BORN: LINCOLNSHIRE, UK, 1965
LIVES: MILAN, ITALY
PROFESSION: CEO OF RICHARD MILLE EMEA YACHT CLUB
MEMBERSHIPS: MONACO YACHT CLUB, YACHT CLUB COSTA SMERALDA, NEW YORK YACHT CLUB
FAVOURITE ANCHORAGE: COLOMBIER, ST BARTHS, WHERE HE’S SPENT THE MOST TIME WITH HIS FOUR CHILDREN

The unseasonably hot sun is riding high on the first day of the 2026 Superyacht Cup Palma Richard Mille. Peter Harrison stands on the dock at the redeveloped Club de Mar-Mallorca marina looking out across the Bay of Palma. His newly acquired J Class yacht, the 40-metre Rainbow, sits low and impressive in the water as the fresh wind builds. A few metres to its right rests the 43.6-metre Svea, the longest vessel in the J Class fleet and Rainbow’s principal rival in the regatta.

Harrison’s 30-strong race crew, largely drawn from his highly successful Jolt Sailing Team, bustle around him. They slather sun cream over their deeply tanned faces as they prepare for their first competitive outing together aboard the legendary J.

“We did a lot of training in May, but this is our first time racing against another boat,” Harrison told me at the previous night’s cocktail reception. As we hoist the sails and embark on a few practice runs to test sail trim, rig settings and speed, it’s apparent from Harrison’s tight-lipped demeanour at the helm that tension is mounting.

The accomplished businessman and passionate yachtsman has a strong record of winning. At 21, he convinced his then-employer, David Morris of the Fine Jewellery Room in Harrods, to allow him to bid for the watch concession inside the famous London department store.

“Jewellery was the big thing in the UK back then, and watches were just something jewellers had to complement their stock, but it was something I thought I could get into,” he says.

He later became commercial director of Time Products PLC, which distributed 14 of the 15 main luxury watch brands across the UK, Switzerland and the US. He eventually crossed paths with Richard Mille in 1995, six years before the French watchmaker launched his namesake brand.

What began as a close friendship morphed into a commercial partnership in 2006, when Harrison founded his premium distribution company, Redgrave Luxury Ltd, and partnered with Mille’s Swiss parent company, Horométrie SA, to establish Richard Mille EMEA.

As CEO, Harrison took control of the brand’s distribution, retail operations and marketing strategy across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Two decades later, Richard Mille sells an estimated 6,000 watches a year, generating around CHF1.75 billion (£1.6bn) in sales, giving it a 3.6 per cent share of the Swiss watch market by value.

With a 50 per cent ownership stake in Richard Mille EMEA, Harrison has more than proved that watches are a business worth getting into. His daughter Tilly, herself a competitive skipper, followed suit in 2021 by co-founding Ninety Watches & Jewellery, Richard Mille’s first authorised pre-owned retailer in Europe and the Middle East.

For Harrison, who favours sport over the spotlight, business has afforded something far more valuable than money: time. “As the company has grown, I’ve been fortunate enough to carve out more time for sailing, which has become an increasingly important part of my life,” he says.

His current racing programme spans multiple classes, including the Maxi Grand Prix, where he won the 2026 IMA Maxi European Championship in Sorrento aboard his 72 Maxi, Jolt. His proudest moment is skippering Jolt 3, his Botin-designed TP52 optimised to rate as an IRC52, in the Yacht Club de Monaco’s victorious 2025 Admiral’s Cup campaign, which combined inshore races with the 695-nautical-mile Rolex Fastnet Race.

“I absolutely adore TP52 racing; it’s the best kind of sailing, but that was really tough. The toughest thing I’ve ever done,” he tells me later back on shore, noting that he plans to defend his title in 2027. “It was very high stress, very competitive, and we were sailing against other boats that had professional helmsmen from the America’s Cup set. By the end, we were pretty broken.”

He puts the “surprising” Admiral’s Cup win down to great preparation and the team’s hard work, with training beginning as early as March in miserably cold conditions on the Solent.

The victory marked both a personal and professional high for Harrison, secured a landmark result for the Monaco Yacht Club and cemented his standing in international offshore racing. “It was the first time people approached me in the street for something that isn’t watch related,” he says. “I had well-known Olympic sailors stop me and say, ‘Hey, Peter, unbelievable job.’”

“I quickly learned that, with the right mercenaries on board, winning becomes a lot easier”

It’s quite the coup for Harrison, who grew up in landlocked northeast England and was schooled in Reading. His first foray on the water didn’t come until his early twenties.

