Olivier Audemars and Ilaria Resta

For Olivier Audemars, growing up, his family’s historic watchmaking business always felt rather remote. “We didn’t really discuss the watch brand,” he recalls. “It was something my grandfather was taking care of up in the mountains.” Those mountains were the Jura Mountains, a range north of Geneva, and the watch brand in question was Audemars Piguet, one of the oldest watch manufacturers in Switzerland and the only one still in existence that has never left the hands of its founding families.

The grandfather Olivier mentions was Paul- Edward Piguet, whose own father, Edward Auguste Piguet, had been one of the co-founders of the company back in 1875, along with Jules Louis Audemars. Olivier remembers Paul-Edward with fondness. “I was very close to him,” he says. As a child, on his visits to see him in the village of Le Brassus in Canton Vaud, Olivier remembers finding it hard to understand why his grandfather spent so much time with these “tiny pieces of metal” rather than playing with him. “Then one day, he came home with a movement that was fully assembled,” Olivier recalls. “He asked me to touch the escapement and, when I did, it came alive. I felt, ‘Wow, this is magical.’ It was like a beating heart.”

As Olivier grew older, his grandfather would take him to visit the manufacture to see the team of watchmakers at work. Over time, Olivier learned about the history of the company, and of the Vallée de Joux, where Le Brassus is located, one of the cradles of high end watchmaking. Many of the residents here can trace their roots back to Huguenots and Protestants who fled from France in the mid- 1500s during the French Wars of Religion. They moved to the Jura Mountains as farmers and eventually learned the craft of watchmaking to keep themselves occupied and to bring in extra income during the harsh and hostile winters.

Later, when he graduated from university, going into the family’s watch business was far from Olivier’s mind, as he set up his own venture, a materials-science laboratory, with his former professor. But eventually, his relatives asked him to join Audemars Piguet, feeling that someone with an inside understanding of the company needed to be more closely involved. “I wasn’t very enthusiastic, because I had my company,” he recalls. “But I think it was probably the memories of my grandfather when I was a kid that helped me make the decision.” He joined Audemars Piguet in 1997.

While he worked for many years in an operational role, Olivier eventually moved from the day-to-day running of the company to a seat on the board, and since 2014, he has been vice chairman of the board of directors. This move initially brought with it a range of challenges, both personal and professional. “When I was in an operational position, my name wasn’t really an issue,” he says. “There are a lot of Audemars in the Vallée de Joux, so the connection wasn’t obvious. But when I became one of the voices of the company, that anonymity disappeared. When your name is above the door, it changes the perception people have of you.”

Joining the board also gave him a new perspective on leadership. “You realise you’re one of the people who is responsible for making sure the company continues and people have good jobs,” he says. That pressure can make decision-making tough, but Olivier has a strong compass guiding him: “Quite often when I have to make a difficult decision, I think about what my grandfather would have done 50 years ago, and what my grandchildren will think of my decision in 50 years’ time.” Stepping up to the board, he also felt even more keenly the weight of history. “It’s more a notion of stewardship than ownership,” he says. “Our role, during the limited time we are here, is to forge the next link of a long chain and to make it strong enough to support the links that will be added by the next generations.”

Of course, a position on the board also means working closely with a CEO , who leads the company day to day and drives it forward. Since this January, that position has been held by Ilaria Resta, an executive who had previously spent most of her career in the cosmetics and fragrance industry. Her first job was in a marketing position at Procter & Gamble, where she quickly developed a passion for consumer innovation and ideation, and gained experience in brand-building, sales and management. In 2020, she left to work for the Swiss, family-owned fragrance giant Firmenich, before she landed the CEO role at Audemars Piguet.

When we speak with her, Ilaria is quick to outline the difference between working for a public and a family-owned company. “In a private company, you have to get to know the family, get under the skin of their motivation, understand their history, their motivations and their dreams for the generations to come,” she says. It’s clear that she has wasted no time in doing exactly this. “The mission I received from the board was to protect the independence of this family company, which is a huge responsibility,” she notes. “I’ve been given an amazing opportunity to write a chapter in its long and successful history.”

When it comes to how she wants to lead, Ilaria believes it’s important not to change your management style entirely upon assuming a new position – she therefore plans to keep her leadership style, as she puts it, “close to my style as a person”. She is also incredibly proud to be one of the very few women CEOs in the watch industry, which has historically been highly male-dominated. “This definitely brings me lots of pride, but at the same time, I feel a responsibility to open up the doors to more women who have a passion for this job and this industry,” she says. After all, she adds, the number of women among Audemars Piguet’s customers is expected to grow considerably over the next five years.

Looking ahead, Ilaria’s strategies for the future are guided by three distinct pillars. The first is “innovation”, covering not just manufacturing and the watchmaking process itself, but also organisational ways of working and even retail, given that “we are truly an end-toend company,” Ilaria says. The second pillar is “client-centricity” and placing clients at the core of the way the brand thinks. In practice, this means “listening to them, understanding their needs, understanding their behaviours, and starting to anticipate and read the trends of the market”. The third pillar is “responsible business”, which refers to the positive impact that Ilaria wants Audemars Piguet to have on both the environment and society at large. “I feel a responsibility in the broader sense,” she says, “to support our partners and suppliers, and the communities that made our history and our success possible.”

This word, “responsibility”, is referenced time and again throughout our conversations with both Ilaria and Olivier. Fundamentally, for Ilaria as CEO, it reflects what she sees as a relationship built on trust: “The family members put their trust in me to lead their company. It’s their company, their history, their future.” She feels a responsibility to repay that trust and to shepherd Audemars Piguet into the future and towards continued success.

For Olivier, this sense of duty stems in part from a deep understanding of the brand’s history and the socioemotional wealth that is tied to it, for both himself and his family. “Audemars Piguet is the only traditional watchmaking company still in the hands of its founding families,” he says, “which means that during the difficult periods of the company, people had to be very dedicated and had to make a lot of sacrifices to keep it going.” This sense of perspective allows him to think, as he puts it, “in terms of generations rather than quarterly reports”, but it also underlines his feeling that he isn’t truly an owner of the business, more of a temporary steward. And, of course, this affects the way he thinks about the brand’s future too. “The company doesn’t really belong to us,” he says. “And if something doesn’t belong to you, you cannot sell it.”