édric Berruex has spent his entire career straddling the worlds of watchmaking and jewellery. A graduate of the Art School of La Chaux-de-Fonds, he specialised in gemmology before joining the Swatch Group in the early 2000s. There, he worked with Arlette Emch to create the group’s multi-brand jewellery platform, Dress Your Body. This entity was tasked with producing both Swatch’s jewellery and Breguet’s high jewellery. It was a great leap, especially since the brands were not necessarily keen to extend into jewellery, which they did not directly control themselves.

One day, Nicolas Hayek summoned him to his office and declared, “You have 15 minutes to decide if you want to create the purchasing centre for all of the group’s diamonds and gemstones. And if you accept, you’ll have a week to present the business model to me.” Cédric Berruex went on to dedicate several years to this highly political task. Looking back, he admits, “It’s under the statute of limitations now – it was a fascinating and ultra-dynamic era, but also very exhausting!”

The White Star brand and its Diagrafic model in a 1952 edition of Europa Star.

©Archives Europa Star

In 2006, he joined Piaget in Geneva as manufacturing director. “We quadrupled the production of high jewellery and significantly altered the ratio between the watchmaking and jewellery categories, favouring the latter,” he shares. “We integrated new dedicated departments, also covering high jewellery watches, and inaugurated a manufacturing facility dedicated to the artisan crafts.” This was a transformative period for the brand, which he helped steer until 2017, when a crisis hit its key Chinese market.

Cédric Berruex then ventured into the world of subcontracting, specialising in the delivery of mother-of-pearl dials and various other components, while also consulting in jewellery. Before relaunching White Star, he embarked on several other projects. He contributed to the creation of the brand Edelmont, then obtained a licence for cutting and importing rough diamonds from Namibia, and opened his company in... March 2020, amidst the outbreak of COVID-19, which derailed all his plans.

Cédric Berruex

Numerous patents

It was ultimately in 2023 that Berruex discovered the vintage watch brand White Star, and acquired ownership of both the trademark and the Swiss company. Initially, he planned to develop a business model and then sell the brand as a turnkey operation. But he grew attached to the project and decided to realise it himself, taking advantage of the networks he’d built over the past two decades.

So what is the history of this brand? White Star was launched in 1895 by Henri Weiss (note the phonetic similarity of the brand and its founder’s surname). The company registered numerous patents throughout its history and remained in family hands for over a century, gradually fading into obscurity like many other Swiss brands after the advent of quartz watches.

“White Star had three factories, two in La Chaux-de-Fonds and one in the canton of Fribourg,” Berruex says. “I draw a lot of inspiration from their designs spanning from 1895 to 1985. During that period, there was considerable exchange between brands, and they produced components for numerous third parties.”

Almost one for one

The first model Berruex has relaunched, with an almost identical design, captures the aesthetics of a 1951 model, the Diagrafic, in which the seven functions were powered by a Venus calibre at the time. “We recreated this movement by developing additional modules on a 2892 base,” he explains. “From the front, it is difficult to tell which is the old and which is the new model.” The only visible difference is an aperture at 12 o’clock that displays the day of the week, along with a day-night indicator. It is priced at 4,300 CHF and 18,300 CHF in gold.

Distinctive for its original display combining the day of the week and the day-night function at 12 noon, the Diagrafic of 1951 has been recreated with a new movement.

Cédric Berruex has kept the suffix ’-grafic’ for the other two models resurrected to date, which are reinterpretations rather than exact copies. The Unigrafic (1,150-1,300 CHF) is a pure and elegant three-hand model, while the Neografic (1,900-2,100 CHF) features a moon phase, day-night function, and horizontal date aperture. Should we expect see the ’Chronografic’ next?

With its midnight blue dial, studded with twinkling stars, and its crown at 2 o’clock, the White Star Unigrafic is the brand’s dress watch.

The entrepreneur partners with a team of seasoned professionals. “But I have to say that I somewhat underestimated the magnitude of the task,” he confides. “The investment is considerable. We are seeking to advance to the next stage and go further, in line with the brand’s slogan: ’Beyond the reasonable, lies excellence.’ We benefit from some existing recognition of the brand, particularly in Europe, South America, and the United States, and have launched a campaign on Kickstarter. Our visibility on social networks is also strong.”

The Neografic is a moon phase watch inspired by a model created in 1953.

With his experience, Cédric Berruex is well aware of the challenges: “It’s relatively quick to reach a first, even a second circle of customers. But often it falters at the third circle when we have to go beyond our close community. Two factors are crucial: solid stock management and visibility outside Europe. That said, our ambition is not to become known as quickly as possible, but as well as possible.”

To achieve this, the brand is participating in more events this year, such as Time to Watches or the Swiss Festival of Watchmaking. The goal is to restore White Star to its rightful place in the watchmaking firmament.