In 2024, the most prestigious names in Swiss watchmaking had a hard year. Vacheron Constantin — founded in 1755 — saw sales drop around 14%. Jaeger-LeCoultre fell roughly 18%. The Swatch Group, which owns Omega, Longines, and Tissot, watched its operating profit collapse by 75%. Swiss watch exports declined overall.
In that same down market, a brand that did not exist until 2001 grew. Richard Mille sold roughly 5,700 watches and brought in about $ 1.77 billion in revenue in 2024 — making it the sixth-largest watch brand in the world by revenue while producing fewer watches than almost every competitor above it. Its average price per watch sits around $300,000. To put that in perspective, Rolex — a company most people associate with the top of the market — sells at an average price near $16,000 and produces roughly 200 times more watches every year.
Let that sink in. A brand with no heritage, no nineteenth-century founder, no historic complication to its name, walked into the single most heritage-obsessed category in all of luxury — and now commands the highest price per unit in the entire industry.
Here is the part that should interest every marketer and strategist: Richard Mille, the man, was not a watchmaker. He studied marketing. His competitors descended from master horologists; he came up through marketing and industrial production at Finhor, Matra, and the jeweller Mauboussin. He is best described not as a craftsman but as a luxury-industry executive who understood positioning at a level the entire industry had forgotten was possible.
This is a positioning story. And it is one of the cleanest examples I have ever seen of a principle I come back to constantly: you do not win by being a better version of the incumbent. You win by changing what the category is about.
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