“After work, my New Zealand flatmate and I would put our windsurfers on the roof of the car, and drive from our place on the King’s Road to Hayling Island, a scenic windsurfing Mecca in Hampshire,” he says. “I worked in Harrods at the time, which closed at 5pm back then, and we’d arrive at Hayling by 6.30pm, race for two hours, have a pub dinner and be back in Chelsea by midnight. That was my sailing budget.”

It wasn’t until 2008, when a friend visited him at his house on the Isle of Wight with a “very pretty” Tofinou, that he jumped into ownership. Harrison bought his own seven-metre Tofinou, Alouette, and sailed her around the south coast of the UK before moving to Switzerland, where he raced her on Lake Geneva.

There he learned about the Tofinou 9.5 class, a one-design fleet that races annually at Les Voiles de Saint Tropez, upgraded to a 9.5-metre – the first Jolt – and graduated from cruising to racing.

He later moved onto a Baltic 45, “a compromised cruiser racer that we used a lot in the Caribbean and Palma”, before getting into TP52 racing and eventually Mini Maxis. He bought his first Maxi 72, Sorcha, from Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström (owner of Svea), before selling her to Peter Dubens, owner of North Sails.

“It was TP52 that got me into racing properly,” he says. “I paid someone to take my boat down to Saint-Tropez, launched it, had it cleaned and ready to race. We finished tenth out of 20, while this other guy, my now great friend Peter Dubens, won. I couldn’t understand it because I’d spoken to Peter the day before and he’d told me it was his first time sailing.

“Then a friend pointed out his tactician, the Olympic sailor Nick Rogers, who is still his tactician today, another Olympian on his bow and an America’s Cup sailor at his stern. I quickly learned that, with the right mercenaries on board, winning becomes a lot easier.”

North Thin Ply Technology (NTPT), a lightweight, high-strength material, was first familiar to Harrison through its use in his racing sails. The NTPT laboratory in Lausanne subsequently approached Richard Mille about adapting the material for watch cases.

“Everything is performance-related,” he says. “We try to use materials that don’t compromise the structure of the watch, that make it lighter and more durable. So, there’s a synergy between the two.”

Today, Harrison’s extensive fleet – “I find it very difficult to sell boats” – includes the small J/70 Jolt 2, which his three daughters sail, including Tilly, who sailed it to victory at Cowes Week; his ultra-modern foiling monohull, Jolt 4, and his latest acquisition, Rainbow.

“I absolutely adore TP52 racing; it’s the best kind of sailing”

True to his word, he surrounds himself with a rock-star racing crew. The resonant words of two-time America’s Cup winner and Rainbow’s tactician, Ed Baird, fire across the deck as we race across the Bay of Palma, joined by British world-champion sailor and Rainbow’s strategist, Ben Saxton, and David “Freddie” Carr, a veteran of two decades of America’s Cup sailing, who runs trimmer at the back.

“Ed understands me. He knows how I sail and what I’m going to do next. I love sailing with him,” Harrison says. “You can’t sit behind Charles Leclerc when he’s going round a Formula One circuit, but with J Class racing, you can be on one of the most amazing boats of all time, surrounded by America’s Cup sailors and be fully in the moment.”

It’s an apt comparison considering Harrison’s endorsement of the Richard Mille Young Talent Academy, which, in partnership with racing entrepreneur Nicolas Todt, has helped nurture the next generation of Formula One drivers. Not that you’ll find him at a racetrack anytime soon. “I’m not a huge fan,” he says. “Too many people.”

He’d rather play golf or tennis or go fishing, though his passion project is his farm on the Isle of Wight, the 607-hectare Rowborough Estate located in the undulating downland near Newport.

“We plant trees and develop crops. I’ll never see the benefit of it, but my children might, or my grandchildren. I love that kind of thing where you are doing something for the future.” This year, he and his partner cruised the Norwegian fjords and the Arctic Circle. But nothing beats the meditative calm of sailing – “the one hobby where I can fully switch off ”.

Svea may have clinched the win in Palma, but Harrison is happy to play the long game. Together with Zennström, Ronald de Waal, owner of Velsheda, and Giovanni Lombardi Stronati, who bought Hanuman in May, he represents a new, younger breed of J Class owner.

“When I decided to go down the road of buying a J Class, it was because I wanted to race bigger boats and to keep that 1930s spirit alive,” he says. “We did it with the Maxi Grand Prix class, and I hope we can race these boats as they’re meant to be.”

Even as he looks to preserve the past, Harrison is already thinking about what comes next. “I’d like to build a new 30-metre Maxi Racer, but for that I need to work a bit harder,” he says. For Harrison, it seems, there is always another boat, another race and another challenge on the horizon.

First published in the October 2026 issue of BOAT International. Get this magazine sent straight to your door, or subscribe and never miss an issue.