François Moreau is a French entrepreneur with a background in luxury product design. In 2017 he founded Reservoir in Paris with a specific design premise: watches that look and feel like industrial instrumentation (fuel gauges, speedometers, pressure indicators, dashboard dials) rather than the classical watchmaking vocabulary. The brand's name, Reservoir (French for "tank" or "gauge"), directly references this positioning.
The technical implementation uses a retrograde-minute display: the minutes hand sweeps across a 0-to-60 arc at the top of the dial, then snaps back to zero when it reaches 60. A separate jumping-hour aperture at the bottom of the dial displays the current hour as a discrete numeric digit. The combination reads like a dashboard gauge: a power-reserve indicator arc also occupies part of the dial, mimicking a car's fuel gauge. Movements are ETA base with a proprietary retrograde module designed by Reservoir's technical team.
The collection is built around themes drawn from specific industrial objects. The Longbridge references classic British sports-car dashboard instrumentation; the Hydrosphere uses submarine-style depth-gauge dial layouts; the Tiefenmesser (German for "depth gauge") references submarine instrument panels; the Supercharged references aviation-instrument layouts. Each design has specific dial colour, typography, and indicator styling tied to its industrial reference.
Reservoir has grown through direct-to-consumer sales via its own website and a small network of boutique partners. Retail runs from approximately CHF 3,500 (Longbridge steel) to CHF 7,000 (Hydrosphere Pacific Blue) and CHF 10,000+ for limited editions. Production is in the low thousands per year, making Reservoir one of the faster-growing design-led independents at the accessible price tier. The brand's design-first approach and French identity have generated strong collector interest particularly in Europe and North America.
