At the end of June 2026, I was invited to the launch of Courbelin in Paris. A Swiss watch house that no one saw coming, driven by a father and daughter duo, with a debut collection that challenges everything we know about dive watches. Let’s discover this singular project together through this joint interview with Romain and Manon Réa.
Tell us about that day at the flea market in Nice: what turned a simple find into a project to relaunch an entire watch house?
Romain: Everything started completely unexpectedly. An antiques-dealer friend had offered me about ten vintage watches. Among them was a Courbelin dive watch from the late 1960s. At first glance, it wasn’t really what I was looking for. And yet, as soon as I picked it up, I immediately thought of my daughter Manon. I told myself it would make the perfect gift for her first collector’s watch. Manon fell for it the moment she saw it!
At that point, there was absolutely no question of relaunching the brand. It was simply a shared coup de foudre! But once the watch was on Manon’s wrist, the reactions were immediate. Its compact size, elegance and personality consistently sparked curiosity and admiration.
That’s when we realized just how far ahead of its time this watch was. At a time when dive watches were almost exclusively large and masculine, Courbelin had imagined a more compact model without sacrificing anything of its identity or technical qualities. This vision won us over completely.
That’s when the idea began to take shape. What if this watch deserved a second life? Very quickly, the desire to bring Courbelin back became an obvious choice. What started as a beautiful find at a flea market in Nice became the starting point of a genuine family adventure.
Between discovering the watch and deciding to move forward, what convinced you that this story deserved to be told in the present, rather than kept as a family memento?
What convinced us — and above all gave us the energy to launch this project — was, first and foremost, the desire to live this adventure as a family. Relaunching a watch house is a considerable challenge, but we immediately understood that our strength would lie precisely in that family dimension. Each of us could bring our own sensibility, perspective and energy to it.
We didn’t want this watch to remain just a memory tucked away in a collection. On the contrary, we wanted to give it a voice again, extend its story and pass on the values it embodied.
Paradoxically, this rebirth only strengthens the family dimension of the story. The original watch remains Manon’s. It is the starting point of this adventure and will remain the witness to that discovery. As for Courbelin’s heritage, it doesn’t stop at one collector’s piece: today it finds continuity and a new generation to write its next chapter.
Courbelin spanned the 1930s through the quartz crisis: what did you want to keep from that heritage, and what did you deliberately leave behind?
Courbelin has an exceptionally rich heritage. Over the decades, the house created dive watches, dress watches with intricately worked dials, chronographs, and also beautiful enamelled pocket watches. That diversity is one of the brand’s great strengths, and we’re committed to preserving it.
For us, respecting a watch house’s DNA is essential. It’s not about reproducing the past identically, but about understanding what shaped its identity in order to evolve it with the times.
So there’s nothing we wanted to leave behind. Every family of watches, every design detail, every area of expertise is a source of inspiration. Our ambition is to reinterpret this heritage with today’s technical, aesthetic and contemporary demands, without ever betraying the spirit of Courbelin.
The founding piece was a women’s dive watch, a real act of audacity for the 1960s: why come back today with a unisex model rather than extending that original gesture?
That was actually one of our goals: to preserve that audacity. In the late 1960s, imagining a genuine women’s dive watch was a visionary idea. We wanted to pay tribute to it.
The major change concerns the diameter, which we increased by two millimeters without distorting the proportions of the original watch. That choice wasn’t dictated by a trend, but by the bold decision to offer a unisex watch, at a time when watch houses continue to maintain the divide between models designed for each sex.
We also wanted to preserve a strong symbol. On the case back is an engraved female diver, a nod to the dive watches of the 1960s and 1970s, which almost always featured a male diver. As far as we know, this is the first time a genuine dive watch has featured a female diver as its emblematic figure. It’s a detail that brings a lot of smiles and appeals equally to women and men. In the end, this diver has become the emblem of both NOUVELLE PLONGÉE and Courbelin: she tells the story of our heritage as well as our vision of watchmaking today.
Where does this very colorful artistic direction (green, turquoise, orange) come from, for a Swiss Made dive watch, a world more accustomed to understated codes?
NOUVELLE PLONGÉE’s artistic direction is, above all, the result of our fully embraced family and collective adventure. At first, we imagined a collection of three colors, then five, then seven… before finally settling on eight. Each new shade came about naturally, through our discussions.
