HHDR Group launches today, born of a bold and unprecedented conviction formed in 2024: that only by bringing seasoned specialists together with talent from outside the industry — from entrepreneurship, finance, consulting, and design — can the fresh, complementary perspectives be generated that watchmaking needs to keep reinventing itself.
1. An unrivalled architecture. Four autonomous entities. One shared foundation.
HHDR Group brings together a watchmaking creation platform (Haute Horlogerie Dominique Renaud), a Support Company, a strategic consulting firm (Bettering Group) and a Research & Development department – all united by seven shared values.
2. Two brands, two fertile territories. Radical exploration and reinterpretation of archetypes.
The Dominique Renaud brand, with its Pulse60 timepiece, embodies a new watchmaking language grounded in radical exploration. The Renaud Tixier brand, with its Monday timepiece, reinterprets archetypes through an intergenerational dialogue. These two territories enrich each other; they do not compete.
3. A commitment across the value chain. Supporting what the market tends to overlook.
The Support Company takes equity stakes in strategic subcontractors weakened by market cycles, based on a long-term, hands-on mentoring model.
4. R&D that builds on controlled serendipity. Constraint seen as a catalyst for breakthroughs.
HHDR Group’s proprietary methodology transforms constraint into a chance for innovation, nurtures attention to anomaly, and offers an original approach to R&D consulting. Human intelligence and artificial intelligence work in concert.
5. A think tank for rethinking time. The Fondation Dominique Renaud, an independent entity.
HHDR Group seeded the Fondation Dominique Renaud (FDR), which is active across three initiatives: the Amplitude colloquia, an open science network named Open DR, and a forthcoming Dominique Renaud academy.
6. Genuine and meaningful luxury. Interdisciplinarity, transmission, open collaboration.
HHDR Group embodies a vision of luxury founded on depth, transmission and collaboration — in tune with a clientele seeking genuine substance in the objects they choose.
7. A leadership team aligned on this vision
Four leaders carry the responsibility of driving this vision forward: Jean-Luc Errant, Michel Nieto, Pierre-Henri Verlhac and Stéphane Vial.
Verbatim
“Watchmaking does not need to be comforted in its certainties. On the contrary, it needs to be exposed to outside perspectives that see what it no longer sees.” — Jean-Luc Errant, Founder of HHDR Group
“HHDR Group is a group that knows what it is doing, that you want to follow because it carries a unique and inspiring vision of the future of luxury and watchmaking.” — Stéphane Vial, Secretary General of HHDR Group
“Dominique Renaud, the humanist watchmaker.” — Specialist press, 2026
The 7 Founding Values of HHDR Group
These values are rooted in the singular journey of Dominique Renaud — watchmaker, inventor, voluntary fugitive from the system, patient builder — and are embodied in every entity of the group.
Freedom of Thought
Leaving at the crest to reclaim one’s freedom. Capturing the low frequency when the market is in high pitch. Choosing mechanical disruption where consensus smoothed things out. This is not obstinacy: it is a philosophy. Intellectual freedom is the precondition for any real advancement.
The freedom to think outside prevailing currents manifests itself differently depending on the discipline: mechanical disruption at HHDR, institutional questioning at FDR, abductive reasoning in the R&D department, and the courage to preserve what major players abandon within the Support Company. One value, multiple concrete expressions.
Rigour in the Service of Exploration
Without exploration, rigour generates repetition; without rigour, exploration produces only noise. To move wisely beyond established rules, one must first understand them in depth: learn before unlearning. Rigour in the service of exploration ensures the internal coherence of every HHDR Group operation. It is the framework that prevents freedom from turning into dilettantism and exploration from producing disorder. It enables HHDR Group to be both nonconformist and high-performing.
Interdisciplinarity
Time is universal – and inherently interdisciplinary. Watchmaking that speaks only to itself weakens itself. Watchmaking that opens itself to physicists, architects or biologists grows richer — and enriches them in return. The friction between disciplines is generative. HHDR Group acknowledges that watchmaking has more to learn from the kingfisher, from Becquerel, from Monet and from the spirit of the Enlightenment than from itself.
Transmission
What a generation builds only has meaning if it can be passed on — not as a frozen legacy, but as energy in motion. To transmit is to give others the means to go further than oneself could.
Transmission takes several forms within HHDR Group: the passing on of creative gesture and posture at HHDR, the dissemination of knowledge and thought at FDR, and the safeguarding of artisan skills by the Support Company. Three expressions of a single, indivisible continuum.
A Vision of the Form–Function Relationship
Watchmaking must keep moving. It must say something about our relationship with time, about the beauty of mechanics placed in the service of life. A watch that merely measures time with accuracy misses the point.
This vision of the form–function relationship extends well beyond watchmaking: it determines the clarity and interface of the R&D department’s research tools, and the quality of Bettering Group’s deliverables. For HHDR Group, a solution is only truly accomplished when its form exactly reflects its function — when that consistency is itself a form of excellence.
