Roger Dubuis works with Pirelli and Lamborghini, and focuses on top 10 world cities

Roger Dubuis recently made a foray into the world of motorsports through collaborations with Pirelli and Lamborghini. How did it happen?

Last year, I was invited by Pirelli to the Grand Prix in Monaco as part of their team, with the engineers on the circuit. I said to Pirelli, ‘I don’t know what we can do together, but I am fascinated by what I have personally experienced with your engineers. We can do a product together’. I asked them what they were doing with the tyres at the end of the Grand Prix, and that was how we had [the idea to reuse] the winning tyres in the straps of our watches. It was then that I discovered the world of motorsports, and Pirelli brought me to Lamborghini.

You said at the Excalibur Aventador S launch event with Lamborghini that you wanted to do more than just putting a logo on a product. Can you elaborate on that?

We took the partnership as a platform to say, ‘How can we be different when compared to other partnerships’? That’s why we value the claim this is where visionary engineers meet incredible watchmakers. We work together and say, what is it that you are doing in cars that we can make use of [in watches], and let me tell you what we do well in watches that you can do well in cars.

I could have made my life easy to just say, let’s take this model and make it in carbon, and put the Lamborghini logo on it and produce 88 pieces. It would have taken me three months instead of one year to develop the project.

What’s next for the partnership?

We are going to have a major brand presentation at Harrods [in Britain] in the summer of 2018. We will take all of the ground floor, and it will be the first time they have cars in Harrods because they don’t sell cars. So Roger Dubuis will help bring Lamborghini in. Then we will have a huge 22-metre-high advertisement for a week in front of the Trump Tower, with two Lamborghinis facing the Fifth Avenue. And we will try to do the same at The Peninsula in Hong Kong.

What are the factors that have helped Roger Dubuis stamp its mark in the world of haute horlogerie within decades?
We are a brand that thinks forward because we don’t have any historical background except for our 23 years. With our manufacture … the building itself is very futuristic. Normally, in Switzerland, when you talk about a manufacture, it’s always conservative, it’s always traditional. Our building is about demonstrating the assets of the brand, and the assets of this brand are [that we] think about the future, take into account the materials of tomorrow and the calibres of tomorrow.