How Richard Mille Takes Quartz Watches to a Surprising Level

For the team at North Thin Ply Technology (NTPT), a Lausanne-based manufacturer of high-tech composites for America’s Cup yachts, satellites, F1 cars, and aerospace, abstruse topics like interlaminar fracture toughness, the chemistry of resin matrices, and the elastic modulus of fiber-based materials are meat and drink.

Less typical, in an industry where performance trumps aesthetics, is NTPT’s knack for creating … well, pretty colors and lively patterns within lumps of hardcore materials. But NTPT’s work with Richard Mille, the Swiss watch brand known for engineering and designs as highly evolved as its price points (the average is around $311,000 a watch), has taken its R&D team down some divergent innovatory paths, says Olivier Thomassin, the engineer charged with overseeing the Richard Mille collaboration. “It’s led us into investigating a lot of new processes to make patterns and develop new colors, and we’ve spent a lot of time finding ways to bond together unusual materials,” he says. “It’s not the kind of thing a company like this normally does.”

There is little in the watch world that resembles Carbon TPT and Quartz TPT, the composites from which NTPT makes cases for Richard Mille. The flagship watch of the brand’s partnership with McLaren Automotive, the RM 11-03, features both: rippling layers of charcoal-toned carbon interlaced with bands of lurid orange. The RM 74-02, a svelte but showy skeletonized tourbillon, repeats the trick with seams of yellow gold fused into the carbon, something Thomassin says took three years to get right.

The automatic tape laydown machine overlays strips of tape impregnated with quartz thread.

Photograph: Scanderbeg Sauer

Or else look to the RM 65-01, a high-octane split-seconds chronograph inspired by motorsports, which recently received a Gen Z–friendly glow-up with versions in banana yellow, baby blue, or soft gray. The colored material has the lightness and feel of plastic, but is several times stronger than stainless steel.

For both firms, the collaboration has become a crucial calling card, such that a dedicated facility was opened at NTPT’s Lausanne headquarters in 2018, just for making Richard Mille watch cases. Behind the glass walls of this all-white inner sanctum, a big robotic printer shifts repeatedly back and forth along a large table, busily laying down precise strips of sticky-looking material on a spotless surface. Staff in white coveralls administer the machinery, while, to the rear, spools of see-through fibers feed mysteriously into equipment that will process them into micro-thin layers of “UD” (unidirectional tape), the stuff the machine is depositing.

For Richard Mille, color and texture actually turned out to be the by-product of a challenge the brand’s eponymous founder set NTPT more than a decade ago. The firm was already making Richard Mille watch cases out of its carbon-fiber variant, Carbon TPT, but Mille asked to brighten the template, says Thomassin. “He said he wanted a composite for a pure white case, so we started experimenting. We actually ended up with red first.”

Most fiber-based composites—think Kevlar, fiberglass, or forged carbon—share basic principles with materials such as concrete or MDF: Tiny strands of a given material are set within a binding matrix, usually a polymer resin, like epoxy. The mixture is shaped, compressed, and heat-cured. The resulting composite is typically very light and extremely strong, with the fibers serving as structural reinforcements to the surrounding matrix.

Spools of see-through quartz fibers …

Photograph: Scanderbeg Sauer

… are then turned into UD tape …

… which is layered to create case blanks.

It was by using fibers from quartz, a material paradoxically associated with cheapness in watches, that NTPT changed the game for Richard Mille. Being transparent in its purest silica form, quartz composites tend to be used in areas like optics, sensors, medical scanners, and weapon systems.

“Because it’s opaque, we can get a real color into the resin mix, and keep that color fixed in,” says Thomassin. “It’s the only fiber where we can do that.”

Since NTPT specializes in the chemical formulation of its own resin solutions, it was able to research ways to add rich pigments, and to fix these within a composite called Quartz TPT. The first Richard Mille watches to use it, in stripy white and bright red respectively, appeared in 2015. The terrifically odd look—bold colors whipped through with layered textures—quickly became an exclusive and conspicuous calling card for the brand.

Every shade and style, says Alexandre Mille, the watch company’s global commercial director, is the result of extensive R&D.

“It isn’t just picking a Pantone or a treatment and adding it in. Every new color represents a substantial technical effort to produce it and to get it right, without any compromise to the material itself,” he says. For instance, the light gray shade seen in last year’s RM 65-01 was originally intended for another watch. “That was three years ago, but it wasn’t ready,” says Mille. “So we continued refining it until we could use it.”

