In a homecoming of sorts, given her grandfather’s Swiss roots, British neo-soul singer-songwriter Raye (born Rachel Keen) had just brought the crowd to its feet at the 2024 Montreux Jazz Festival on the shore of Lake Geneva, riding the momentum of an artist who had reclaimed, loudly and proudly, ownership of her work after a bruising split with her label. Beguiled by the lyrical candour and authority with which she commanded the stage, Audemars Piguet CEO Ilaria Resta invited the Brit Award winner to compose a song for the maison’s 150th anniversary last year through its APxMusic programme, an initiative that fosters dialogue between the arts and horology. Raye’s collaborator for the project would be producer Mark Ronson, the high priest of retro-cool pop and a brand ambassador since 2022.
A classicist turned consumer-goods executive is not the successor one might expect at the helm of a family-owned watchmaker. Yet, Ilaria Resta, a lateral thinker with an artisan’s imagination, is the kind of leader Audemars Piguet needs to carry its vision well beyond the next 150 years.
Serendipity is a word that businesses prefer to leave to poets. Happy accidents imply that the marketplace occasionally drops golden tickets into unsuspecting laps, as if success obeyed the logic of coincidence rather than mathematical certainty. But every once in a while, a bolt from the blue becomes valuable when someone perceives its potential.
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