Collaboration & Open Science
Talent only has value when it is part of a collaborative effort. Breaking down silos, sharing, attracting talent. HHDR Group is convinced that thinking only with one’s usual partners leads nowhere. New connections must be actively forged, thinking must be opened up to others; and an open model must be embraced in which the group’s companies do not work solely for the group.
Collaboration and open science are reflected in the group’s entire structure: four autonomous yet interconnected entities whose discoveries and resources flow freely. The Support Company protects the artisans that HHDR needs. The R&D department feeds the broader horological network. HHDR Group is a living ecosystem.
The Human as a Cardinal Value
The homo faber of watchmaking is the irreplaceable source of value. Artisans who carry unique know-how, subcontractors weakened by sometimes unpredictable markets, young builders in search of an intellectual horizon… – these are the individuals that HHDR Group is committed to supporting, without reservation.
Haute Horlogerie Dominique Renaud
Watchmaking as Exploration
Haute Horlogerie Dominique Renaud (HHDR) is the creative heart of HHDR Group. It operates two complementary brands: Dominique Renaud, a laboratory for radical exploration, and Renaud Tixier, a workshop for reinterpreting watchmaking archetypes through intergenerational dialogue. These two territories do not compete — they cross-pollinate, embodying the conviction that deep innovation arises from the tension between disruption and mastery.
At Dominique Renaud, the Pulse60 demonstrates that the true challenge lies not in performance as an end in itself, but in exploring watchmaking more deeply and expressing it with clarity. Moving towards low frequency was an act of intellectual freedom rarely seen in a sector where truth tends to be validated by tradition. At HHDR, form is the direct consequence of an innovative mechanism that demands both clarity and legibility, where the complex is made accessible. When every element exists because it must, the result achieves a unity of form and meaning that no decoration can imitate.
At Renaud Tixier, the Monday watch illustrates the conviction that energy management is one of the new frontiers of watchmaking. The Monday is also the quintessence of decorative arts and craftsmanship, brought to life with the utmost attention to form.
Support Company
A fund dedicated to safeguarding the strategic suppliers in watchmaking
The Support Company is HHDR Group’s concrete response to a quiet crisis: the weakening of subcontractors – usually small and family-run, always irreplaceable – undermined by the vagaries of the watchmaking market. These businesses hold cutting-edge expertise and form a vital component of high watchmaking, yet the industry has no structural mechanism to protect them.
The Support Company does. Having acquired stakes in DS Assemblage and Niton, it operates on a thesis of committed, patient entrepreneurial support: combining capital with strategic involvement to preserve what the market tends to let die.
This reflects a fundamental conviction of the group: added value in watchmaking is human before it is mechanical. Exceptional know-how cannot be reconstituted. When a precision bar-turning workshop closes, it is a future capacity for innovation that disappears with it.
Beyond providing capital, the Support Company creates links between entities that had previously worked in isolation, builds productive connections among suppliers and subcontractors, and integrates them into the broader HHDR Group ecosystem — giving them access to markets and projects they could not have reached alone.
Bettering Group
Management Consulting · Business Intelligence · Digital Marketing
Bettering Group is the strategic and consulting arm of HHDR Group. It comprises Bettering Partners, an advisory entity specialising in market intelligence, positioning and the development of high-performing business models, and Inox Communication, an agency focusing on brand strategy and the development of business intelligence technology solutions, founded and led by Lats Kladny – an entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience at the intersection of strategy, creativity, and technology.
Together, these two centres of expertise give HHDR Group a powerful lever for translating the Group’s vision into action – while operating as a growth engine open to the wider market.
Research & Development
A Laboratory for Disruption
“Observing the process of a discovery is often more fruitful than studying the discovery itself.” — Jean-Luc Errant, Founder of HHDR Group
HHDR Group’s R&D department is a laboratory where the major questions of micromechanics are formalised, structured and explored with agility. The ambition is to build a new methodology – a cognitive infrastructure that makes it possible to propose and then explore unprecedented R&D directions, creating an advisory service without equivalent on the market.
The R&D department’s premise: true discoveries are not always the ones being sought. Becquerel, for instance, discovered radioactivity by noticing that a photographic plate had been exposed by a piece of uranium left in a drawer. This department cultivates attention to anomaly – the ability to turn an incident into a foundational question. Constraint is no longer an obstacle — it becomes an invitation to look beyond.
For HHDR Group, the creation of something that does not yet exist — true disruption — is the privileged territory of the human mind. Within this architecture, artificial intelligence, whether documentary or generative, is present as a tool for exploration and analytical amplification, never as an end in itself.
The notion of constraint is also a powerful engine of disruption. When a resource disappears or a limit is imposed, solutions that conventional optimisation would never have found can emerge. Monet did not choose Impressionism: he invented it because he could no longer do otherwise. The constraint did not reduce the field of possibilities — it shifted it towards something truer.
The R&D department’s knowledge base is deliberately fed by heterogeneous sources — biology, engineering, history of science, design — because the great horological breakthroughs rarely come from within the craft.
This department will directly feed Open DR (working title), the open-science platform of the Fondation Dominique Renaud, by accompanying ideas through their development. Open DR and the R&D department thus form an open research ecosystem: the discoveries of one serve as resources for the other.
