2024-02-12 05:52:25
This Monday morning, luxury watches are also turning to recycling.
Is making luxury watches from grape marc or dead leaves serious? And yet, that did not prevent the Swiss start-up ID Genève from raising two million Swiss francs last October from investors, including American actor Leonardo DiCaprio.
ID Genève has been manufacturing luxury watches from recycled materials for four years with 7 employees, including its 3 co-founders, on board.
Objective: to continue its research into materials and increase its production.
What does this company make its luxury watches from?
For steel, they recover it from scrap from watch factories and medical equipment manufacturers in the Jura. High quality steel and for watch movements, they source from unsold items from major brands, destined to be destroyed anyway. We take them apart, wash them, put them back together and that’s it. For the bracelets, an Italian company is in charge and which manufactures vegetable leather from grape marc but also a British start-up which produces this leather from vegetable waste from London parks, my famous dead leaves from earlier.
As for the packaging, ID Genève watches are presented in boxes that look like cast iron. They are actually made with algae that dissolves in water and can even be reused as garden fertilizer.
On steel, this start-up even wants to go even further.
To melt the steel, its founders went to carry out tests in a solar oven in France, in the Pyrenees. And it works, they come back with kilos of recycled steel, melted without fossil fuels, which they will use for their second model. In the future, they wish to use a solar oven which should be built in Switzerland, in La Chaux-de-Fonds precisely.
It’s time Jean to talk regarding the price.
Before checking out, it must be said that these watches are very beautiful. Like really, they’re classy without being ostentatious. The price, on the other hand, is a bit steep: around 4,500 euros per model. It must be said that production is not really industrialized, 620 ID Genève watches have been manufactured since the launch of the activity.
The brand intends to market 1,000 watches this year.
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