The Watch That Started Everything: RALF TECH WRX Chrono Night

Montpellier, France. April 2009. That is where this story begins.

I saw a watch in a magazine. There was no business plan. No carefully calculated decision to enter the watch industry. No strategy presentation explaining where I thought independent watchmaking might go over the following decade.

There was simply an advertisement on Montres de Luxe. The brand was called RALF TECH. I had never heard of it. The watches being reviewed were the new Automatics WRX, among them there was the WRX Automatic Chrono Night, and I thought it was the most beautiful, extraordinary and mad watch I had ever seen in my life. I fell in love with it immediately. The shape of the case, the orange and black accents mixed with white gave it a crazy and outlandish look... I knew there and then what I wanted, I always had liked watches and had several at the time, famous brands, mainstream ones, historic pieces from Zenith and Heuer (including an original Monaco from the mid 70s). All of that became obsolete in that very moment, this tiny little image on a magazine in a foreign country changed everything, changed the course of my life in ways I did not expect, and it is still doing it as I type this article.

Looking back now, the timing was almost extraordinary in itself. RALF TECH really was virtually unknown in the horology world. The article described RALF TECH Watches as a young brand still little known to the general public. The WRX itself had only recently emerged: Frank Huyghe had drawn the first design in 2007, followed by a pre-series in 2008 and years of development through real-world testing.

I did not know any of that when I saw the advertisement. I didn't know what RALF TECH would become.

I certainly didn't know what Sincrono would become. I just knew I wanted that watch.

And perhaps the most important things in our lives begin exactly like that: not with logic, but with recognition. Something speaks to you before you have found the words to explain why.

The Watch

Even today, the WRX Automatic Chrono Night is an extraordinary object.

47.5 millimetres of black PVD-coated steel. A black carbon dial. A 5.9mm curved sapphire crystal. A mechanical automatic chronograph. 300 metres of water resistance. A hand-sewn black alligator strap.

It was enormous. Dark. Mechanical. Slightly intimidating. And utterly unlike the watches I had been accustomed to seeing.

RALF TECH made only 250 pieces of this wild beast. Inside is the RTAC001 automatic chronograph movement, a personalised version of the famous Valjoux 7750 architecture.

But specifications are not why I remember it. I remember it because it appeared to have been designed with absolutely no interest in seeking approval, with freedom in mind, freedom to follow one's wildest and strangest dreams, this resonated to me as it does today.

It did not seem to be asking whether people wanted this unhinged design, if they could handle the size, weight, purpose of such a marvel. It simply existed because somebody believed that this was the watch that should exist. Years later, I would understand that this was not accidental. It was Frank Huyghe.

The Man behind the masterpiece

My passion for the watches eventually led me to work directly with RT after a short period of time, a completely different path my education and career had led me until that moment. Working with RALF TECH eventually gave me the opportunity to understand the man behind the watch I had first seen on that magazine page, Frank Huyghe. Frank's influence on me has gone considerably further than watches. An extraordinary human being, Frank has imbued his ethos, strength of character and extraordinary vision in Ralf Tech creations.

His philosophy is remarkably clear: the objective was to create technically accomplished watches without allowing marketing to dictate the product. The WRX was developed through a process that RALF TECH still describes essentially as instinct, design, real-world feedback and final design.

That philosophy stayed with me.

Start with what is right. Not what is easiest. Not what everybody else is doing. Not what a spreadsheet tells you people ought to want. Build something that deserves to exist. Then stand behind it.

Frank came to watches through professional diving, not through the conventional luxury industry. RALF TECH began with equipment for professional and military divers; watchmaking grew from that world of reliability, field experience and consequences. When something is conceived as equipment rather than decoration, excuses become rather less acceptable. Either it works or it doesn't. Either you solve the problem or you haven't. I think that mentality found its way into Sincrono. Perhaps more than I realised at the time.

From a Watch to Sincrono

Eventually, my fascination with RALF TECH became a relationship with the company. That relationship became representation. I became the distributor for RALF TECH. And from there came everything else.

Sincrono grew. Other independent watch companies followed. New watches, new relationships, new customers, new ideas.

But if I follow the thread backwards far enough, I always arrive at the same place.

