Reviving Nivada Grenchen & Vulcain and Building SpaceOne

Welcome to The Micro Collector, a podcast where I talk with the founders and operators behind some of the most exciting microbrands and independent watch companies. I'm your host, Justin Dorfman, and in today's episode, I'm joined by Guillaume Laidet, one of the key figures behind the modern revivals of Nivada Grenchen and Vulcain and co-founder of SpaceOne.

What makes Guillaume's story so interesting is that he's built watch businesses from almost opposite starting points: bringing historic brands back to life by staying close to their archives and collector communities, while also creating something completely new with SpaceOne. In this conversation, we talk about Guillaume's journey into the watch industry, the lessons from his first brand, William L. 1985, what makes a heritage revival work, and when a revived brand earns the right to move beyond its past.

We also get into the story behind SpaceOne, including how a million-euro Kickstarter campaign nearly disappeared overnight, and why Guillaume believes independent brands are gaining ground in the watch industry. If you enjoy the episode, be sure to subscribe for more conversations with the people behind these incredible watch brands. And with that, please enjoy my conversation with Guillaume Laidet.

All right, Guillaume, welcome to The Micro Collector Podcast. I'm super excited to have you on today.

Thank you for the invitation. Very nice to speak to you and to your audience.

I have to say, when I started this podcast at the beginning of this year, I had a couple of brands on my wish list, just being an avid collector of microbrands and an enthusiast of both microbrands and vintage watches, and a number of your brands were on the list. At the time I'm not sure I was aware that all these brands came from the same person, from the same background. But obviously, as I learned more about the space and the brands, I started to learn about you. And I think, like many in the space, I was just in awe of everything that you're doing. So I'm really excited to chat today and learn a little bit about your journey into the watch industry, but also about building these amazing brands.

So maybe to start, for those that aren't familiar with you, give us a little bit of your background: personally, how you got into watches in the first place, but also professionally, what was your entry point into the industry?

I started in the watch industry at Zenith after business school. I was supposedly going to work in the wine and spirits industry, because I was born in Cognac in 1985. So I'm just over 40 years old now. And my first touch point with watchmaking was when my father started to collect vintage watches on eBay back in the day. I fell in love with some of the mechanical vintage watches he was buying, and one Omega Constellation that I was stealing a lot. I still own it, because he finally gave it to me when I graduated. But it was a steal, in fact.

And then after Zenith, I worked for Jaeger-LeCoultre. Then I quit and started my own brand on Kickstarter. It was William L. 1985, the re-edition of a vintage chronograph. I inherited it a bit by accident; the vintage chrono was unbranded, and I did the restoration back when I was living in La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland. I was wearing this watch a lot, and a lot of my friends thought it was a super cool watch. But when I told them the price, that it was a few thousand euros, they said it was too expensive. So that's how I got the idea to make the re-edition, but at a good price. It was quartz, a Miyota quartz, if I remember. And that's how I started my journey in entrepreneurship.

And then after five years of William L., I revived Nivada Grenchen, which is a brand that was famous among collectors and disappeared in the quartz crisis. I also relaunched Vulcain with the same kind of model, with pre-orders and first online sales. And I co-created SpaceOne, which was just a small project with a friend, Théo Auffret, but it has become even bigger than all the rest now. So, crazy, crazy success with SpaceOne, and with our last collab with Baltic. And the Seconde Majeure, the one I'm wearing right now; it's one of the first prototypes.

And yes, I also advise a few brands and a few groups. So I can't complain. I'm very busy, but I really like what I do. Sometimes I don't feel like I'm working, because I enjoy what I'm doing a lot.

Very cool.

And I'm a vintage collector too, so I love to collect watches. Recently I bought one of my dream watches. I wanted to show you, as you are also a collector. It's a vintage Chronomaster Aviator Sea Diver. I just bought it from Watchfid. I had an interview last week with them; it's the guy who wrote the Chronomaster Only book. And that's the book that gave me the idea to relaunch Nivada, in fact. They brought some of the collection they used for the book, and this one is a crazy example, untouched. It looks like a re-edition. So it was a nice way to close the loop on the story of me and Nivada Grenchen, even if the story is not finished. It was a cool way to thank them for inspiring me without knowing it at first. So it was cool.

