Franck Muller is a Genevan watch brand founded in 1991 by two men whose surnames define it: watchmaker Franck Muller and case maker Vartan Sirmakes. The company styles itself the “Master of Complications,” which is marketing, but it is marketing with receipts, since the house has spent three decades stuffing complications into watches and collecting world records for it. It is headquartered at a sprawling campus called Watchland in Genthod, on the shores of Lake Léman. And in one of the great boardroom divorces in watch history, the man whose name is on the dial walked out of the company in 2003 and has been a consultant ever since.
Lake Léman at Geneva, near Genthod, where Franck Muller’s Watchland headquarters overlooks the water. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Two founders, one watchmaker
Franck Muller the man graduated from the École d’Horlogerie de Genève in 1981 and made his reputation restoring vintage masterpieces for the Patek Philippe Museum, the kind of job that tells you everything about where his ambitions pointed. Vartan Sirmakes was born in Constantinople in 1956 to an Armenian family of jewelers, moved to Geneva at eighteen, apprenticed in jewel setting, and built a business making cases and gem-set components for houses like Cartier. They started the brand together in 1991, while the industry was still coming out of the quartz crisis. The pitch was simple and slightly unhinged for the moment: a new house devoted to high complications and flamboyant design when everyone else was playing defense.
The divorce
By the early 2000s the company was selling nearly 49,000 watches a year and growing fast, but the founders were fighting over strategy and direction. In the fall of 2003 Muller left Watchland entirely, and what followed was ugly. There were rival lawsuits, public accusations in the Swiss press, and Muller calling for the liquidation of the company bearing his name. The dispute ended in October 2004 with a joint statement: Muller withdrew his allegations, acknowledged they were without basis, and agreed the company would stay in Sirmakes’s hands, with Muller retained as a consultant. The planned public stock offering died in the wreckage. Sirmakes has owned and run the group ever since, and the founder’s name remains on the dial of a company he no longer controls.
The hits and the records
The first Cintrée Curvex tonneau case arrived in 1992 and made the brand’s visual identity overnight, a curved three-dimensional case designed to hug the wrist, something nobody else was doing. The Master Banker with three time zones followed in 1996, the Conquistador in 1997, and the Art Deco-flavored Long Island in 2000. In 2003 the brand introduced the Crazy Hours, a patented complication where the hour numerals sit scattered around the dial and the hour hand jumps to the correct one every sixty minutes. In 2009 came the Aeternitas Mega 4: 36 complications, 1,483 components, a perpetual calendar good for a thousand years, a $2.7 million price tag, sold in Monaco. Later the sporty Vanguard line brought the brand’s wild numerals into a chunkier case for a new generation of buyers.
What happened to the shine
Say “Franck Muller” to a watch collector in 2026 and the reaction is complicated. The 2000s were a flood of production, discounting, and grey-market chaos, with the company spending 2006 winning court rulings against unauthorized dealers trafficking its watches through New York’s diamond district. The brand became the unofficial uniform of rappers, footballers, and anyone who wanted a watch that screamed, and the tonneau case got copied and cheapened across the industry. The company never quite recovered the collectors’ respect it commanded in the 1990s, when a brand three years old was producing world-record complicated watches and it felt like a genuine shock to the system.
A Franck Muller boutique in Frankfurt, Germany. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
A Geneva building on Rue de la Tour-de-l’Ile housing a Franck Muller store. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Why it matters
It matters because Franck Muller did something real. At a time when the industry was still convincing itself that mechanical watches had a future, a brand-new house launched with nothing but complicated watches and a strange curved case, and it worked. The Cintrée Curvex is still one of the most recognizable silhouettes in watches, and the Crazy Hours is a genuine mechanism, not a gimmick painted on a dial. The company remains independent and still manufactures at Watchland under Sirmakes’s ownership, with Nicholas Rudaz as CEO. The brand peaked, got greedy, lost the plot a little, and survived anyway, which is a more interesting story than a straight line to glory.
Official site: franckmuller.com
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