the crazier your design, the more out there the materials you use, the more limited your edition, the bigger the demand and the larger the price tag you can command.
So who is the man whose name is on every one of these multi-hundred-thousand-dollar watches? And how has his company risen so quickly, to become one of the all-time success stories of haute horlogerie?
Let's start with the basics. Richard Mille (the company) was founded in 1999, as a partnership between Richard Mille and Audemars Piguet. The relationship with AP is functional as well as behind-the-scenes: to this day, some of the most complicated Richard Mille calibres are manufactured by Audemars Piguet's fine watchmaking development arm, Renaud et Papi.
Richard Mille the man was born in 1951. His rise through the ranks of the luxury watch world began in the 1970s: first in marketing and then in management and manufacture. Working initially for French watch brand Finhor, and then as a manager for Seiko, Richard Mille ultimately left to found a watchmaking arm for Paris-based jeweller Mauboussin. His work was rewarded with a CEO position and share of the company, which he sold to fund the creation of his own watch brand. That brings us to 1999, and the foundation of Richard Mille's partnership with Audemars Piguet.
At this point, Richard Mille begins work on the RM 001, in the Swiss municipality of Les Breuleux.
It's been said that Richard Mille creates luxury sports cars for the wrist. The analogy is a good one, and not just because the brand has such strong associations with motor racing (at the time of writing, Richard Mille sponsors Felipe Massa and Romain Grosjean . The brand also sponsors, or has strong partnership ties with, Aston Martin, the McLaren-Honda F1 team, and the Haas F1 team). From the start, Richard Mille watches have utilised materials and design codes associated with motorsports.
The first Richard Mille (the RM 001 Tourbillon) was released in 2001, a statement of the new brand's intent to create 21st-century luxury watches. It had the tonneau case-shape we now associate with almost all Richard Milles, incorporated a tourbillon with ceramic elements (intended to diminish the effects of wear over time), and used a design philosophy borrowed from the construction of F1 cars. Instead of bending his designs to fit the capabilities of standard luxury watch parts, Richard Mille chose to create the RM 001 Tourbillon from the ground up, incorporating non-standard parts designed to fit the final concept of the watch—much like an F1 car is built from the chassis, with every element created to fulfil the ultimate functions of increased performance and handling.
Plenty of brands (Rolex being a prime example) bring all the elements of luxury watch manufacture together under a single roof. For a watch producer like Richard Mille, though, this 'vertical' (everything done in-house) construction approach simply won't cut it. Instead, in a practice that goes all the way back to the historic old men of fine watchmaking, Richard Mille began by outsourcing different elements of watch production to a number of fiercely expert material and component suppliers. The rationale for outsourcing, in Richard Mille's ultra-high-end luxury watch design, was and is simple. The insanely complicated elements of each Richard Mille watch sometimes require innovative solutions, and those solutions are often best developed by companies with very specific knowledge and expertise, which work with very specific kinds of materials.
The use of these materials is the cornerstone of Richard Mille's 21st-century luxury watch design. While the older, more established brands remained wedded to gold cases, leather straps, or stainless steel sports watches, Richard Mille has created an entirely new language for the super-high-end sports watch. Gone are the reminders that even the toughest sports watches are created by manufactures with long and rich traditions of fine watchmaking. In their place, Richard Mille puts emphases on the function and performance of the individual pieces and the seamless integration of the whole. A Richard Mille watch is a 3D work of art, and the movement is as much a part of the experience of owning one as the case, or the legibility of the hands, power-reserve indicators, and torque indicators.
Having access to limitless expertise is vital to the Richard Mille philosophy: but there are advantages to in-house production too. If you rely only on outside contributors, your designs are limited not just by what those experts can do now, but by what they believe it is possible they can accomplish in the future. A brand like Richard Mille , which is built on the idea of pushing boundaries, needs some control over the direction its watches take. It needs to be able to show its material suppliers that the impossible is possible.
So while it was liberating – and necessary – for Richard Mille to use external suppliers for some of its more complex movements, or esoteric materials, the element of internal control may have been lacking at the start. In the company's second decade, though, a new opportunity presented itself. Richard Mille's existing case-maker was bought up by the Richemont Group (which owns, among other luxury watch manufacturers, A. Lange and Söhne and Roger Dubuis). Instead of sourcing another fine case-maker, Richard Mille elected to sink massive investment into its now-famous in-house design and development HQ: ProArt.