Well, I have a vintage Chronomaster on my list as well. I haven't picked one up yet, but I am wearing a 1948 vintage Cricket right now. This is one of the first editions, the caliber 120, and the cricket alarm still works perfectly. So I really enjoy this. I show this to my sons too. They're starting to get an appreciation for watches. One's five, so not quite yet, but the nine-year-old is getting an appreciation for watches, and he loves it whenever I make the sound of the cricket on this.

Yeah, of course.

So very, very cool. Tell me a little bit about that journey into your first entrepreneurial experience. You were working at some of the big players. Was it always an ambition or aspiration for you to start your own brand, or at what point did that start to be the case? And what did that transition look like, going from working for one of the big brands to starting your own brand? What were some of the learnings in that experience?

I always wanted to have my own business, I think, not specifically my own brand. But I knew that I was not going to spend my whole career at LVMH or Richemont, because I was not political enough. It was not fun. When I saw what my boss and my boss's boss were doing all day, it was not motivating for me.

And I had a few business ideas. One of them was to do watches for clothing brands, for example, using the brand and developing watches for them. That was my first idea. I started to create it with a re-edition of the chrono I was wearing, and I started to propose it to clothing brands, but they all said no. I had no track record, no big company behind me, so I was just no one; I was not very credible. So I took a lot of no's. And I said, I'm going to do it for myself. That's how I had the idea to put my name on the design as the brand name. I started with the watch, and then I had to find the name. Guillaume Laidet is not very cool, so maybe Guillaume in English, William L., sounds good. And I added my birth year to get the class 14, to have something I can copyright. That's how I found the name William L. 1985.

Then I checked what I could do, because I had no money from my family. I'm not from a rich family, and I didn't have a lot of savings. Crowdfunding was the best way for me to launch it, and that's how I did it. I left a very well-paid job in Switzerland, and everyone in my family told me I was crazy. And it was a great success for the first two and a half years. Then for two and a half years it was much less successful, because at the end I had to fire everyone, and I had debts to my suppliers, and it was a big nightmare. Because I had too much stock, it was a real nightmare of entrepreneurship.

But in fact, it was like my MBA. I learned how to grow a business. And then I learned how you can totally destroy it, have debt, and have to give terrible news to your employees, to fire everyone, to close a subsidiary in China. It was not cool. And then I relaunched Nivada Grenchen from nothing thanks to Remi Chabrat. It seems that you know him; he was one of the guys I owed a lot of money to. And then we became associates and developed this project. That was a rebound for me and a rebound for Nivada. Now Nivada is going to do more than 10 million euros in turnover this year, and it was doing zero five years ago. So it's quite cool.

I want to dig a little bit deeper into the Nivada story. You mentioned the book that inspired it. Did you have this idea of reviving a heritage brand and then discover Nivada? Or was it through discovering Nivada that you started to think about bringing an existing brand back into the market? And maybe a little bit about what it was about Nivada specifically that inspired you, that made you think this brand is well positioned for revitalizing.

In fact, as a vintage collector, I identified a few brands that I think deserved to be revamped or relaunched in a good way, and not a revamp with bigger watches, thicker watches, that didn't respect the heritage. So I identified Nivada, Excelsior Park, Vulcain, Universal Genève, Gallet. But the Chronomaster Only book rang a bell when I was speaking with Remi, when I told him, "I owe you 150,000 euros and I don't know how to reimburse you." In the discussion, I don't remember why, he spoke about Nivada and said that he knew the owner. And then I had the idea. I said we have to revamp Nivada and do what I did with William L., but in a Swiss-made way, and maybe bridge what I learned at Jaeger and Zenith with what I learned from William L. That's how I made the business plan for him in a few days, and then we relaunched it in the following months. That's a bit of everything that gave me this idea.

