Watch out for fakes

Leonie Flückiger gets the day off to an energetic start with a morning run. The young company founder is training for her first marathon, and the music in her ears keeps her moving through the streets at a steady pace. Glancing down at the smartwatch on her wrist, she assures us with a smile that it is only for sport. Any other occasion would demand a Swiss-made mechanical timepiece, the kind with a precision-crafted movement that Flückiger can truly appreciate, thanks to her degree in micro and nanosystems. She has always had a penchant for wristwatches – even before she launched a start-up in the industry – so it was only natural she should treat herself to a watch as a graduation present. For this particular ETH 
alumna, a watch is more than just a fashion accessory; it also symbolises her feeling of success and sense of pride in having completed a highly technical study programme.

Flückiger originally planned to study art rather than anything technical. In her baccalaureate paper, which focused on fashion inspired by nature, she looked at a variety of surface structures occurring in nature and discussed how these could be applied to textiles. Her work turned out to be a textbook take on bionics, a field that concerns itself with how phenomena found in nature can be harnessed for technological applications. This led her student advisor to point her in the direction of ETH, which offers various degree programmes in surfaces and materials. Keen to find out more before making the leap, Flückiger attended an ETH open day. There, she was spellbound by a materials science stall where you could freeze marshmallows in dry ice. Her eyes still shine with enthusiasm when she recalls that moment. “I was hooked by the whole experience and the prospect of doing something practical in the lab myself. Those two factors played a decisive role in my decision to study materials science at ETH,” she says. As a woman, it took a certain amount of courage to attend a technical university, but it’s something she has never regretted. The first year was dominated by mathematics, and she found some of the theory rather dry, but her enthusiasm grew steadily as the course progressed.

In future, Flückiger hopes to incorporate even more of her creative talents into her technical career. And thanks to her background at ETH, which helped her see art from a completely new perspective, she’s confident she’ll succeed. “I’ve always been intrigued by the world of optics. ETH taught me why we perceive a colour as red, why metal is shiny, and how a camera obscura works. I find it absolutely fascinating delving into the physics of these kinds of optical phenomena,” she says. Her Master’s degree took her deep into the realm of micro and nanosystems. Part of her research was focused on nanorobots, which are used in medicine to treat tumours. Once injected into a patient's body, they detect where the tumour cells are located and move independently to the affected part to carry out treatment.

Her interest in robotics steadily drew Flückiger closer to the world of IT, just as blockchain technology was starting to garner worldwide attention: “Everyone was talking about it, but I was completely in the dark. At first, I thought: I’m too late! I’ll never understand blockchain. That was only two years ago. Then they awarded me the blockchain project at ETH Juniors, but I still didn’t really know how it all worked. I started reading up on it. It was all so fascinating that I ended up writing my Master’s project about it and also received the official ETH spin-off label!” Few would have suspected that Flückiger’s initial forays into blockchain would ultim­ately lead to her founding a company based on that very technology – all by the age of 27.

Flückiger showed business acumen and entrepreneurial spirit early on. While still a student, she worked for for ETH Juniors, a management consultancy led by ETH students that brings together companies with suitable specialists from ETH. Its clients include Swiss SMEs and major corporations such as Helvetia Insurance –and it was this company that approached her with the idea of a blockchain project to boost confidence in the watch market. Helvetia had spotted a ser­ious problem in the second-hand wristwatch market, where a lack of trust meant the authenticity and provenance of watches were often clouded in uncertainty. The company’s innovation team was confident this could be resolved using blockchain – and so the idea behind Adresta was born.

The ETH graduate teamed up with Mathew Jobin Chittazhathu and Nicolas Borgeaud from the Helvetia innovation team to form her first company. Today, Adresta creates digital authenticity certificates for the watch industry. The company’s location is hard to beat, as 99 percent of all luxury watches are manufactured in Switzerland. The company now has seven employees working alongside the three founders, and its ambitious goal is a future in which no luxury goods will be sold without a digital twin. Part of this digital twin is the authenticity certificate, but it can also store other product documentation such as operating instructions and warranties. The system can also provide proof of a luxury item’s rightful owner. If Adresta’s software becomes an industry standard, this could massively reduce the number of fakes in the watch market.  

Start-up culture is still heavily male-dominated, especially in the tech sector. As a female founder working in a technical field, Flückiger is therefore the exception rather than the rule – though the dynamic CTO hopes her career will motivate other women to take the plunge. After 15 years as a member of a football club and a childhood spent playing the drums, she was never intimidated by the fact that most of her fellow students were male. Instead, she says she took their boldness and ambition as a template for her own career, and this attitude has served her well ever since: “Young women need strong female role models to show them that studying at ETH is cool and something they can genuinely aspire to.”

Her determination to get young women interested in materials science was evident even during her student days, when she helped present the subject to secondary-school pupils. Nowadays, her ETH degree earns her credibility and respect among the male members of the start-up scene. For her, it is proof of her achievements, and she is rightly proud of the significance it holds. Flückiger is an enthu­siastic member of networks such as “We shape Tech” and “Woman in Tech”, which enable her to meet and learn from women who have trodden this path before her. The young entrepreneur finds their occasional meet-ups over coffee inspiring and motivating, and it reinforces her hope that she, too, could one day be a role model for young women.