MAURON MUSY Hope: an independent debut at Christie’s Geneva

On 9 November, in a Geneva saleroom more used to Patek Philippe and Rolex, a 41mm titanium watch from a farming village in the canton of Fribourg found its new owner. It was the MAURON MUSY MU06 UniX “Hope”, a pièce unique, and its sale marked the first time the independent house had ever put a watch under the hammer. It went in the Watches for ELA section of Christie’s Rare Watches auction, which raised CHF 501,400 at hammer for ELA International, the charity that funds research into leukodystrophies and supports the children and families living with them.

We like this story because it says a great deal about the people behind the brand, and very little of it is about money.

A message written in light

In daylight, “Hope” reads as one of the quietest watches MAURON MUSY has made: a 41mm case in Grade 5 titanium around a blue gradient dial, with nothing on it that does not need to be there. The trick arrives at dusk. As the light goes, Super-LumiNova on the dial reveals the word “Hope” at six o’clock, written in the hand of co-founder Christophe Musy. Strap it on in the evening and the watch changes character as the room dims, the blue dropping back and the handwriting coming forward. It is a personal gesture rendered in a material normally reserved for hands and indices, and on the wrist it feels less like a logo and more like a note left for whoever wears it.

Christie’s catalogued the piece, reference MU06-115, with an estimate of CHF 15,000 to 25,000. MAURON MUSY created and donated it, so every franc it raised went to ELA’s work.

The engineering underneath

The MU06 UniX is the house’s more compact expression of the ideas that made its name. The case is built in four segments, held together with pinned hinges and recognisable from across a room. Inside that architecture sits the patented nO-Ring system, which makes the watch water resistant without a single conventional gasket. On the UniX it achieves 100 metres through 29 precision-made components that seal mechanically, metal against metal, so there is no rubber to perish over the years.

Power comes from the MM02, the brand’s first in-house micro-rotor calibre: 30mm across and 4.6mm thick, 27 jewels, 169 components, beating at 28,800 vibrations per hour with a 40-hour power reserve. Because the rotor sits within the movement rather than across it, the calibre stays slim and the view through the caseback stays open.

A family workshop in St-Aubin

MAURON MUSY was founded in 2013 by Eric Mauron and his son-in-law Christophe Musy. Eric had taken over his father’s precision mechanics workshop, Atelier Régis Mauron SA, which machined components for the Swiss watch industry; Christophe trained as a precision mechanic before moving into mechanical development and project management. The two first met in the late 1990s, when Christophe was an intern in Eric’s workshop.

The house now works from a former farmhouse in St-Aubin, converted into its own manufacture, and produces around 300 watches a year through roughly fifteen retailers worldwide, alongside collectors who come to the village to buy directly. Its watches carry a “Swiss Crafted” label rather than “Swiss Made”: the components are produced within about 60 kilometres of St-Aubin. Christophe Musy, co-founder and CEO, has said the brand’s DNA is about “opening our doors, explaining, sharing”, and a donated unique piece with his own handwriting on the dial is a very literal version of that.

Why ELA matters to the watch world

Watches for ELA began in 2024, when Christie’s sold a group of mostly one-of-a-kind pieces for the European Leukodystrophy Association. Funds from that first edition allowed ELA International to launch a €500,000 call for projects into Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease, a particularly rare leukodystrophy. The 2026 edition gathered pieces from houses including Bovet, Montblanc, Tissot, Louis Moinet, Konstantin Chaykin and Gerald Charles, and one of its headline lots was the first wristwatch of ELA’s long-standing ambassador Zinédine Zidane, a steel Cartier Pasha Chronograph.

For a house of MAURON MUSY’s size, a debut in that company is a statement of confidence. MAURON MUSY thanked the winning bidder, Christie’s, ELA International and everyone who made the sale a success. The wider MU06 UniX collection remains available through the house and its retailers.

MAURON MUSY
St-Aubin, canton of Fribourg, Switzerland
Website: mauronmusy.com
Press: Malika Brown, Marketing Manager, malika.brown@mauronmusy.com

Imagery courtesy of MAURON MUSY.