Looking back at Nivada and that experience, what do you think it was about that brand specifically that made it a good candidate for revitalizing and made it a successful relaunch?

Because there was still a base of vintage collectors who were enjoying the brand and looking for cool pieces on Chrono24, eBay, all these kinds of websites. And there were some active forums with a lot of collectors. So you could see that there was interest in the brand, and that there were also transactions at good prices. The brand was not totally dead on the collectors' side, so there was some potential.

And the back catalog of Nivada was quite crazy. There was the Chronomaster, but there was also the Depthmaster, the Antarctic. Then I discovered the F77, which is now our best seller. Almost every week I discovered a new collection from the past. There are also a lot of ladies' watches. We are going to revive the Colorama collection, for example, in the coming weeks. So the potential and the patrimony of the brand were crazy. It was, in fact, probably the easiest candidate. It was less known compared to Universal Genève, but in the end, it was already quite popular in the US, in Italy, even in South America and the Middle East.

So the brand has been a bit of everywhere, and a lot of people knew what Nivada was from their grandfather or great-grandfather. It was even a bit more famous than I thought at the start, to be honest. And now we see that we are reaching many more customers. After targeting only the hardcore collectors, the core customer base is expanding, and we now have a lot of newcomers. They discovered the brand thanks to events like the Worn & Wound Windup fairs and all that kind of thing, and all the work we have done in communication is starting to pay off.

I think the communication side is a really interesting one, because you mentioned there's such a big archive of all these different models, and I've seen you use different social media platforms as a way to engage collectors and get their feedback on which models to bring back, and even their feedback on little touches that you can add. Maybe talk a little bit about that, and your process when you find a model that you're thinking about bringing back, how you engage the community.

Yes, it's what I did from scratch, from the first project with the Chronomaster relaunch. We did a lot of surveys on Instagram, asking the fan base directly. I started the Instagram page with zero followers, and now we have something like 80,000. And I have always engaged them with questions in the posts and stories, and the surveys. That's how I learned that they wanted the same size as the vintage one, 38 or 39 millimeters max for a chrono, with the best thickness, so using a manual-winding chronograph movement to keep the thickness as low as possible. That's how we avoided the mistake of, for example, making only an automatic chrono that would have been too thick.

In fact, we listened to the community. We made both versions, and in the end we saw something like 90% for the manual-winding version. So if we hadn't listened to the community at first, I would not be here today to speak to you, because it would have been a disaster. And I would have to put on a tie and work for LVMH or Richemont again. So that's that.

So that's your motivation, right?

Yes, exactly. Since this launch, I've always continued to listen to the community. For example, with the F77, there was a lot of feedback that the shape was not good enough on the wrist, because I wanted to do exactly the same as the vintage one, and there was this defect, if you think it's a defect, in the shape. I revamped it for the Mark II, and now the community is super happy because the shape and the wrist integration are better. So that's one example.

Yeah. You know what's cool about your job is I think you can use your mission to bring these brands back in their true essence as an excuse for collecting vintage watches, right? Because then you can compare and show the manufacturers that this needs to be changed, or this needs to be exactly the same, right?

Yeah, and in fact, when I took over Nivada, there was no archive left anymore. Everything had been sold in the liquidation when the company failed. So I have rebuilt a museum in my office for now, but we are going to try to open a boutique in Geneva next year, with a small workshop and all the pieces I have bought for the museum. We will try to have this starting next year. I will show some of the pieces at the fairs around the world, but my goal is also to have a permanent touch point in Switzerland to show it all year.

Very cool. So you had Nivada, and Nivada was successful in terms of bringing it back. At what point did you start to think, let's maybe do this with another brand? I know that there's Excelsior Park and Vulcain, which was sort of the next one that came onto your radar. Tell us a little bit about the story of trying to do this in round two.

