Hands-On: Renaud Tixier Introduces the Monday Organica by Oliver Vaucher, a Visually Stunning Solution to a Horological Problem
Our first meeting at thai year’s Geneva Watch Days might turn out to be one of the best. Renaud Tixier launched during Watches & Wonders week of 2024 with a bold idea: seven revolutionary horological creations, released in a series of watches that will take nearly two decades to complete. Their first watch, the Monday (guess what the others will be called) is an attempt to solve the problem of the micro-rotor. While these small, often heavy rotors are wonderful for creating automatic watches that are nearly as thin as manually wound watches (and for showing off elaborate movement decoration) they are inherently inefficient. The Monday seeks to solve that problem with a completely new horological invention.
The Renaud of Renaud Tixier is Dominique Renaud, the legendary watchmaker who was one half of the famed Renaud & Papi firm, who carved out a niche for themselves in the 1980s and 90s by creating ultra high end complications for the most prestigious brands. Renaud Tixier works along similar lines, but of course is a brand unto itself, and Renaud seems free to pursue whatever horological problem solving might be of interest to him. These watches, while incredibly beautiful, are ultimately for the hardcore movement nerds among us.
The innovation of this first Renaud Tixier caliber is in the behavior of the micro-rotor. The brand refers to it as “the Dancer” because of the way the mechanism seems to dance at even the slightest jostle. Renaud Tixier’s micro-rotor incorporates a central, platinum inertia wheel that converts otherwise unused energy that a normal micro-rotor wastes. The principle, as Renaud Tixier describes it, is similar to how the strings of a tennis racket store energy when impacted by a ball, and then launch it like a catapult. It’s basically a very small shock absorber that converts the shock back into power.
It’s all very complicated, to be sure, but looking at the movement it somehow makes sense. Under a loupe, you can see “the Dancer” come to life with even the smallest movement of the watch. The brand claims that the movement has been tested extensively under normal wear patterns, and they estimate that full power (around 60 hours) can be achieved in just a matter of hours, possibly as little as four. That’s remarkable for any automatic movement, and unheard of for one using a micro-rotor.
From the brand’s debut until now, they’ve offered the Monday in a fairly staid, sober dial. This year’s Geneva Watch Days novelty is a new version of the watch with an elaborate and quite beautiful dial crafted by Olivier Vaucher, who has been making artisanal dials for high end brands for years, and this time around is celebrated with the honorific of being included in the name of the watch itself. The Monday Organica by Oliver Vaucher uses motifs based on components of the movement (a way of “skeletonizing” the dial without actually skeletonizing it) in an artistic and expressionistic way. This is a grand feu enamel dial that has been hand engraved with microscopic textures – it really pays to view it under a loupe, if possible. According to the brand, each dial takes 120 hours to create, and only 9 will be made (they’ve also all been pre-sold to the brand’s clients, so even if you have $100,000+ to purchase one of these, you’re out of luck, unfortunately).
And that right there is one of the most impressive things about this watch, and brand. We’ve heard all year that the watch industry is in trouble, and that the Covid bubble has burst, and tariffs threaten to truly destabilize the worldwide watch market. So it’s genuinely impressive that an independent brand like this, that makes truly high end watches that take a particular kind of expertise and interest in movement making to appreciate, has been so successful. I’ll admit when I was introduced to this brand in that initial Watches & Wonders meeting, their ambitious, multi-decade release strategy seemed like it would be tough to realize, to say the least. Surely, there will be challenges ahead for the brand (and the industry), but they couldn’t have gotten off to a better start, or put themselves in a better position for success. Renaud Tixier
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