CEO Of The Month | Chapter 7: Ilaria Resta - The Outsider Architect of Audemars Piguet’s Future Code

Ilaria Resta’s rise to the helm of Audemars Piguet is one of the most intriguing leadership stories in contemporary watchmaking: a seasoned brand builder from the world of consumer goods, now steering one of Switzerland’s most revered independent manufactures through a pivotal, post‑hypergrowth decade. Her trajectory from perfumes and hair care to high complications and haute horlogerie might seem improbable, yet it is precisely this blend of consumer insight, creative rigor, and strategic restraint that makes her one of the most closely watched CEOs in the industry today.

Introduction To Ilaria Resta: A New Kind of CEO

A Swiss‑Italian national with more than 26 years of leadership experience across global consumer goods, beauty, and luxury-adjacent industries, Ilaria Resta joined Audemars Piguet in August 2023 and formally took over as Chief Executive Officer on 1 January 2024, succeeding François‑Henry Bennahmias after his transformative 12‑year tenure. Her appointment marked a deliberate inflection point: the board did not seek a traditional watch insider, but a leader fluent in global branding, digital transformation, and long‑term consumer behavior, capable of preserving AP’s independence while sharpening its relevance for the next 150 years.

​What distinguishes Resta is not only her outsider status, but the clarity of her mandate: to protect the “creative chaos” that made Audemars Piguet an authentic disruptor, while tightening fundamentals around client experience, product ergonomics, and sustainable, perennial growth rather than volume‑at‑all‑costs. In a market still digesting the excesses of the last boom, that combination of restraint and audacity is unusually timely.

Ilaria Resta and the AP Royal Oak RD#5.

From Procter & Gamble To Firmenich

Before Le Brassus, Resta built her reputation in sectors where emotional connection and mass‑scale execution must coexist with ruthless discipline. At Procter & Gamble, she spent more than two decades across Europe, the Middle East, China and North America, shaping household names such as Tide, Ariel, Fairy, Swiffer, Duracell, Pantene, Head & Shoulders, Herbal Essences and Aussie.

​At P&G she rose through sales and brand management in Italy to senior regional leadership, including Vice President Hair Care Europe and Senior Vice President Hair Care North America, where she delivered the strongest hair‑care business results in over a decade, growing share, penetration, revenue and profit while reinventing retail distribution.

​She became known internally as a crisis‑to‑success specialist, restructuring Duracell ahead of its divestiture and helping to turn around P&G’s European hair business, earning recognition as WWD’s (Women's Wear Daily) Brand Builder of the Year in 2020.

​In 2020 she moved to Firmenich SA, a family‑owned fragrance and flavor powerhouse, as President Global Perfumery. There, her brief was explicitly transformational: to lead organizational change, pioneer digital innovation, and expand perfumery into new markets while “augmenting creative excellence” and driving sales - an agenda that uncannily foreshadows her later mission at Audemars Piguet.

Crossing The Bridge To Le Brassus

When Audemars Piguet’s board began searching for Bennahmias’s successor, it was clear that the task would not be to rescue a struggling Maison but to steward a success story: revenues had climbed from roughly CHF 600-640 million to around CHF 2-2.3 billion in just over a decade, on a production of about 50,000 watches per year. The board, led by new chairman Alessandro Bogliolo, sought a leader whose compass was not quarterly growth, but deep consumer insight, brand health, and a long‑view understanding of cultural relevance.

​Resta herself has described how unexpected the call felt: coming from beauty and fast-moving consumer goods, she had assumed watchmaking was a “closed” world that would never consider an outsider. In interviews she recounts that the board was neither chasing gender optics nor industry orthodoxy, but leadership attitudes: agility, the capacity to learn, and the ability to guide a creative, entrepreneurial culture without smothering it in process.

Her first contact with AP as a prospective CEO is telling: before presenting herself formally, she walked into the Geneva boutique as an anonymous client, spending an hour and a half with a sales associate who explained the Manufacture’s history and complications and sent her home with a book on high watchmaking. That mystery‑shopper visit crystallized two things: the strength of AP’s front‑line culture at its best, and the importance she places on client experience as the real test of brand truth.

Vision And Early Moves At Audemars Piguet

Five months into the role, Resta described the company she inherited as “very healthy” in growth, revenues, brand interest and brand‑health metrics, and insisted that this was not a moment for emergency management, but for asking the right strategic questions at a time when a new generation of collectors is reshaping demand. Those questions revolve around three axes: innovation, controlled desirability, and inclusion without dilution.

