t’s early July and I’m on my way to the southern suburbs of Paris to meet Gautier Massonneau. This isn’t a place with well-tended flower beds and luxury boutiques on every corner. Instead, there are buildings at various stages of construction, big-box stores and boats loading on the Seine that runs alongside. Hardly glamorous. The address that Trilobe has given me blends into the surroundings. A business incubator and a vast parking lot. I buzz an unfamiliar name on the intercom.bda.

Man of a thousand faces

There’s more to Gautier Massonneau than meets the eye. Beneath the disarming ordinariness of the Harry Potteresque round glasses, open collar and trainers is a formidable strategist with a solid vision for his brand and a sharp financial thinker who isn’t afraid to put in the hours. He has the shoulders to join the C-suite of a major player but his focus is on Trilobe and nothing else.

One of Massonneau’s strengths is that he is a multi-hyphenate leader. He can summarise a P&L while telling you the weight per square metre of every one of his CNC machines. He remembers to wish a retailer’s youngest happy birthday while checking that bridge chamfers are seven tenths, not four. His only bad habit is a typical trait of watch CEOs. He’s giving nothing away.

At the end of the day, we don’t actually know that much about Trilobe. Probably a little over 500 watches a year. The forces at play are masked by its structure as a holding company; it discloses neither production figures nor revenue. Over the past couple of decades, independents have been more (or less) open about communicating the key data that serves to position them on the horological spectrum, and in this respect Trilobe’s discretion seems almost old-fashioned.

A new production centre

Gautier Massonneau is more show than tell. I won’t learn much more that day but I will see a lot, namely a spanking new production site with several machining centres already in place. Trilobe is becoming a Manufacture.

The X-Nihilo calibre in the Trente-Deux collection.

The project takes root in a global dynamic to bring the brand’s know-how back to France, starting with the “know” and the opening two years ago of a headquarters, just off Place Vendôme, where the watches are designed and modelled, and where assembly and servicing are carried out by the dozen watchmakers employed there. The “how” happens here, a half-hour subway ride from Paris, at this rather blandly named production centre.

Why not “Manufacture Trilobe”? Because the site is earmarked to supply other brands. “The term ‘manufacture’ gets thrown around a lot,” Massonneau says, “when really it means the entire value chain is contained in one company. We already had the creation studio and assembly, now we’re adding the technical office and machining. Apart from the dial, balance spring and lubricants, we aim to produce everything in-house. A job well done is a job you do yourself. Plus it makes sense. Historically, watchmaking revolved around Paris and London.”

The new centre covers a sizeable 600 square metres with the potential to add a further 400 square metres on a separate level. “It used to be a potato factory,” Massonneau chuckles. Not much in common with watchmaking, apart from oil, perhaps, but the available space and proximity with the capital sealed the deal.

Trilobe’s Trente-Deux is the first to draw on the brand’s in-house production capacities.

The project has been on Massonneau’s radar since 2022. “It’s a sister company owned by Trilobe. We’re positioned as a subcontractor for watches and jewellery before stone-setting. We’ve been RJC for a month and we’ll be ISO this autumn, so we’re solid in terms of traceability, standards and quality.”

Ready to roll

Since moving in, in September 2023, Trilobe has wasted no time kitting out the new site with two 5-axis machining centres for bridges and plates (tolerances of 6 to 10 microns) and two turning and milling machines arriving this autumn. Plus a Schaublin lathe. Plus probing and optical metrology tools for inspecting tolerances within a micron. Plus a dozen staff already on-site.

It’s a tried and tested economic model. Any number of independent brands are the visible face of a subcontractor working behind the scenes: Armin Strom, Kross Studio, Doxa, Speake Marin, Lip and many more. Many are heir to the Dixi group which, back in the day, acquired Zenith, Movado and H. Moser & Cie.

Even so, there are enough defunct brands to remind us that France’s watchmaking sector is fragile. Brands that have either gone out of business or are surviving on life support: Lornet, Phenomen, Apose, Klokers, Routine, Dodane, Inguz. You have to hand it to Gautier Massonneau: so far, he’s always been one step ahead. As Christelle Rosnoblet, CEO of Speake Marin, recently declared, “it takes 20 years for a brand to turn a profit.” Trilobe has been around for seven and, having embarked on the extremely costly development of a Manufacture, faces a sizeable challenge.

Trente-Deux, Trilobe’s first in-house watch

Sporting a new case, new bracelet and redesigned movement, the Trente-Deux is the first watch to come almost entirely out of Trilobe’s Parisian studio and its new production unit. During development, the project was codenamed Trente-Deux (thirty-two), as in 32 Avenue de l’Opéra where the brand is headquartered. The name stuck.

It reprises the distinctive off-centre rotating discs display. The case has been substantially reworked to match with Trilobe’s first integrated bracelet. Movement architecture has been completely revised by separating the time-telling complication and the escapement into two units.

The Trente-Deux’s architectural aesthetic is an interesting direction that will appeal to anyone looking for a genuinely atypical watch. It is unmistakably Trilobe and a coherent and fitting next step in the brand’s journey.