Haute Time Presents Manuel Emch, CEO of Romain Jerome Timepieces

Haute Time Presents Manuel Emch, CEO of Romain Jerome Timepieces

Seth Semilof
By Seth Semilof April 13, 2012

Recently Haute Time had the wonderful opportunity to sit down with Manuel Emch, the CEO of one of my favorite watch brands, Romain Jerome.

The company works around the really unique concept of the DNA of famous legends. It’s not just about a nod to history, Romain Jerome goes one step further in physically integrating elements of history and man-kind into its timepieces. For example, around the concept of  “Sea,” timepieces are integrated with steel from the legendary Titanic. For “Air”  it features elements of the Apollo 11 aircraft and real moon-dust and the “Earth” components uses more limited legends such as the famous icelandic volcano.

The magnificent Space Invader watch we looked at with these elements is priced at $15,500 Swiss Francs. The demand has been been overwhelming, all pieces they previewed have already been sold.

From one extreme to another, we then looked at a Tourbillon timepiece that was the hot talk at Basel World this year. Aesthetically the watch is very cool with  four unique pistons and the toubillon positioned at 6 o’clock. It is priced at $160,000 Swiss Francs and available on the market now.

We also discussed the very complicated Romain Jerome Chronograph. It has a very eye-catching function- a little propeller that creates animation on the watch. The steel version will retail for $14,000 Swiss Francs and the gold version will be around $26,000 Swiss Francs.

The last piece we looked at was the first Romain Jerome Diver watch, “The Octopus.” The watch features two crowns- one to set time the other to set the graduation for diving- and internal sapphire basel. The really cool thing about this Diver watch is you can actually open it underwater and it will still be water proof- a special patent Romain Jerome has. It is limited to just 888 pieces, a nod to the watch being able to go down 888 feet.

Check out the video above to see all these incredible Romain Jerome timepieces and get an inside look at my meeting with the CEO, Manuel Emch.

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