Entering the atelier of the watchmaker Julien Tixier in Switzerland’s Vallée de Joux, one must navigate carefully past high benches filled to the brim with equipment such as decades-old lathes, drilling machines, grinders, cutters and high-tech devices, plus spaces dedicated to heat treatment, galvanization, decoration and assembly.
Despite being only about 270 square feet, this miniature factory is where Mr. Tixier transformed bars of raw steel into components for the prototype of the Monday, a $87,730, 40.8-millimeter, three-hand watch that is the first from the new brand Renaud Tixier. Sixty-two of the watches are to be made and over the next 20 years another six models are planned, named after the other days of the week.
The crowded space has an air of a crazy inventor’s playground, appropriate perhaps for a man who knew that he wanted to be a watchmaker since he was 7 years old growing up on the west coast of France. Mr. Tixier is now 31, and his long dark hair, goatee, skinny jeans and well-worn black fedora add to the picture of a free-spirited artist. “It would not be possible for me to work in industrial watchmaking,” he said. “I would prefer to change my job.”
Since 2018, Mr. Tixier has been an independent artisan creating unique pieces, but in 2023, after a couple of successful collaborations with the industry veteran Dominique Renaud, the men founded their own brand, Renaud Tixier, based in Nyon, Switzerland, north of Geneva. (Mr. Renaud, 64, was a co-founder of the high-complication watchmaker Renaud & Papi in 1986.)
Chief Executive Michel Nieto called Renaud Tixier “a proper brand with a proper structure; a mix of in-house capacities, partners and suppliers.”