ProArt opened in 2013. It's Richard Mille's exclusive case manufacturing location, and it also develops and manufactures specific movement elements. Richard Mille cases are designed, prototyped and perfected here. The unique combinations of expensive materials that shape the iconic tonneau cases associated with the brand are conceived, born, and finished here. The ProArt installation is, in other words, the heart and mind of the Richard Mille operation. When you strap a Richard Mille to your wrist, you're ending a process that began in its rooms.
If the RM 001 established the classic Richard Mille case shape and laid the groundwork for the Richard Mille design language, then the RM 008 Tourbillon Chronograph Felipe Massa really set the parameters for Richard Mille watches yet to come. Here, for the first time, was a luxury watch that embodied all the elements we associate with Richard Mille today: exhaustive R&D with a famous sporting partner, radical complexity, and a movement completely revealed in all its depth and clarity.
The RM 008 was the first Richard Mille through which the movement could be seen completely: previous models had large percentages of their movements revealed, through both front and rear sapphire windows, but the RM 008 was the first model to do away with a large baseplate. The result was a watch so three-dimensional that its carbon-fibre baseplate was barely visible at all. Now, all Richard Mille baseplates are skeletonised, and the stacked 3D design of the movement forms a key part of each watch's visual appeal. The case becomes an arena, in which the magic of the frantically-working cogs and balances is played out.
From case to clasp, every element of a Richard Mille watch is deeply thought-out. Each design – like all good designs – begins with a problem. Like how to make a luxury watch that is light enough to wear while playing championship tennis, but strong enough to withstand a direct hit from an opponent's volley. Richard Mille's solutions to problems like these have been legendary. His watches for Rafa Nadal are spectacularly light and strong, and have actually been worn during Rafa's matches. Richard Mille watches designed for Jamaican sprinter Yohan Blake are built to minimise drag resistance and withstand extreme external force. His F1 watches are worn in the cockpit by Brazilian racer Felipe Massa.
Of course, many of the 'problems' solved by Richard Mille are 'unreal-world' problems: like the difficulty of creating a mechanical G-force indicator to tell drivers when they're braking in an unsafe fashion. In reality, the idea of looking at your two-hundred-thousand-pound watch while you're braking your LaFerrari through a tight bend is pretty silly. But the client that wants to buy a Richard Mille isn't looking for sensible. The ability to pay a couple of hundred grand for a timepiece is signalled by the unmistakeable shape and flair of the Richard Mille on your wrist. The rationale for buying it (as opposed to all the other super-high-end watches out there) comes in the form of conversations about what it can do:
'It senses G-Force and registers it mechanically, with a swinging needle. So I know if I'm driving too fast or cornering dangerously.'
The point is that the watch can do what the watch can do, not that the watch is ever going to benefit its wearer by doing it. After all, a person who's just flung their LaFerrari into a bad corner too quick is going to have many more pressing indicators of the dangerous nature of their driving. Like the multi-million-pound repair bill they'll need to pay to replace the obliterated carbon-fibre nose cone. But when the same watch collector modestly shoots a cuff at a dinner party, the Richard Mille on his wrist guarantees a fair share of the 'latest luxury toy' kudos. In a world in which all of your peers wear their fortunes on their sleeves (and on their watch arms), you need something out of the ordinary to stand out.
At its heart, the success story of Richard Mille is a story of an audience . Right from the beginning, Richard Mille understood there was a market for high-end sports watches of such audacious design that their price tags could be set in the stratosphere. He created watches that played with the notions of technology, performance, and advancement until the reason for the existence of each timepiece he made became much less important than the fact that he'd made it. And he did it all with a sense of fun that can be sorely lacking in the luxury watches made by older brands.
There's no 'reason' for a watch you can wear while you're playing a Grand Slam final. Because who, apart from the guy who's been sponsored to do so, is going to wear a hundred grand watch on a tennis court? No, the reason each Richard Mille exists is purely so it can be seen and enjoyed by the very, very rich. Created for friends, tested by friends, these are the most audacious and OTT toys in the world. And they have set the standard for luxury sports watches for decades to come.
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