Raketa: Watches With Russian Soul

The company grew, reaching its peak in the 1970s when an 8,000-strong workforce manufactured over five million watches each year, exporting to nearly 40 countries. Soviet polar explorers wore Raketa’s 24-hour watches during their expeditions, while the company was also entrusted with making the official watches of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games.

In the 1990s, Raketa weathered the transition from communism to capitalism as the Soviet Union disintegrated. But, when the current managing director, David Henderson-Stewart, first visited the Raketa factory in 2009 with the idea of taking over the business, he found the company on its knees, with a dozen elderly workers operating old machines in poor condition, making cheap timekeepers destined for the tourist market.
 

A Franco-British lawyer of Russian ancestry based in Moscow, Henderson-Stewart felt that, with a large dose of TLC and some fresh designs, he and a handful of investors might be able to return Raketa to its former glory.

While there have been obstacles along the way, with wealthy locals needing some convincing that a Russian company could create luxury products to rival the quality of foreign-produced ones, Henderson-Stewart and his team made progress towards achieving that feat.
 

Today, Raketa employs a 100-strong workforce, which includes many of those workers in the autumn of their careers, who pass on their know-how to apprentices and new recruits via an onsite watchmaking and mentoring school.

They make 4,000 watches per year, all based around an updated version of one of the brand’s calibre from the 1960s, the robust and reliable Raketa-Avtomat. The brand either leaves this hour-minute-seconds movement as is, slows down the hours to make a 24-hour complication, or reverses the mechanism for a whimsical backwards way of telling time.
 

Barring the rubies, the Raketa-Avtomat is, quite impressively, all made in-house, including the hairspring that is machined from a “secret Soviet alloy.” The Raketa finishing specialists ensure the movement looks the part as well, through frosted matte decoration or Russian-style guilloche work. The hands and some of the simpler dials are also made in the Petrodvorets factory, while straps and other parts are sourced locally to uphold the brand’s “Russian manufactured” tagline.
 

Raketa’s Curiosity collection celebrates Russia’s contribution to the arts and sciences, with the triangular hour hand and indices, circular minute hand, and distinctive numerals of the Avant-Garde 0279 taking noticeable design cues from the works of Kandinsky.
 

Another stand-out Curiosity model is the Copernic 0265, whose anti-clockwise indications are inspired by Copernicus’ theory of the universe. Its large, circular minute hand symbolizes Earth rotating around the sun in one year, while the small, circular hour hand represents Jupiter rotating around the sun over 12 years.
 

While Copernicus may have hailed from Royal Prussia, the heliocentric symbolism of the indications is directly taken from Raketa’s vintage “Copernicus” watch, launched in the early 1980s

Finally, Raketa’s Tool Collection typically makes use of the brand’s 24-hour indication that is handy in environments where it is tricky to tell night from day: space exploration, polar expeditions, long-distance military flights, and submarine missions.
 

One of the more recent additions to this collection is the Leopard 24, whose bezel is made out of steel from the hull of the Leopard K-328 submarine, while its dial and hands resemble those of a submarine control panel gauge. The watch was even developed in collaboration with Captain Valery Dyakonov, who was commander of a Leopard K-328 for over a decade; and there is nice video of him going to the Raketa factory to pick up the watch.
 

That video is one of several Raketa has published on its YouTube channel, displaying the brand’s sound understanding that in the modern era of watch marketing, authentic storytelling, backed-up by cool content, is the way to go.