RACING AGAINST TIME

Xavier de Roquemaurel may be the head of historic watch brand Czapek & Cie, but he's more concerned with how time is spent rather than how it is used.

- CHARMIAN LEONG

EVEN THOUGH THEY BOTH occupy exclusive addresses on the world’s most luxurious shopping streets, fashion and horology can seem antithetical. The former moves at breakneck speed, chasing and setting trends in equally frantic measure, without paying too much attention to the styles that were around when it was founded. In contrast, watchmaking is a slow and deliberate craft that strives to convince the younger generation that the way things were done two centuries ago is still cool.

So, it was not surprising that Xavier de Roquemaurel encountered resistance when attempting to combine fashion’s speed and agility with watchmaking. Following a successful career spanning L’Oréal, Loewe, and Ermenegildo Zegna, he joined Ebel in 2011 as head of marketing to assist in its relaunch, only to be let go after a year—a role he later described as being “ just hired to be a fuse”.

Yet, it was during this time that he fell in love with watchmaking. He then joined an haute horlogerie company (whose name he cannot disclose due to an NDA) but was dismissed after five days. “That was the worst weekend of my life. I felt utterly destroyed. I thought I was dead professionally,” he recalls. “My culture was too different from theirs. ‘This guy has too many ideas. He wants to go too fast. He does not see the problems we have,’ they said. But I did see them. I was just saying we could overcome them.”