I think Excelsior Park arrived around the same time as Vulcain. But Vulcain was still operating; there were still a few people in the company, so it was easier. And the Cricket movement is also quite a cool story. So I also relaunched Vulcain. Thanks to the success of Nivada, I was put in touch with the owners of Vulcain, and I showed them what I was able to do. It was already two years of Nivada, I think, something like a year and a half or two years, so there were already some solid results. So it was easy for me to explain the approach to them. I told them that you don't need a lot of money; I just need a few prototypes of the new collection, done the way I want. Almost exactly what you have on your wrist, the re-edition.

So that was the goal: keep the same design, same size, do not do crazy shit in 42mm, automatic, ugly, that will break the brand. And that's what people liked about Vulcain too. Vulcain also had a rich patrimony around the Cricket; there was not only the Cricket. So that's how I was able to redo the Skin Diver, the chronograph from the 70s, and the Nautical, which is a crazy diving watch with an alarm and a very strong design. That made it possible to have a real brand.

For Excelsior Park, it was a bit more complicated, because the back catalog is very narrow, without a lot of three-hand watches. It was more difficult, and the community was also smaller. The community of Vulcain owners was probably bigger than Nivada's, and the brand was still more famous than Nivada. Now I think Nivada is maybe more famous in terms of new collectors.

But yes, we have a crazy cool project for Vulcain next year, with a new Cricket movement that will let you see the cricket on the dial for the first time. This will be introduced in Geneva next year. It's something I have right here on my desk. I cannot show you yet, but it's pretty cool; I have it in my hands. That was the first thing I wanted to do with Vulcain: to show the cricket on the other side, because I thought it was too bad to see the hammer only on the back of the watch. So that has been a long, long development, but now it's working, and I will start to show it a bit undercover in New York at the Windup, for example. I will have it with me, so I will start to tease the guys a bit. And I hope it will be a big success for Vulcain next year.

Yeah, well, I'll be at Windup New York, so maybe you'll give me a sneak peek there.

Exactly.

But this is an interesting point, and I've started to notice this a little bit, right? You mentioned that in the very beginning, when you brought back Nivada and Vulcain, it was really important to stay true to the heritage of the watches and the original designs. Now you're starting to introduce new colorways and new materials. I know there's a titanium Vulcain watch, for instance, and now you're talking about taking it a step further, to almost a new design in terms of showing the movement. At what point do you feel the catalog becomes limiting, and that you've earned enough credibility with collectors to earn the right to start innovating outside of the archive?

That's what I'm touching on with Nivada. This year is the 100th anniversary of Nivada. And I think I have relaunched, not all, but probably the biggest ones. So now we have the right to do something totally new. It's also because some collectors are asking us, "Why do you only do re-editions? Don't you have any imagination to do something new?" So yes, I wasn't ready for that at first, and now, yes, we are. That's why next year we will introduce the first new collection for Nivada that is not a re-edition. I'm working with a great designer named Eric Giroud, who is quite famous in the industry.

And we came to a cool design that I hope will please the community, and we will also show it in Geneva next year in April. We are finalizing a few points, because there will be some cool complication on it. That's what I'm working on right now. I think we have some cool ideas and cool founder. It will be something that you guys will like, I hope.

You kind of summarized some of the elements that make a good revival, right? That there's an existing catalog that's pretty deep in terms of all the models, there's heritage and a following in the vintage market, people are still going after the different models. And you've proven that playbook of bringing a modern twist, both in terms of the execution of the watches themselves, but also the go-to-market, and you've done that successfully across Nivada and Vulcain.

Beyond your own brands, like you mentioned, Universal Genève has been brought back and Gallet has been brought back, and there's a number of others. Do you think there is more room for revivals of heritage brands, or do you think this playbook has been played at this point? And if there is room, are you still on the lookout for other brands? Or is the next step starting your own brands, like SpaceOne, which we'll talk about in a moment?

