Montfort followed up on that experience with another Hermès internship, this one in its leather goods division. She rounded out her C.V. at Cartier, where in 2015 she interned for six months in the brand’s eyewear manufacturing department. After graduating from university that same year, she got her first real job at the Richemont service center, where she discovered watchmaking. But her time there was cut short when Benoît, an engineer in the car industry, found a job in the Jura region, and the couple moved to Belfort. Soon, they moved again, this time to Reims, where Benoît took another job, and they welcomed their first child, a daughter, in 2019.
You might call Maison Alcée Montfort’s pandemic project. On the first day of lockdown in March 2020, the young mother, pregnant with her second child, conceived the idea for a luxury company built on the concept of D.I.Y.
During the early days of lockdown, Montfort began reaching out to prospective clients and watchmaking luminaries to test the idea. “I didn’t know them, but we were in confinement, so they had time and were happy to discuss with me,” Montfort says. “And it was the best way to begin. A lot of people said to me, ‘It will be a crazy project – to succeed will be really difficult.’”
The first person to join Montfort’s dream team of independent contractors was the watchmaking teacher Thierry Ducret, who in 2007 was designated horology’s Meilleur Ouvrier de France, or best craftsman of France, a prestigious title awarded by the Ministry of Labor. By the summer of 2020, another watchmaking teacher, Jean-Marie Desgrange, and the Swiss designer Antoine Tschumi had also signed on.
“The goal was to create a watch movement, just with bigger dimensions,” Montfort says.
Hodinkee Inc.
2025-10-07 19:00:00