Back in the noughties, it was the transformation of Formula 1 and supercar engineering that first brought carbon fiber, along with other novel composites, to the attention of luxury watch brands. Richard Mille was an early adopter: When he’d founded his brand in 2001, his big idea was to translate the high-tech wonder of frontline automotive engineering into something wrist-bound—“a racing car for the wrist” as he described it.

Richard Mille RM 65-01 Split-Seconds Chronograph

Photograph: Richard Mille

Richard Mille RM 11-03 Flyback Chronograph

Richard Mille RM 35-03 Automatic Winding Rafael Nadal (Blue Quartz)

Accordingly, all manner of material innovations and technical ideas—carbon nanotubes, graphene, silicon carbide, movements suspended in pulleys—have made their way into Richard Mille’s watchmaking. It is responsible for some of the lightest and thinnest watches ever made, such as the 1.75-millimeter-thick RM UP-01 Ferrari. But it is the partnership with NTPT, a company that emerged from the marine engineering sector (it started out in sail-making technology) that has been especially transformative. Alexandre Mille describes the relationship as “like working with a brother. There’s a lot of cross-pollination of ideas, depending on what they are researching that can inspire creative concepts for us, or vice versa.”

The research that led to the use of opaque quartz does carry a downside: Unless the manufacturing environment is very closely controlled, dust particles and other impurities will show up in the finished material. For most NTPT products that wouldn’t be a problem, but the luxury industry—and particularly quarter-million-dollar watches—requires a different level of perfectionism. Hence the facility’s sealed-off “clean room” environment.

The “thin ply technology” in NTPT’s name refers to the use of much thinner layers (or plies) of resin-impregnated material than is found in standard composites. Thomassin says this allows for greater precision in tailoring the mechanical properties of whatever is being made, as well as achieving the kind of aesthetic consistency that a luxury product requires.

The base fibers arrive from suppliers as rolls of thread, which are stacked up and distributed via an intricate creel system. The translucent quartz thread consists of over a thousand tiny, interwound silica fibers or filaments, each one no more than a few microns in diameter. NTPT’s proprietary system unravels these filaments from each other and aligns them in a wider, unidirectional layer, before binding them in resin to create a broad “prepreg” tape that’s at most 45 microns thick.

A roll of the prepreg tape is loaded into a robot device known as an ATL (automatic tape laydown). With its boxy red body and rivets, the ATL rather resembles a giant piece of Meccano, skimming slowly back and forth as it builds up a precise crosshatch of layers.

The autoclave oven in which the quartz goes through the curing process, heating to 120 degrees C.

Photograph: Scanderbeg Sauer

It’s the overlaying of these prepreg layers in strictly angled sequences that allows factors like load-bearing capacity, stiffness, fatigue performance, and resistance to cracking to be managed and directed. While more intensive to manufacture, thin-ply composites are designed to maintain part integrity over longer periods, and at greater stresses, than standard composites with thicker plies. (Elsewhere in the building, a lab puts bits of composite through all manner of trials—pulling, twisting, compressing to breaking point—though Richard Mille’s own suite of tests is apparently even more demanding.)

For the watch cases, this means layering at 45-degree increments—what’s known as a “quasi-isotropic” formation, meaning near-uniform strength and stiffness in every direction. Stacks of this preform (the combined layers) are then laid by hand onto curved molds. Between the watch case body and the bezel that sits on top, there are around 600 plies in total which, as they bond together, creates the unique striated patterning. The hallmark wavy stripes of a watch like the RM 35-03, the latest signature piece for tennis superstar Rafael Nadal, available in either a silvery-gray, or deep blue with rippling bands of light blue, are made by including differently colored stacks at regular intervals.

Fusing and hardening the material takes place under heat and pressure in an autoclave oven resembling a small blue submersible. Lengths of composite, laid on the molds and sealed in vacuum bags, are compressed at 6 bars and heated to 120 degrees C. The resulting Quartz TPT block is finally cut up into barrel-shaped case blanks by a high-precision waterjet, before being sent to Richard Mille’s own manufacturing facility in the Jura mountains for CNC machining into finished watch cases.

Quartz watches they may be, but also around 3,000 times more expensive—and about the same degree more engineered—than what that term customarily means.