THE CURATED EDITION.
Reportage / La Chaux-de-Fonds
Founded in 2017 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Vanguart makes two watches, in tiny numbers, for a client list that runs from Michael Jordan to Sam Altman. Now the Orb comes in pink and blue ceramic.
WATCHES · INDEPENDENT HAUTE HORLOGERIE
Some brands ask history for permission. Vanguart decided not to have one. Founded in 2017, the La Chaux-de-Fonds manufacture has turned the absence of heritage into a method, and in less than a decade it has found its way onto the wrists of Michael Jordan, John Mayer and Ed Sheeran.
The workshop occupies the former premises of Vulcain, in a town listed by UNESCO precisely because it was planned around watchmaking. The address says a great deal. Vanguart is young but not naive: two of its four founders, CEO Axel Leuenberger and technical director Jérémy Freléchox, came out of Audemars Piguet Renaud & Papi, the complications atelier that spent decades solving the hardest problems in fine watchmaking. Creative director Thierry Fischer had designed for Audemars Piguet and Harry Winston. Chairman and co-founder Mehmet Korutürk completes the quartet.
The first watch arrived only in 2021, four years after the company was founded. The Black Hole Tourbillon, powered by calibre T-1701, arranges the hours on discs that seem to spiral towards the centre, where the tourbillon takes the place of a gravitational core. It is a difficult object, deliberately so.
It’s like an album or a film that isn’t understood on opening weekend, but with time it becomes a classic.
Mehmet Korutürk, Vanguart chairman, to Rolling Stone UK
The Orb followed in 2024, the second creation and the more accessible one, if the word applies to a six-figure watch. The case measures 41 millimetres across and 10.5 high. The argument lies in the selector built into the crown: one press chooses between manual winding, automatic winding and time-setting. In manual mode the peripheral rotor locks; in automatic it spins freely. It was the first flying tourbillon to offer that choice.
Fischer likens the brand to a spaceship. Korutürk puts the method more plainly: “We take the best of the craft and its centuries of heritage, but without being constrained by it.”
At Watches and Wonders in Geneva this spring, the house unveiled the Orb Pink Ceramic Titanium and the Orb Blue Ceramic Rose Gold, 25 numbered pieces each. The pastel ceramic sits well outside the usual vocabulary of haute horlogerie. The movement is unchanged: 395 components, 21,600 vibrations per hour, a 60-hour power reserve. Indicative prices are around CHF 150,000 for titanium and CHF 180,000 for gold.
“We set out to create watches that feel both warm and precise, technical yet tactile,” Fischer said at the launch. Korutürk speaks of pieces that “move with them, across different moments, different environments, different lives.”
The client list explains the noise around such a small house. Michael Jordan, John Mayer, Ed Sheeran and Bad Bunny are among Vanguart owners, according to Europa Star. In August, the Wall Street Journal reported that Sam Altman had ordered seven Orb Flying Tourbillons for OpenAI. In January, Elena Rybakina won the Australian Open wearing a rose gold Orb on a white strap. Since 2025 the brand has been official timekeeper of the Ballon d’Or.
None of this changes the scale. Vanguart delivered around 15 watches in 2025 with a team of roughly twenty. Theoretical capacity is about a hundred a year, and the house is in no hurry to reach it. In North America it sells exclusively through Material Good. Fischer is clear about who it is for: “We’re never going to be the first watch of a collection. It will always be for the seasoned collectors.”
Vanguart never asked history for permission, and perhaps that is why history has started to make room. Nine years, two watches, a few dozen pieces. In a craft measured in centuries, the house is betting that it is still only opening weekend.
Details and further reading: Vanguart, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. Orb Pink Ceramic Titanium and Orb Blue Ceramic Rose Gold, 25 pieces each, price on request. vanguart.com
GABRIEL SILVEIRADO, FOR WAYFARER.
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