David Henderson-Stewart

It was like a diamond laying on the floor, which I just picked up.

The Accidental Watchmaker #

Nothing in Henderson-Stewart’s biography suggested watchmaking. He was a Franco-British lawyer with an Oxford education and a Sorbonne degree, a member of the French bar, an adviser to Russian business who had spent years practising in Moscow. His ancestry traced to the Counts Palen, a Baltic German noble family whose most famous member helped assassinate Tsar Paul I in 1801. He understood contracts, not calibers. He could parse Russian corporate law but could not identify a single component inside a watch movement.

What he did understand was Russia — its contradictions, its capacity for reinvention, its buried assets. By the time he first heard about the Petrodvorets Watch Factory (Петродворцовый часовой завод) in Peterhof, Henderson-Stewart had lived in the country for more than a decade. He had watched the post-Soviet economy cycle through collapse and recovery, had seen fortunes made by people who recognised value where others saw only chaos. He had also absorbed something subtler: a feel for the emotional weight of Russian institutions, the way a factory or a brand could carry meaning far beyond its commercial function.

The factory itself carried three centuries of meaning. Founded by Peter the Great in 1721 as the Imperial Peterhof Lapidary Factory for hardstone carving, it had pivoted to watchmaking under Stalin’s orders in 1945, been renamed Raketa in 1961 to honour Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight, and at its Soviet peak employed eight thousand workers producing five million watches per year. Every third resident of Peterhof had worked there. When Henderson-Stewart arrived, roughly twenty elderly masters remained, keeping a single production line alive through what he later called “indomitable spirit.” The factory director had died. Much of the complex had been converted into a shopping mall.

The visit changed everything. “I picked up the watches,” he recalled in a 2020 Europa Star interview. “They were going tick-tock. And I said to myself that with new designs, it would work.” The statement captures something essential about Henderson-Stewart’s approach: a willingness to trust direct observation over expert consensus. The Swiss watchmakers he consulted found it “hard to believe” that anyone would take on an entire factory. Every specialist who examined the factory’s condition concluded it was beyond saving. Henderson-Stewart lacked the expertise to reach the same conclusion.

The Discovery That Nobody Wanted #

In 2010, Henderson-Stewart and his partner Count Jacques von Polier — himself a descendant of Counts Shuvalov, one of imperial Russia’s most prominent families — completed the acquisition of the Petrodvorets Watch Factory. The money came not from investment funds or banks but from “friends, relatives, and acquaintances.” The structure was deliberate: Henderson-Stewart held 23.3 percent, the largest individual stake belonging to Andrei Suzdaltsev at 28.9 percent. No institutional investor would have funded what the industry universally regarded as a fool’s errand.

Henderson-Stewart opened Russia’s only watchmaking school on the factory premises almost immediately — an acknowledgement that the revival required not just capital but a talent pipeline that post-Soviet Russia had entirely lost. He recruited Jean-Claude Quenet, the former director of escapements at Rolex and former production head at Franck Muller, to bring Swiss haute horlogerie expertise to a Soviet-era production floor. He hired Xavier Girodet, a veteran of Jaeger-LeCoultre and Blancpain, to assemble the ultra-premium IPF line by hand. Prince Rostislav Romanov, a direct descendant of Peter the Great, joined the board — connecting the factory’s imperial origins to its twenty-first-century future.

The problem was that none of this mattered to Russian retailers. In the first six months after Raketa’s (Ракета) relaunch in 2011, not a single shop would stock the watches. Not even on consignment. Henderson-Stewart took the new collection to Baselworld, the world’s most important watch trade fair, and received polite interest from international buyers who had no frame of reference for a Russian luxury watch. Back in Russia, the response was silence. The brand was associated with two-thousand-ruble tourist souvenirs, not eighty-five-thousand-ruble luxury goods. Henderson-Stewart had repriced the product one hundred times above its Soviet-era positioning. Retailers looked at the price tags, looked at the name, and refused to carry stock at any terms.

Fifteen Workers and a Frozen Dream #

The rejection cut deeper than commerce. Henderson-Stewart had abandoned a successful legal career. He had invested his friends’ and family’s money. He had recruited world-class Swiss talent to a factory that Russian retailers would not acknowledge existed. “If I’d been a specialist, I would never have got involved,” he later admitted. “It was all much more complicated than I’d imagined.”

The admission reveals the paradox at the heart of his story. His ignorance was simultaneously his greatest vulnerability and his greatest asset. A watchmaking professional would have understood the impossibility of what he was attempting: reviving a factory that had lost 99.75 percent of its workforce, repositioning a Soviet brand at luxury price points, competing against Swiss houses with three centuries of unbroken prestige. Henderson-Stewart could not see these obstacles because he did not have the training to recognise them. By the time he understood the scale of the challenge, he was too invested to retreat.