I think, yes, the room is quite full now. But I think there is always a place if you have something different or good value for money. For me, it's the best thing you can do. If you have a good story, a good product, maybe a good complication that you're the only one to do, cool storytelling, and something that is exciting for customers, I think there is always room. Because when I did my first Kickstarter, for example, people told me there were a lot of brands at 150, 200 USD. Yes, but there was not this vintage side with cool storytelling. And it was the same for Nivada; there were a lot of heritage brands already on the market.

But I think the big groups, like Swatch or LVMH or Richemont, and many other independents, totally forgot the price point between 800 and 2,000, or even up to 5,000. Now if you want to buy a TAG Heuer Carrera Chrono, it's like €8,000. It was €2,000 when I started in the industry, and I'm not that old. So yes, they all completely increased their pricing without adding any value. And you are a watch collector. You don't want to be fucked. When you buy your watch and then want to resell it, good luck. Maybe two years later you want to change your watch, or you have an issue for any reason, and you want to resell it, but the watch is worth €2,000, not €8,000.

So that's what I think the big groups totally forgot. And that's why they are not selling out and they have big stocks in a lot of boutiques. I think it's a big problem for them right now. That's why a lot of microbrands like us, like Baltic, like Furlan, like Atelier Wen, like Studio Underdog, have been getting a lot of success, because they're bringing value for money, cool design, and cool communication.

And this year we made a cool salon named Chronopolis in Geneva. We are the base of it, with Baltic, Furlan, and Atelier Wen, because we have all been together in a room in the Beau-Rivage hotel for a few years, since we are not big enough to be in Watches and Wonders, for example. And this year we did this crazy thing, a bit like a Windup but in Geneva, with cool curation, and we had a lot of people. It was crazy; for a first edition it was insane. And we will probably do it even bigger next year, in the same area in Geneva.

And I think if you check all these brands, five to ten years ago they were nothing in the industry. Now if you add up all these brands, it's maybe 100 or 200 million euros in turnover altogether. And maybe in five years it will be more. That's what the big brands are losing, and what we are probably gaining. People want to have cool stuff for a good price, be proud of what they are wearing, with good storytelling and good quality. So... I don't know why I'm telling you that. What was the question?

No, no, you answered it. It sounds like there is room for bringing back these brands, as long as the whole recipe is there and the value is there. And that's an important point, because I found the same thing that you just mentioned. As a collector, if it wasn't for brands like Nivada, Vulcain, Baltic, and so on, it would be hard to be a collector, right? That world becomes really small, because the people who can afford these ever-increasing watches and justify them as pure purchases of love, and not something that retains its value as well, become a much, much smaller group.

I saw that event going on. I wasn't able to make it this year, but I heard a lot of really good buzz about it, and I had a lot of FOMO. I've been to a lot of the Windups this year. I missed out on that event, but I heard a lot of what you were saying. And what I love about that event, as with Intersect in the US, is that a lot of the brands are coming together and working collaboratively, right?

Yes. It's the same concept as Intersect.

To raise each other up, which is really, really cool. I wanted to touch on SpaceOne a little bit as well. I read a little bit about how that came to be. It sounded like a bit of serendipity that also came out of what you talked about, brands collaborating and building a community among themselves. Maybe talk about how that brand came to be.

I love the movie Serendipity. I don't know if it's the same title in English.

Yeah, yeah.

With John Cusack, I think, and Kate...

Yeah, it's a great movie.

Beckinsale. I was in love with her when I was younger. Yes, I never met her; it was only a frustrating story.

No, but yes, the story is a bit, yes, a bit sad. I met Théo Auffret thanks to Etienne Malec, the founder of Baltic. Etienne and I met thanks to my project William L., because he was creating Baltic at the same moment, and I had already had my big Kickstarter. So he came to me asking for advice on how I did it, and then he did even better and bigger. I was super happy for him, and we have stayed in touch since then, since 2015. And when I relaunched Nivada, we always shared information on which journalist is okay, which group of collectors around the world is going to do a limited edition or not, whether this retailer is good or bad. And we started to work together on the Windup fairs, to try to have some synergy and help each other.