Montpellier. April 2009. A magazine. A black watch. It is strange to think about how much of a life can turn on something so small. Had I not seen that advertisement, perhaps I would eventually have entered the watch business anyway. Perhaps Sincrono would exist in another form.

Perhaps something else entirely would have happened. There is no way of knowing.

What I do know is that the WRX Chrono Night created an obsession. The obsession created a relationship. The relationship eventually became a business. And the business became something much more personal: a philosophy about watches, customers and what I believe luxury should actually mean.

What RALF TECH taught me

I have never wanted Sincrono to be simply a place where watches are exchanged for money.

Retail can become terribly transactional if you allow it.

A product arrives. Someone buys it. You ship it. Transaction completed.

Next customer. I have never believed that is enough.

A person buying a meaningful watch is placing a remarkable amount of trust in the people selling it.

Sometimes they are having a birthday. A marriage. A promotion.

A success nobody else completely understands. Sometimes the watch has taken months to choose and years to afford. Sometimes there is no occasion at all. They have simply found the one.

Once you understand that, customer service stops being a department.

It becomes an obligation. You answer the telephone. You answer the email. You solve the problem.

You explain when something is unclear. You fight someone's corner when something has gone wrong.

And you remain interested after the payment has cleared.

That uncompromising approach to customer service is one of the things I took from my relationship with RALF TECH and from observing Frank's way of working.

If something matters, you take responsibility for it.

That sounds obvious.

It isn't. This simple concept is very often overlooked and dismissed as a cost, while it is the most important aspect of being in this kind of environment, fuelled by passion, experience and emotions, not tech specs or materials.

Timepieces are the fuel of dream and emotion

There is another idea that became fundamental to Sincrono. I wanted to sell watches that mean something. Not necessarily watches from the most famous companies. Not necessarily the most expensive. Not whatever happens to be fashionable this year, and certainly not watches selected because somebody on the internet predicts they will be worth 20 per cent more next year.

I have very little interest in that way of thinking about watches. A watch is not a share certificate with hands. I don't want somebody to buy a watch from Sincrono because they are already thinking about the person to whom they might sell it.

I want them to imagine keeping it. Wearing it. Travelling with it. Scratching it. Looking at it years later and remembering who they were when they bought it. As I remember that eventful day in Montpellier 17 years ago.

A good watch should accumulate something considerably more interesting than market value. It should accumulate your life. The scratches become yours. The strap changes. The case acquires marks. Perhaps one day you give it to a son or daughter and have to explain why this slightly battered object matters so much to you. That, to me, is value. Of course some watches become rare. Some become collectible. Some increase in price. But those things should be consequences, not reasons.

If the first question we ask about a watch is “What will it be worth?”, I sometimes think we have missed the considerably more important question: “What will it mean?”

And so we return to the Night

Today, the WRX Automatic Chrono Night has become something very different from the watch I discovered in 2009. It has become history. For me it remains a dream, a memento of who I was, of what I have become because of it, what I have become because of the people I met in this journey.

RALF TECH now places the surviving unworn examples within its N.O.S. — New Old Stock — collection, reserved for authentic watches from earlier collections that have somehow remained new and unworn. RALF TECH describes these pieces as witnesses to its own history — watches carrying the character of an era that cannot simply be recreated by producing another one today.

Only 250 Chrono Nights were made. Finding one is difficult. Finding one brand new is becoming exceptional. That makes them rare. It makes them collectible. It probably makes them precious. Certainly they are to me and they always will be part of my life, my ethos, Sincrono's soul if you would.

An Unexpected Journey

I could never have known that one watch would help shape my belief that exceptional customer service is not a marketing slogan, but a moral responsibility to the person who has trusted you.

And I certainly could not have known that it would help create a business dedicated to finding watches that are not merely expensive, fashionable or commercially convenient, but meaningful.

Watches worth keeping. Watches worth wearing. Watches capable of becoming part of someone's story.

Perhaps that is why, after all these years, the Night still affects me.

It reminds me where all of this came from.

Sincrono did not begin as a money grabbing exercise, not as a job and certainly not with greed in mind.

It did not begin with a website, a shop, a spreadsheet. It did not begin with a distribution agreement, a sales target or a business plan.

It began with a feeling, an instinct, an unhinged piece of metal that changed my life in a cold and fateful day in France.