Roger Dubuis

Roger Dubuis, the watchmaking house, was founded in Geneva in 1995 by Roger Dubuis and Carlos Dias. Dubuis had worked for two decades as a designer at Patek Philippe after beginning his watchmaking career in the 1950s; Dias came from a design role at rival watchmaker Franck Muller. Together they set out to build an independent brand under Dubuis's own name. Four years after founding, in 1999, the company produced its first in-house movements, and by 2001 it had built its own manufacturing facility in Geneva, moves that established it as a genuine manufacture rather than an assembler of outsourced movements. In 2005 the brand launched what became its signature collection, Excalibur, built around large, heavily skeletonized tourbillon watches whose openworked dials reference the Knights of the Round Table, and which became a platform for elaborate gem-setting work. Roger Dubuis was acquired by the Richemont luxury group in 2008 and now operates from a manufacture in Meyrin, on the outskirts of Geneva, with annual production limited to only a few thousand watches. The brand is also known for applying the Poinçon de Genève, the Geneva Seal quality hallmark, across its entire output of calibers, one of a small number of watchmakers to do so consistently rather than on selected pieces.