And Etienne organized a Christmas party, or maybe just a party, a watchmaking party in Paris with French brands. I was in Paris that day, and Théo Auffret also came. I didn't know anything about his work, to be honest. He was just starting; I hadn't heard of him before. And he was wearing one of his tourbillons that he had already sold to a big collector, but he was wearing it. We started to talk thanks to the piece he was wearing. I said, "Wow, it's crazy." It was quite beautiful. If you know Auffret's work, his tourbillons are insane. And that's how we started to talk.

He told me that he had some cool ideas to make watches at more affordable prices, and I told him that I had the competence to do it. So I asked him to show me the design. A few days later, we exchanged some ideas and he showed me the design, and that's how SpaceOne was born. He showed me the jumping hour. Well, it was not a jumping hour yet; it was just the design of the case at first. And I said there is some good potential, but at a price point of 1,500, 2,000 max. Then we decided to add the jumping hour, because when you were reading the time, it was not cool, because the hour was not in line with the minutes. And he developed the jumping hour in 48 hours. He had the idea, and, I mean, he's a genius in terms of movement construction.

And that's how SpaceOne was born. Then we made the Tellurium, which was nominated for the GPHG, and then the Worldtimer, and then the Seconde Majeure. We sold more than 3,000 pieces of the Seconde Majeure in one week. It was just insane. So yes, we also made 10 million in one week, and now we have to deliver. We have hired four new watchmakers, we have a new workshop in Paris, and the team is growing. It's super cool. From the start to today, it's only three years, maybe four now. But a lot of things came in such a short time. That's why I don't see the time passing. It's too quick.

Yeah. And I'm sure there are benefits in some ways to having a new brand that doesn't have that heritage, because it gives you free rein to do what you want.

Yes. So, that's it.

But there are also challenges as well, right? You have to build a brand for yourself. And I heard a little story; I wasn't aware of this, but last night I was listening to a podcast you had done and heard a story about some Kickstarter challenges with SpaceOne in particular that was really, really interesting.

Yeah, we lost it. In fact, we made 1,200,000 euros on Kickstarter. And there are always about two weeks after you finish a project before you get the money. Within this time, there was another brand in the US. Because at first, SpaceOne was named Argon, like the gas, and that was a name Théo had registered four or five years before the project. And the brand Aragon in the US made an assignment in Florida and then also assigned Kickstarter, because the project's name was too close to their brand. So Kickstarter freaked out. They froze the project without any communication. We just arrived on the Kickstarter project page and it was frozen. And I said, "What the fuck?"

You have 1.2 million, and you don't have any phone number. You don't have any email. It's just like when you're on Amazon and your parcel has not been delivered, so you have an automatic form to fill in. It was crazy. So we started to fill in this shit, and no one was answering. We had to get a lawyer in the US to get things moving a bit more. And then it moved. And then Kickstarter told us, if you change the name of the project and everything, it's okay. So in one day we had to Photoshop everything, change the name, and trademark a new brand. As the collection was named SpaceOne, we took the collection name as the brand name. Then we changed everything. We changed the movie. It was a nightmare.

It was, let's say, a Wednesday. They told us, the first day you're back online, we send the money. So we had to change everything to SpaceOne. And on Friday morning, I started to receive notifications on my phone from guys who bought the watch: "I don't know why I've been refunded, and the project is dead online." And I said, "What the fuck?" I realized that if they had refunded everyone, it was dead. It was over. We had already started to order components, to order movements, to hire watchmakers, so we had started to spend our own money. And I was like, wow, nightmare. Fortunately for us, it was not our own fault, and I was not depending on that to live, and Théo either. It's a strange feeling to lose €1.2 million in one second.

Yeah.

And especially since it was a lot of work, and it was quite crazy to have no communication. It's crazy, Kickstarter. Then a few days later I had some DMs on Instagram with the guy from Kickstarter, and the guy was just a piece of shit, to be honest, in his answers. You're CEO; you don't have a lot of projects doing more than one million, so wake up. This guy was pathetic.

