Marteau & Co. is giving watchmakers 3% royalties on auction sales

This story is from an installment of In the Loupe, our weekly insider newsletter about the best of the watch world. Sign up here.

Not long ago, Arthur Touchot, founder of Marteau & Co., a new Geneva-based auction platform specializing in watches by independent makers, was on the phone with none other than Daniel Roth, the legendary watchmaker whose namesake brand now belongs to LVMH. During their conversation, Touchot mentioned that a tourbillon Roth created in the 1990s would be featured in Marteau’s inaugural online sale, taking place Oct. 15 to 23.

Touchot then began to explain how Marteau & Co.’s unique platform works. The auction house, which he founded in partnership with his friend Leonard Pictet, a former Richemont manager, redistributes 3 percent of the buyer’s fee, calculated on the hammer price, to the watchmaker who made the piece. The model is based on the concept of Artist’s Resale Rights (ARR)—sometimes called droit de suite—which are laws in France, the U.K. and elsewhere designed to compensate artists when their work is resold by an auction house, gallery, or dealer.

“I told him, ‘I’ve got this watch, and I don’t know how much it’s going to sell for yet, but it’s an important piece in the catalog, and you’re going to get 3 percent,’” Touchot tells Robb Report . “And I got total silence on the other side of the phone. And so I said, ‘Are you still there?’ He said, ‘Yes. Can you repeat your concept?’ And so I told him once again what we’re doing. And he’s like, ‘You’re going to give me money?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m not giving you money. I think you deserve this money. You’ve made this watch. It’s your work. It’s being sold, and I think that you deserve to receive a cut. And he got a little bit emotional about it.”

The watch in question, a white-gold tourbillon with a Clous-de-Paris dial, “was one of the first pieces that announced Roth’s arrival as an independent watchmaker after having worked for Breguet and others,” Touchot says. 

It joins at least 25 other timepieces by independent makers—such as a limited-edition MB&F Legacy Machine 101—in Marteau’s first sale. But the compensation aspect isn’t the only thing that sets the auction platform apart. In a video clip recently posted to Marteau’s Instagram feed, Max Büsser, MB&F’s founder and creative director, offers a hint of what else is different about Marteau. He explains why the Legacy Machine in the sale is important to the brand: “It’s one of the 10 stainless-steel LM101s which we created for Hodinkee 10 years ago. It’s the very first collab they did with a brand. The very first Legacy Machine in steel. The very first Legacy Machine using this dark brown chocolate PVD. And those 10 pieces sold in a day. That didn’t happen in those days.”

Touchot, who spent eight years at Phillips, where he served as a director and international head of digital strategy and watches specialist, says the degree to which Marteau plans to incorporate watchmakers into the sale process is unprecedented in the auction world.

“A traditional auction house would have a team of specialists present the watches,” he says. “But I think there’s no better person to present the watches than the watchmakers themselves. All of the catalog will be written by the watchmakers. Obviously, the core information—the specifications—will always be there for clients. But in terms of presenting the watch, instead of writing the essay, I’m interviewing the watchmaker and pressing the record button and collecting their words and in the first person will publish their presentation of the piece.”

The list of names associated with Marteau includes all the heavy hitters: François-Paul Journe, Laurent Ferrier, Romain Gauthier, and Urban Jürgensen, for example. Small but well-regarded brands such as Ming and Baltic are also represented. “I certainly believe that these are artists, that the very fact of creating pieces and signing them with your name and making watches your own way and not in a commercial way, that that is a sort of artistic expression,” Touchot says. “I feel like if you do present them as artists, then you should apply ‘droit de suite’ or those kinds of protections.”

He notes that Marteau’s compensation plan is much simpler than how most auctioneers implement the law. “In the art world, it’s on a sliding scale,” he says. “There are caps where the artist will receive a maximum amount. But since it’s new in our industry, I thought we should make it very simple. So it’s 3 percent calculated on the hammer price, whatever the hammer price is, whether that’s 1,000 francs, 100,000 or a million. It’s 3 percent guaranteed.”

He also stresses that the buyer’s premium at Marteau, which means “hammer” in French, is 20 percent, significantly less than the 27 percent typical of most auction houses. “We’re redistributing 3 percent of that revenue to the watchmaker,” he says. “I know it’s not going to change their lives, but it’s a principle that I think deserves to be defended.”

In the case of watchmakers who are no longer living, like George Daniels, Marteau will compensate the watchmaker’s private foundation. “We want to find the best destination for the 3 percent, and the best destination is where that watchmaker’s legacy is being served and promoted,” Touchot says.

And if other auction houses adopt the model? “That would be great,” Touchot says. “That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to normalize the idea that someone should be rewarded for their work throughout their life.”

For buyers, he says, the value lies in Marteau & Co.’s curation, its reduced buyer’s premium “and the fact that you are the one who is ultimately supporting the watchmaker,” Touchot says. “Ultimately, the greatest indicator of success for the first sale would be that it forces other people to really think about this and move in that direction.”