Very few brands in the watch industry have made it so big in 15 years. What do you attribute the success of your brand to?

To two things – believing in myself and putting my heart in whatever I do. I have never calculated money. When I do something I take a lot of risk. The designs might look normal now, but when they were introduced they were unusual. I broke the rules. Like, I made gold look dark, almost brown, to the point that some people asked me why they have to pay so much when nobody sees the gold. But that is my attitude.

How do you characterise this attitude of yours? Can you call it revolutionary
or maverick?

It is an attitude, wherein it is not necessary for people to accept you, but it’s more important for you to understand the value of it.

So, you have just gone by your instinct and it has worked for you...

Yes. Even going into watches, I have never been a watchmaker in my life. To
be honest, for me, a watch was just an instrument to see the time. I never really
paid any attention to the brand. It was for commercial reasons that I did watches. The few stores that I had at that time were not getting enough clientele since the selling point was quite high. It was quite depressing. I had to find a way. The most natural thing was to do watches.

And then I went on innovating. I have been the first one in the world to use dual time within one movement with the dual times being totally independent. The Doppio was the only watch in the world, at least until I did it, where you could put Bombay time or India time being totally independent.

So you could also take care of the half-an-hour time slot.

Yes. And there is another one that is called Otturatore, which will be out soon. It is more complicated to do this watch than the Meccanico. It has four functions. But you will see them one at a time. You just have a button here. You push and you do not even see it.

Now, the difficult part. When it turns, it is like a car going at 280km an hour. But when the car brakes, it does not stop instantly. We had to find a system to brake immediately. Finally, we found a way, which is another small revolution.

Desribe a de Grisogono customer.

Men come to us for complications. I am trying to do a complication which others have never thought about. My clients are those who probably have everything, are collectors, and are fed up of similar designs. I am not mentioning brands, but if you take 10 brands in

That was in 2008, right? Till then you were a jeweller?

Yes. I realised that if I do the same kind of watches like everybody else did, I do not have any chance of succeeding. So I decided to take a different path. And we succeeded. I put stingray strap in watches for women with all different colours and believe it or not, it was successful.