Manon played a decisive role in this evolution. She challenged our initial ideas, which were more classic and understated, bringing a freer, bolder perspective. Little by little, she made the case that Courbelin shouldn’t simply reproduce the traditional codes of the dive watch: it should express its own personality.
Ultimately, these colors tell our vision of diving. They evoke light, reefs, lagoons, the depths and marine life. They bring joy and energy, while remaining true to the technical demands of a genuine Swiss Made dive watch. It’s this combination of emotion, creativity and craftsmanship that defines Courbelin’s identity today.
Manon: We didn’t just want to create colorful watches. We wanted to bring color back into dive watchmaking and give its image a younger feel.
What were the main points of friction between the desire for bold design and the technical constraints of a watch certified to 200m/660ft?
This is precisely where the whole interest of a project like this lies. It’s relatively easy to design a beautiful watch. Turning it into a genuine dive watch, capable of guaranteeing 200 meters of water resistance while keeping elegant proportions, is a completely different story.
Every aesthetic choice had to be weighed against technical reality: case thickness, machining tolerances, the gasket system, the screw-down crown, the sapphire crystal, the rotating bezel, and integrating the movement. Nothing was left to chance by Pierrick, our technical director, and David, our project manager.
We refused to sacrifice technique for the sake of design, just as we refused to give up our identity for purely functional reasons. The goal has always been to find the right balance between performance, reliability and elegance.
What’s probably what best defines Nouvelle Plongée today: a watch with a strong personality, bold colors and a genuine identity, while never forgetting that it is, above all, a Swiss Made diving instrument, built to meet the highest standards.
The choice of eight colors was also a real industrial challenge. In Swiss watchmaking, the minimum production quantities imposed by suppliers make multiplying references particularly complex. Producing eight different colors right from launch was an ambitious bet, one that the entire Courbelin team took on with real commitment.
You chose to build in a digital certificate of authenticity from launch: what pushed you to invest in this tool before even having an established clientele?
This choice is directly linked to Romain’s experience. For many years, he has worked in the world of collector’s watches, where he deals daily with issues of authenticity, appraisal, counterfeiting and traceability. That experience showed him that it’s far more effective to build trust from the very start than to try to restore it later. So we wanted to build in a digital certificate of authenticity from Courbelin’s launch. Each watch is linked to a secure digital certificate, developed with WatchCertificate, which acts as a genuine digital identity for the piece.
Beyond certifying authenticity, this certificate offers many benefits: it makes proof of ownership easier, strengthens security in case of loss or theft, follows the watch throughout its life by preserving its history, and simplifies the process when it’s resold or passed on.
For us, it’s not just a technological tool, but a natural extension of our commitment to transparency and trust. We wanted to offer our very first customers the same level of security and peace of mind expected today from the biggest watch houses.
Do the marine material straps (Malàkio, ICTYOS tanning) come from a personal connection to the sea, or from a deliberate intent to reposition traditional watchmaking toward a more sustainable approach?
The two are closely linked. The sea is part of NOUVELLE PLONGÉE’s DNA, but above all we chose partners able to offer exceptionally high-quality materials, sourced locally and responsibly.
The Malàkio plates, made from upcycled shells, give each case a unique identity, while the marine leather straps tanned using the ICTYOS process combine suppleness, durability and the valorization of materials from the food industry.
Beyond their sustainable dimension, we chose these materials for their quality, their traceability and the expertise of our partners. They embody our vision of contemporary watchmaking: favoring exceptional materials, from local and responsible sourcing, without ever compromising on quality.
If you had to name the main risk you’re taking with this revival, what would it be?
There are many risks, but we’ve identified three major challenges that shape our journey. First, that of being a new entrant in a highly competitive market, where legitimacy is built over time and where the trust of customers and distributors is earned piece by piece. Second, the question of minimum order quantities (MOQs), a structural constraint for any young independent house that refuses to sacrifice quality for short-term profitability. Finally, visibility in a saturated communications landscape (Instagram in particular), where standing out requires asserting our strong identity, showing both our history and our modernity.
In ten years, what does Courbelin look like if everything goes as you hope: an established watch house, or still a family adventure in motion?
Our wish is for Courbelin to be known and recognized for its true worth, with the family still at the helm (Manon has siblings, hahaha…); for the company to continue evolving with the times and challenging conventions by offering diverse ranges, just as it did before! We’re already focusing on upcoming projects…
