Talking time with Tag Heuer’s Antoine Pin

Dubai Watch Week has become one of the industry’s most relaxed but insightful events, where CEOs can get close to the craft, the competition, as well as the collectors that covet their brands.  During his visit, Tag Heuer CEO Antoine Pin spoke with The Kurator about design and creativity, but also the two special TAG Heuer Carrera Chronograph Middle East Exclusive Editions…

What I love most about Dubai Watch Week is the human element. It’s a prestigious event, yet intimate enough that you truly meet everyone, watchmakers, designers, industry leaders, and individuals who are simply passionate about watches. At its heart, watchmaking is about people.

Mechanics are just the foundation beneath the beauty of human creativity: the hands, minds, and emotions behind every timepiece.

That’s exactly what the Seddiqi family has managed to create here, a space where people from all over the world can meet, connect, and share this passion.

As for the pieces, we’re showcasing two Middle East exclusives here designed with smoky green tones, which beautifully express the bond between the region and the brand.

But the one I’m most excited about is the Monaco Split-Second R1. It represents the pure avant-garde spirit of TAG Heuer, both technically and aesthetically. It features our split-second calibre in a case made through additive manufacturing, a process that uses titanium powder fused by laser to “grow” a structure that would be impossible to create with traditional machining. It takes a full day to build one case. It’s complex, innovative, and inspired by modern GT cars, a true concentration of our engineering and design DNA.

Dubai is not just a hub for watches; it’s a global hub in every sense. It’s a super-modern city dealing with super-modern challenges, innovation, sustainability, infrastructure, and doing so with remarkable creativity and long-term thinking. That mindset is inspiring for us.

Dubai’s “can-do” attitude permeates the collector community here. Our clients are highly demanding, entrepreneurs, visionaries, affluent individuals with deep knowledge and a love for high-end objects. They hold themselves to incredibly high standards, and they expect the same from us. This always pushes us to raise the bar. This is a market of hedonists, and meeting their expectations is both motivating and essential.

TAG Heuer has always been driven by a fundamental question: what makes people surpass themselves?

Our history, more than a century before many modern brands even existed, is deeply rooted in sports and precision timing. Federations used our timing machines at early Olympic Games because we could measure the hundredth of a second necessary to crown a winner. This heritage shaped our philosophy.

So if you’re new to the brand, I would recommend starting with the Carrera. It perfectly embodies our philosophy and carries a special symbol inside, the crown of laurels, a discreet tribute to the “success watch” Jack Heuer created for Ferrari in 1972.

It would be a watch that expresses both technical mastery and emotional significance. Again, for me, that’s the Carrera, because it brings together everything we stand for. The design is timeless, and it’s a watch made to accompany anyone’s lifestyle.

The future of luxury isn’t guaranteed, for any brand. But if we continue to bring emotion beyond technology, to create watches that touch people on a human level, then yes, people will always wear them.

A mechanical watch is more than a tool; your phone can tell the time. A watch is emotion, memory, intention. It works without batteries, it survives generations, it carries meaning. If you were stranded on an island with no internet, which object would you take with you, your phone or your mechanical watch?

The emotional connection, the stories, the heritage, the inner strength it represents, is what will keep TAG Heuer, and mechanical watchmaking as a whole, relevant for the next hundred years and beyond.