The years between 2011 and 2015 were a slow grind of attrition. Workers trained for four years at the factory school, acquired skills that had taken a generation to develop, and then left to become taxi drivers — the pay was better. The factory lost money continuously. Swiss industry contacts maintained their polite scepticism, the kind that does not argue because it considers the outcome already determined. Henderson-Stewart’s partner von Polier — an aristocrat whose ancestors had served the Russian imperial court — kept the public-facing narrative alive, designing the Raketa Monumental Clock that was installed in Moscow’s Central Children’s Store and creating anniversary watches with Prince Romanov. But behind the spectacle, the financial reality was grim.

Henderson-Stewart kept returning to the factory floor, watching elderly masters assemble movements on machines that dated to the Soviet era, listening to the tick-tock that had convinced him on that first visit. Ludmila Yakovlevna Voinik, the head of the Production-Technical Department, had been working at the factory since 1957 — she had joined before Gagarin’s flight gave the brand its name. Women like Voinik embodied the institutional memory that no amount of capital could replicate. If Henderson-Stewart walked away, their knowledge would die with them.

What sustained him was not optimism but stubbornness, compounded by an emotional attachment to the institution itself. “None of Raketa’s watchmakers really consider the Raketa Watch Factory as a ‘business,’” he wrote on the WatchUSeek forum. “To us it is a priceless national heritage that we saved from destruction after the fall of communism, thus indirectly saving Russian watchmaking.” The language is revealing: not “I saved” but “we saved.” Henderson-Stewart had absorbed the factory’s identity. Walking away would mean abandoning not just an investment but a community of craftspeople who had kept Russian watchmaking alive through three decades of institutional collapse.

The crisis peaked in August 2016. Years of accumulated losses, compounded by the 2014 ruble devaluation, brought the company to the edge of closure. Von Polier described the moment with brutal clarity: “Very quickly we realized this was going to take a lot of work, and were faced with a choice: go all-in, or close the factory.” A last-minute investor — whose identity Henderson-Stewart has never publicly disclosed — provided the capital to continue. By the end of 2016, Raketa recorded its first profitable year: 54.2 million rubles in revenue. The diamond on the floor had finally begun to catch the light.

The Sanctions Paradox #

The ultimate validation arrived through a door Henderson-Stewart never expected: Western sanctions. When Swiss luxury watch brands exited Russia in 2022, Raketa’s revenue nearly doubled to 434 million rubles. Domestic consumers who had previously dismissed Russian watchmaking as inferior suddenly had no Swiss alternative. The brand that retailers had refused to stock in 2011 was now one of the few luxury watch options remaining in the Russian market. Henderson-Stewart’s decade of stubborn refusal to abandon the project had, through a geopolitical accident, become prescient strategy.

The irony was personal and precise. Henderson-Stewart is a British citizen. The United Kingdom became the only nation to impose direct sanctions on Russian watches — meaning the man who had spent fifteen years preserving Russian horological heritage could no longer sell his product in his own country. “I will never become rich with Raketa,” he told RBC in 2022. The statement carried resignation and defiance in equal measure.

He expanded instead into the Middle East — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan — while maintaining European sales through an EU warehouse. By 2024, revenue had reached 452.6 million rubles with net profit of 93.9 million.

A Seat Earned, Not Inherited #

In September 2022, Henderson-Stewart walked into Geneva Watch Days with Raketa displayed as an associate brand alongside Breitling, Bulgari, and Ulysse Nardin. It was the first time a Russian manufacture had been invited to sit at the table of Swiss haute horlogerie. The Swiss experts who had told him to give up now shared a showcase venue with the factory they had pronounced dead.

The moment distilled everything Henderson-Stewart’s journey represented. He had arrived in watchmaking with no knowledge, no network, and no credibility. He had been rejected by every market that mattered. He had nearly lost the factory twice. He had watched his co-founder depart — von Polier relocated to Tbilisi around 2020, the partnership that had begun with shared aristocratic enthusiasm for Russian heritage running its course — and his homeland market close. And he had persisted, not because the business case was compelling, but because he could not bring himself to let a three-hundred-year-old institution die on his watch.

Today Raketa sells in sixty countries. The factory that Henderson-Stewart found with twenty workers and broken windows now employs 104 specialists. Production runs at roughly six thousand watches per year against a target of ten thousand — demand outstrips capacity. The watches that no Russian retailer would carry on consignment in 2011 now retail at prices that would have seemed delusional when Henderson-Stewart first picked one up and heard it going tick-tock.

“If we had adopted the same codes as all the foreign brands, we would have lost,” Henderson-Stewart told Europa Star. “We have to be proud of our uniqueness.” The statement captures the strategic insight that ignorance made possible. A watchmaking insider would have benchmarked against Swiss conventions. Henderson-Stewart, knowing nothing about those conventions, built something that drew its identity from Russian heritage rather than Swiss imitation. The outsider who could not recognise the impossible had created something the specialists never would have attempted.

Last updated: April 5, 2026