Media premiere: Jean-Frédéric Dufour speaks on behalf of Rolex on the TV evening news! Thanks to his report on Georges Dubois, an almost 103-year-old watchmaker who worked with Hans Wilsdorf, TV journalist Nicolas Rossé has just achieved the unthinkable!
Joël A. Grandjean, JSH Magazine & Swiss-Watch-Passport.ch’s editor in chief
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It’s all part of a French-language feature on the doyen of Swiss watchmakers, Georges Dubois, almost 103 years old! Sometimes shot at home, sometimes in town, visiting the Patek Philippe Museum guided by Director Peter Friess, Georges Dubois walks beneath Nicolas Rossé’s camera. He even enters the highly closed exhibition areas of Watches & Wonders 2024. At Patek Philippe, President Thierry Stern welcomes him.
Finally, Rolex’s big boss, Jean-Frédéric Dufour himself, sat down with him. Georges Dubois broke the ice! To everyone’s surprise, he found himself at the crossroads of an indelible media moment: deemed forever uninterviewable, at least in the name of Rolex, the boss expressed himself, and let himself be filmed… Of course, the fussy might point out that he had just given an interview to the NZZ on April 9… Except that he was answering questions from journalists Andrea Martel and Chanchal Biswas not in the name of “The Crown”, but in his official position as President of the Watches and Wonders Geneva Foundation (WWGF), which organizes the watch exhibition at Palexpo.
It took the cheerful, ultra-positive manner of the more than one-hundred-year-old Georges Dubois to get the flow going. It’s hard to remain unmoved by the enthusiasm of the man who found his first job in 1941 in the very first Rolex workshop in Geneva. He was the 16th or 17th employee. He had just graduated from the Geneva watchmaking school, found his first job and became the first watchmaker to be hired specifically for Tudor.
So Jean-Frédéric Dufour welcomed him and talked to him. Without asking for the audio and video mute. The man considered by the media to be one of the most unapproachable public figures worldwide spoke out. Does Nicolas Rossé even realize it? This is a historic moment, certainly also for the 15,000 current Rolex employees, who will discover the joyful face of an ex-colleague who was the 17th of them to be hired by the company.
