Coming from a family of watchmakers, Daniel Roth is today considered one of the first great modern and independent watchmakers like George Daniels, FP Journe, Philippe Dufour, Franck Muller or Roger Dubuis. After having cut his teeth at Audemars Piguet, Daniel Roth was recruited by Breguet where he remained for fourteen years during which he helped to rebuild the prestige of the house. In 1988, he created his own fine watchmaking company in Le Sentier, Switzerland. Innovative and avant-garde, he produced a number of audaciously designed watches, characterized by their Ellipsocurvex case shape, a one-of-a-kind aesthetic that would become his brand’s signature. Various tourbillons were thus launched, including the reference C187, one of the mainstays of the Roth catalogue, the C117 which was a perpetual calendar with an instantaneous jump mechanism – in collaboration with Philippe Dufour – or the C147, a chronograph with two registers and animated by the legendary Lemania 2310 movement.
In total, it is estimated that the watchmaker manufactured between 2,500 and 3,000 watches, i.e. nearly 500 pieces per year until the mid-1990s. we regularly find at auction the image of a Tourbillon Skeleton in yellow gold, sold for more than 290,000 euros at Phillips in Geneva, in May 2022. The secondary market has long remained the only way for lovers of signed watches Daniel Roth, to acquire models produced by him and only by him. Indeed, in 1994, Roth was forced to sell his stake in the company that bore his name to the family that owned the renowned distributor The Hour Glass.
A few years later, in 2000, the Daniel Roth company was finally sold to Bulgari, itself acquired in 2011 by the LVMH group. But now anxious to concentrate its production capacities on its own-name collections, the Italian house recently decided to no longer deal with the creations of the independent master, which have therefore been taken over by Louis Vuitton. This, with the assistance of the teams of La Fabrique Du Temps, in Geneva.
A happy (re)birth more than 30 years after the launch in 1988 of the first Daniel Roth watch. Under the leadership of Michel Navas and Enrico Barbasini – two of the greatest master watchmakers of La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton – the brand will produce a few hundred pieces a year, perpetuating its lifelong mantra: the watch as an object of art. “The creation and development of the first watch is currently underway and its outcome will be revealed to the public within a few months. Daniel Roth will be keen to capture all the mechanical ingenuity and contemporary classicism that have defined the vision of watchmaking genius since the earliest days,” says Louis Vuitton, who also specifies that a first “subscription” series of 20 pieces should be released. first be unveiled. Case to follow.