And then we built a new website, a new Shopify from scratch. We had also lost all the contacts, because a lot of people who buy on Kickstarter use their Apple ID or Google ID. So in fact, we had only half of the emails. Some people contacted us one year later saying, "I haven't received my watch." Yes, but the Kickstarter has been dead for a year; I'm sorry. So we had to relaunch a totally new project, the same project, but on our own website. And in the end, we did more than on Kickstarter.

Well.

It took us a bit more time, one month or two months. But in the end we made 1.5 something, and without the Kickstarter commission. So Kickstarter, bye bye.

Yeah. Well, I think it all turned out for the best in a way, right? Obviously a very painful experience, with lots of learnings in there. But in the end, like you said, you raised the money without the fees, you got direct communication with the collectors, and now you have this amazing brand that you've built, and a story to tell about its founding that is pretty amazing.

Yeah. And it was also a big stress test for the collaboration between Théo and me, because I had only known him for about one year. So imagine: you don't know a guy, you make 1.5 or 1.2 million in one month, so you are super happy. Everyone is happy when you make money. But then you lose all that money, and even more, because you have started to invest, and you have invested your time and everything. You see the real people in this kind of situation, because it could have been a bloodbath: it's your fault, blah, blah, blah, you didn't copyright the brand. You can imagine everything.

But no, we stayed super calm. We are super proud of what we did, in fact, because we didn't panic. We stayed very positive. I also had the experience of one crashed company, so I probably had more experience, but he was also fine. It was a shock, but he took it well. And then we immediately reworked on the new thing. I think that was also the right reaction. The day after, we did a Zoom with 100 or 200 of the collectors, and we had good PR and good communication to reassure people that the project was still alive. And yes, in the end, it was a big learning year and a success. So I can't complain. Now I can laugh about it. I was not laughing on Friday morning, I can tell you.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, exactly.

Well, you've got a lot going on. You've got all these brands that you're working on. I guess to close out: what excites you now? What are you most excited about, and what's next for you? As fans of all your brands and everything that you're building, you mentioned some specific projects that are coming out, but what can we expect from you in the near future?

I'm always excited when I receive new prototypes. I'm like a kid at Christmas when I receive a box with the new Crickets I have in my hand, or the new Seconde Majeure. The design phase is super exciting, and the prototyping and testing phase is like Christmas. So it's always exciting, and I think I will probably never lose this, because I am a collector and I like watches, like toys, like cars. I like these kinds of mechanical things, and I think you never lose the excitement. If you lose this excitement, I think it's over. But if you still have this in you, it's always exciting, also to visit cool factories, to see new processes, to have new ideas because you have seen this or that and maybe you can do something, or to meet a designer like Eric Giroud, or have dinner with Maximilian Büsser, because that was also super cool.

I would never have dreamed of having dinner with Büsser a few years ago. And now I have his WhatsApp, and I exchange with him when I have some cool things, and he bought a Seconde Majeure. That was also quite a cool story. When he saw the piece, he said, "Okay, I want to buy it." I said, wow, Maximilian Büsser is buying it. So that was very cool. And yes, I always have this excitement. Next year will also still be big, because we have cool things coming for SpaceOne that we are finalizing for next year. And I also made the Penguin with Nivada, the erotic watch, which was a totally crazy project.

I saw it in San Francisco. Yeah, it was really popular. There were a lot of people at Windup San Francisco crowding around checking it out.

It was super cool, and we sold something like 2,000 pieces, and it also came from a crazy idea with Remi. I have a cool project coming for Nivada next year too. There's always new excitement coming. I have a plate full of cool stuff coming. Can't complain.

Well, I'm super excited to see all of that play out, and it's been really, really inspiring to hear the journey: the ups, the downs, the in-betweens, everything. So thank you so much for taking the time today and sharing your story, and I'm looking forward to connecting at one of these shows someday soon.

Thank you very much for the invitation, and let's do it again in one year.

Sounds good.