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MANUEL EMCH AND THE UNCONVENTIONAL LOGIC OF LOUIS ERARD

When Manuel Emch joined Ahmed Seddiqi to talk us through Louis Erard’s 2026 novelties, he did not immediately fit the profile of a man running a Swiss watch house. With his swept-back hair, round-rimmed glasses and oversized black jacket over a plain white T-shirt, Emch has always been every bit the approachable creative, not the buttoned-up executive.

The one formal gesture in the room was a pair of white cotton gloves, put on to handle the watches laid out in front of him, as though the object deserved more ceremony than the man presenting it.

THE MATH DOES NOT ADD UP

Louis Erard, the independent Swiss watch manufacturer, has a team of around 12 people and makes roughly 3,500 watches a year. It releases between 20 and 30 new references in that same period, meaning a house barely large enough to fill an elevator is reinventing a meaningful share of its own catalogue every few weeks. “We’re not interested in volume; we’re interested in quality,” is how Manuel Emch, the man who runs it, explains the discrepancy to us in a conversation at Ahmed Seddiqi’s Novelties 2026 event.

The truer answer is perhaps stranger than that: he has built an entire watch brand around never quite settling into one.

Some people call him the King of Collaboration, a title he says is “not too far off” from earning honestly. It sounds like flattery, until you understand exactly what it tries to describe: a Swiss house that hands its own identity to outsiders, on purpose and repeatedly. That habit is the clearest way into how Emch actually thinks about creativity, scale and who gets to decide what a brand is for.

THE WATCH THAT MADE HIM CARE

Born in 1972, Manuel Emch spent his youth in Grenchen, the small Swiss town that still manufactures more watch movements than almost anywhere else on earth, at precisely the moment the industry seemed to be dying. Quartz had made mechanical watchmaking look outdated overnight. During his schoolgoing years, most of his friends' parents lost their jobs. It left him cold on the business his own family had worked in for three generations, though his mother, Arlette-Elsa Emch, later became president of the Swatch brand herself.

What pulled him back in was not a movement or a complication. It was a wristwatch shaped like a piece of Keith Haring artwork, part of a run of Swatch collaborations with contemporary artists that turned plastic quartz watches into something closer to wearable art. Emch became a collector before he became anything else in the industry, and the lesson stayed with him: a watch could be an emotional object first, a mechanical one second.

A CAREER OF WALKING AWAY

Every chapter since reads like a version of the same decision. He left Rado early, because, in his own words, it was “too structured and stiff.” Recruited at 29 to uplift Jaquet Droz, he spent eight years building it around decoration and feeling rather than mechanical one-upmanship. Its eighteenth-century founder, he reasoned, did not invent groundbreaking watch technology. “Droz's inventions were of a more aesthetic and emotional nature.”

He eventually left that role too, once, in his words, having too much freedom started to clash with the group processes. It is strikingly evident from Emch’s career that, given real creative latitude, he tends to use all of it; given a large organisation instead, he tends to leave.

THE YEARS THAT DIVIDED OPINION

At Romain Jerome, the brand he ran next, that latitude produced his most divisive work yet. Watches were built from steel recovered from the Titanic, ash from an erupting Icelandic volcano, dust said to have travelled to the moon. (Forbes ran a piece asking bluntly whether the Titanic watch was homage to or exploitation of a disaster that killed more than 1,500 people.)

Later collaborations built mechanical watches around Super Mario, Pac-Man and Batman, under a collection of generational icons. “We have some people who hang up on us when we say our brand name,” Emch admitted at the time.

WHAT LOUIS ERARD WANTED TO PROVE

By the time Emch became involved with Louis Erard in 2018, the house had been carrying a different story for 15 years. Founded in 1929 as a case-maker and watchmaking school, and revived in 2003 by entrepreneur Alain Spinedi, it had set out to prove something specific: that genuine, 100 percent mechanical Swiss watchmaking did not need haute-horlogerie pricing. “When there are 800 brands worldwide, it's not easy to turn up with the 801st,” Spinedi has said of the market.

For nearly a decade, the idea worked. Production climbed from under 1,000 pieces a year to around 20,000, and turnover passed CHF 10 million. The brand held up better than most competitors through the 2009 financial crisis, proof that credible mechanical watchmaking did not require a luxury price tag to survive hard years.

WHY THE MODEL STOPPED WORKING

Then, several unrelated pressures arrived within the same few years. The Swiss franc surged after the Swiss National Bank abandoned its currency floor in January 2015, making Swiss-made mechanical watches abruptly expensive abroad. Smartwatches took a share of the market mechanical brands had never had to compete for before.

Spinedi's response, introducing quartz lines to defend the entry price point, is one he later described as a costly compromise. “We were forced to offer men's quartz timepieces too, and that only impoverished the brand,” he has admitted. By the time Emch arrived, the brand carried some 300 references, had lost its identity trying to compete on price alone and had become, in Emch's own description, simply “generic.”

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WHEN COLLABORATION BECAME CENTRAL

When Emch took over, his goal was straightforward: “affordable, collectible watchmaking.” Collaboration turned out to be the specific tool for that, not a marketing layer on top of it. “When you're stuck in the idea of a brand logic, like the classical with the classical collections, it's very hard to step off your beaten track,” he says. A named collaborator remains for him an efficient tool to create products which are not necessarily in line with the collection – “where you can go way beyond the framework of the brand” without breaking what the brand is supposed to be.

And that might just be how a house with a small team producing roughly 3,500 watches a year still manages up to 30 new references annually. The reinvention was never optional; it was the mechanism.

THE SAME IDEA, RUN IN REVERSE

Rather than compete on volume and price the way the brand once had, Emch capped individual collaboration runs at 178 units or fewer and priced watches to hold or increase in value rather than simply move stock. “I want my product to at least keep its value, if not double or triple. That guarantees that any buyer will buy purely out of emotions,” he has said.

On watches sold through Louis Erard's own retail partners, he has admitted the arithmetic runs the other way entirely: “For the watches we sell through our retailers, I lose money... It's about building brand equity.” It is Spinedi's original ambition, run in reverse; democratic not because it is cheap, but because it is honest about what it costs to make something worth wanting.

A CREATIVE PROCESS BUILT ON INDIVIDUALITY

Ask Emch about his own creative process, though, and the answer sounds less collaborative than the finished watches suggest. “Creativity is not a democratic process. Whenever it becomes a democratic process, you end up with pretty bad products,” he has said.

In an interview with CRASH Magazine, he named the artists he actually admires, John Armleder and Ugo Rondinone among them, warning against collaboration that tries to associate it with a product without subtlety or care. It sits oddly against a career built on outside collaborators, though perhaps that is closer to how he works: fewer voices, chosen carefully, given real authorship.

He has predicted the wider industry will end up the same way, splitting into indies and micro-brands, with no need to scale and last at all costs. Convenient, for a man who has built his own career around exactly that outcome, and arguably one of his most honest pieces of watchmaking philosophy yet.

THE EMOTIONAL EQUATION

What any of this is actually for folds back to where he started: watching a Keith Haring Swatch decide, for a young man in Grenchen, that a watch could be more than a tool. Several companies and decades later, that conviction has not moved an inch. “For us, watchmaking is not just about making the best possible watch,” he says. “It's about creating an emotional link, something that makes you smile when you look at it.”

And perhaps that is the logic of Emch’s Louis Erard after all: to craft a piece that people want, not because the numbers say they should, but because it brings them joy. In an industry increasingly concerned with scale, efficiency and growth, it might be an unusually simple proposition, but it is one that Emch has spent his career proving in practice.

It appears the math does add up after all.