On growth, she is explicit: AP could generate double‑digit increases by chasing volume, but chooses not to, out of respect for hand‑finished quality and the limits of a craft‑driven production model.

Her “obsession,” as she frames it, is not topline expansion but “innovation of the future”: new materials, new complications, new calibers - and, crucially, making those complications ergonomically and emotionally compatible with modern lives.

That philosophy is already visible in multiple initiatives.

• Product strategy has remained firmly anchored in the Royal Oak, but with notable nuance. The development of hyper-feminine Royal Oak references, a renewed emphasis on material innovation, and the continued technical exploration of the Royal Oak Concept line all point to a brand comfortably operating at the intersection of avant-garde engineering and lifestyle relevance.

• ​The continued development of the Royal Oak Concept and RD series reflects a focus on ergonomic grand complications, watches that can be used intuitively without an instruction manual, including by clients who step straight into perpetual calendars or tourbillons as their first AP.

• The expansion and enrichment of AP Houses worldwide emphasizes a retail and cultural strategy that replaces traditional boutiques with immersive, locally rooted spaces designed to foster community rather than transactions. Here, the experience is as carefully curated as the product.

These moves dovetail with the brand’s continuing experiments in materials and with a product strategy that aims to reduce AP’s dependence on the Royal Oak by elevating Code 11.59 into a true second pillar. Under Resta, Code 11.59 already represents a meaningful share of business, with new executions broadening its reach and providing a technically versatile case for complications.

What Makes Ilaria Resta One Of The Best?

In an industry that often equates legitimacy with decades spent inside the valley walls, Resta’s profile can seem contrarian. Yet several characteristics explain why her peers and observers increasingly see her as one of the most compelling CEOs in watchmaking today.

• Consumer fluency at scale: Years spent building fast-moving consumer goods across continents gave her a granular understanding of how different cultures perceive value and status.
• ​Creative‑driven management: At Firmenich and now at AP, she has consistently framed growth as an outcome of protecting creative ecosystems rather than dictating them, while preventing forced or “commercially guided” disruption.
• Strategic restraint: In an era obsessed with waiting lists and scarcity, she has emphasized the resilience of the brand’s fundamentals and the need to keep volumes in sync with the realities of hand‑finished watchmaking.
• Client‑centric realism: She acknowledges the high demand for core Royal Oak references, and positions her mission as opening doors more intelligently, through better‑matched allocation, without sacrificing long‑standing relationships.
• Inclusive vision of complication and femininity: By insisting that complications must be ergonomically and emotionally adapted to women, not merely scaled down, she is reframing what “serious” watchmaking for women can look like.
  ​In short, Resta brings a rare duality - the analytical rigor of a P&L‑driven brand builder and the instinct of someone genuinely comfortable with polarizing, emotionally charged products.

Major Achievements And Inflection Points

While her tenure at Audemars Piguet is still relatively young, several achievements and directional choices already stand out alongside her earlier career milestones.

• Over 26 years of senior leadership experience across global consumer and luxury-adjacent industries.
• 22-year tenure at Procter & Gamble, contributing to the growth of multiple global brands.
• President of Global Perfumery at Firmenich SA, leading digital innovation and organizational transformation.
• Successful expansion into new markets while maintaining creative integrity.
• Appointment as CEO of Audemars Piguet, one of the greatest independent Swiss manufactures.
• Stewardship of key brand initiatives including AP Houses, material innovation, and product diversification.

The Horizon Line With Ilaria Resta

What ultimately sets Ilaria Resta apart is not a single initiative, but the way her decisions cohere into a philosophy tailored to a very specific kind of manufacture: family‑owned, fiercely independent, creatively restless, and yet under unprecedented global scrutiny.

Ilaria Resta was selected after a global, board‑level search to succeed one of modern watchmaking’s most influential CEOs, with AP’s revenues at, or just above, CHF 2 billion and its brand equity at an all‑time high, testament to the trust placed in her ability to manage success rather than repair failure.

She has embraced Audemars Piguet’s history of “authentic disruption” while making clear that future disruption must be rooted in material science, ergonomic grand complications, and emotionally resonant collaborations, not in shock value alone.

In a landscape where many CEOs are either pure technicians or pure marketers, Ilaria Resta’s blend of consumer acumen, creative empathy and strategic discipline is what precisely makes her the kind of leader AP’s future demands.