Fondation Dominique Renaud
Think Tank · Soft Power · Transmission · Community
The Fondation Dominique Renaud (FDR) is a living, intellectual and collective endeavour — a think tank for new representations of time. Founded at HHDR Group’s initiative, the FDR is a legally independent entity. It extends the group’s vision and convictions into the realm of ideas, without forming part of its operational structure.
The FDR was born from the conviction that watchmaking is a closed world, at risk of isolating itself from the new paradigms and intellectual dynamics needed to conceive the watchmaking of tomorrow. Yet time and its representations are among the most universal questions there are – ones that must remain open to ideas from elsewhere.
The FDR is part of the robust dynamic of open innovation and open science — two paradigms that enabled fundamental breakthroughs such as the sequencing of the human genome and the discovery of the Higgs boson. It provides a contemporary translation of the spirit of the 18th-century Enlightenment, when knowledge broke free of silos and advanced through successive contributions.
The FDR structures its thinking around three major pillars:
The Amplitude Symposia
The Amplitude symposia create transdisciplinary spaces where the friction between disciplines becomes a source of light — where watchmakers meet physicists, philosophers, architects and artists, and where a perspective from the outside reveals what watchmaking no longer sees in itself.
Open DR — The Open-Science Social Network
The Open DR (working title) social network aims to deploy the open-science mindset within the world of high watchmaking: an architecture enabling distributed intelligences — horological or otherwise — to produce together what none could produce alone, through an unprecedented model of collaborative innovation and traceability. Ideas that could find no outlet will finally be able to circulate, be challenged and develop.
The Dominique Renaud Academy
The Dominique Renaud Academy (working title) will not be yet another watchmaking school. It will be a programme centred on the mindset of tomorrow’s watchmaking entrepreneur — one who knows how to build, think, question, unite and persuade. The Dominique Renaud Academy will give method to the instinct of the curious child who never stops questioning what adults have come to accept without thinking.
The Leadership Team
The strategic vision of HHDR Group is carried by three leaders with complementary backgrounds, whose combined experience covers every dimension of the ecosystem: deep mastery of high watchmaking on a global scale, operational structuring and entrepreneurial agility, and strategic vision forged through investment banking and publishing. Together, they give HHDR Group the ability to conceive an ambitious vision and translate it into operational reality (by alphabetical order).
Jean-Luc Errant — Chairman
A French graduate of the École Polytechnique born in 1958, Jean-Luc Errant built an engineering career at the intersection of telecommunications and connected textiles. After assignments at Bayer and France Télécom, he founded Cityzen Sciences, a pioneering smart textiles start-up whose garments were worn by Thomas Pesquet in space and showcased during Emmanuel Macron’s diplomatic missions. In 2023, a chance encounter with watchmaking legend Dominique Renaud changed his trajectory: he established Manufacture Dominique Renaud in Tolochenaz, assuming its presidency. During the past two years, he been structuring the HHDR Group watchmaking ecosystem around two brands, a foundation, and a network of multidisciplinary expertise.
Michel Nieto — Chief Executive Officer, Haute Horlogerie Dominique Renaud
A trained microtechnology engineer and business manager, Michel Nieto is a veteran of the Swiss watchmaking industry with over thirty-five years of experience across the sector’s three major groups. After beginning his career at Swatch Group, he joined Richemont where he contributed to the Group’s watch development before being appointed CEO of Baume & Mercier in 2002, leading its international repositioning and expansion into the Chinese market. He subsequently headed Bulgari’s watchmaking operations. At HHDR Group, Michel Nieto brings a deep knowledge of the watchmaking value chain — from creation to distribution — and a proven ability to build fine watchmaking brands with a global reach.
Stéphane Vial — Secretary General
Stéphane Vial is an entrepreneur and hands-on leader whose career spans strategic consulting, commercial innovation and last-mile logistics. He created and ran his own company for ten years before joining Groupe Adeo, which he supported through its growth. He then joined the Mulliez family’s cross-brand innovation hub, where he notably led The-ring.io, followed by QOMOD, a pioneering collection-point concept. In 2023, he returned to an entrepreneurial path, founding Fox & Company and Bettering Partners to support companies through their growth challenges – a move that became part of building an ecosystem within HHDR Group. Stéphane Vial brings an agile entrepreneurial culture, expertise in business structuring and commercial development, and the operational ability to turn a strategic vision into ground-level reality. Stéphane holds a degree from Eslsca.
Pierre-Henri Verlhac — Chief Strategy Officer
An entrepreneurial publisher for twenty years, Pierre-Henri Verlhac has brought out over one hundred illustrated works in partnership with international institutions and brands such as Rolex, Stellantis, Deutsche Grammophon and CERN. On graduating from Essec, he spent seven years in investment banking, developing the ability to structure complex visions and translate them into operational models. His throughline is the encounter between technology and culture, and new relationships of meaning in the attention economy. A documentary producer, he also brings to HHDR Group a strategic expertise rooted in the structuring of intangible assets, brand narrative and the development of innovative business models at the nexus of luxury, heritage and creation.