In-Depth Carl F. Bucherer’s New "Mastery Lab" Brings Pièce Unique To The Masses – If You Can Afford One

Well, today Carl F. Bucherer is officially unveiling the "Carl F. Bucherer Mastery Lab," an individualization program that allows clients to live out part of that fantasy by nearly completely customizing the brand's top in-house movements for a customer's own unique watch. While it's not likely that any of these pieces will become another eponymous "Henry Graves," it's an interesting entry into individualized watchmaking.

In anticipation of today's announcement, Carl F. Bucherer's team invited me to experience the Mastery Lab in September as if I was a client. Sadly (and unsurprisingly) I wasn't able to walk away with a watch with a price tag that easily would have stretched into the mid-to-high six figures, but I did leave with a better understanding of the brand's heritage.

Most major watchmakers with pièce unique programs have incredibly high barriers to entry. All of the holy trinity of watchmaking theoretically have their doors open to their mega-clients who, through millions of dollars and a shown appreciation for the brand, may earn the right to make a unique piece – most often a grand complication.

There's also Cartier's "New Special Order" program. While these pieces might be easier to order, Cartier seems to be incredibly strict about their customizations, rejecting many requests they don't feel are in line with brand heritage (though paradoxically letting other wild requests through). Cartier also reportedly reserves the right to (and often will) remake any watch, meaning you're not guaranteed a pièce unique.

Carl F. Bucherer is taking a different approach. The process, as I'd come to find out, allows for individualization on almost all parts of the watch. And there isn't any expectation that you've already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars with Carl F. Bucherer. Starting today, the Mastery Lab is open to absolutely everyone and can be initiated at most CFB retailers worldwide.

Sure, the price is steep – the Manero Double Peripheral Tourbillon starts at CHF 76,500, the Heritage Tourbillon at CHF 108,000, and the Manero Minute Repeater Symphony at a whopping CHF 398,000 – but with thousands of possible permutations, the brand assures me that every client walks away with a watch that they wholeheartedly guarantee is and will always be completely unique.

The Mastery Lab isn't entirely new. After a pilot launched around Watches & Wonders in March 2022, Carl F. Bucherer's team has traveled to London, Paris, Munich, Zurich, Lucerne, and Costa Mesa to meet with over 200 potential clients so far this year. That means by the time I arrived for my appointment at the Bucherer 1888 TimeMachine flagship in New York, the Mastery Lab was a well-oiled machine.

I was greeted by Ron Stoll, the North American president of Carl F. Bucherer, and Renato Bonina, the brand's Chief Sales Officer, and then ushered into a more private space with trays laid out on the table displaying dials, bezels, cases, movements with different finishings, and straps to inspire creativity. There were also examples of the tourbillons and minute repeater from the CFB lineup, concrete examples of the end goal. The Mastery Lab, as they describe it to me, is a journey of discovery, hopefully ending with a unique watch. The first thing I discover, however, is my immediate urge to start picking up these components and imagine interesting or – if I'm being honest – expensive combinations.

That's not unusual, Bonina tells me.

"It's very seldom that a customer can touch just a case. Take this one, for example," he says, handing me a black and extremely light watch case, empty of any movement or crystal. "It's titanium with black DLC. You have components in person, not just on a screen. We can show customers a fumé smoked dial, a blue enamel dial – even meteorite or malachite. That's where the discovery begins."

But I was there for the Mastery Lab experience, so I resisted the urge to jump to the ending and settled into the process of discovery in a two-part, two-hour program.

First is an education on the history of Carl F. Bucherer and its watchmaking. In 1888, Carl Friedrich Bucherer opened a jewelry and watch shop in Lucerne and over the decades developed a line of watches, from chronographs to chronometers and supercompressor dive watches. It wasn't until 2001, however, that Carl F. Bucherer was formed as its own entity to manufacture watches, with three-quarters of its distribution outside the Bucherer retail network.

"Jörg Bucherer [the owner of Bucherer AG] wanted to pay homage and tribute to his grandfather Carl," Stoll says. "We're a boutique manufacturer that has never produced over 30,000 watches in the history of the company. Mr. Bucherer believes the watches should still be manufactured the way his grandfather, his uncle, and his father made them. Obviously, we have all the latest CNC machines and all the software programs also, but when it comes to final assembly and finishing, we still use our hands."

As we talk, Bonina opens up an iPad, an integral part of the Mastery Lab experience, and plays a video illustrating that history and the brand's watchmaking. Shortly afterward is yet another video and an interactive display, this time for the real pride and joy of the Carl F. Bucherer brand: peripheral rotor movements.

If you've not dug into the brand's investment in peripheral rotors (or heck, don't even know what that means), there's probably no better place to start than our earlier In-Depth story on the Manero Minute Repeater Symphony. In short, the brand has invested tremendous time, effort, and research into placing the oscillating weight that winds the movement on the same plane as the movement plate, at its edge near the case. Among the benefits are thinner, more efficient, and more easily-viewed movements.

The Manero Minute Repeater Symphony itself contains a peripherally-driven tourbillon (remarkably, left out of its name) and a peripherally-mounted regulator among its 614 components, with "Triple Peripheral" engraved on the rotor.

On the app, I pinch to zoom and study the movement on the screen, then study the watch in real life, with a lot of questions. Less than halfway through the program and I'm feeling semantic satiation as "peripheral" begins to lose all meaning.

As if on cue, Bonina stops our deeply nerdy conversation and reminds me that these aren't generally what potential customers ask about. Not that he's against these questions.

"We're not a reference for a real customer's experience," he says. "All day long we think about watches. But you have to imagine that when we explain our floating tourbillon to a customer for the first time when they take the loupe and they see the tourbillon rotate and tick, they have a sense of discovery."

Finally, we move on to the most intriguing part of the process, the individualization itself. For all my interchangeable usage of customization, personalization, or individualization in this article, due to an utter lack of synonyms, Carl F. Bucherer sees it as more than semantics. Whereas they see personalizing as something as simple as engraving a watch, and customizing as changing a watch using pieces already in the catalogue, a customer individualizing here can propose something never even considered before.

With an imaginary blank check and the world (and the Mystery Lab app) at my fingertips, I begin to work on individualizing my own watch. It's an exciting prospect, but for someone known for analysis paralysis, also a bit daunting.

The Heritage Tourbillon presents a blank palette of white gold on the back which traditionally has been engraved with a scene of Lake Lucerne and the river Reuss, with swans in the water and the Kapellbrücke spanning the river. One artist spends 10 working days to achieve the scene.

"One customer said, 'I like swans, but I want dolphins,'" Bonina says. "So we engraved dolphins. Another client said they were building a castle, so now he has his castle engraved on the movement."

Lacking a castle or an inherent love of dolphins, I'm drawn to the more romantic option: the minute repeater. I'm reminded by the team that the sky's the limit, with a few exceptions. First, I can't get the minute repeater in platinum, I'm told, just because the metal isn't great for transmitting sound. Pretty much anything else is fair game.

Titanium? Check. Two tones of gold? Sure. Gem-set bezels or an engraved case? Why not? You can order custom guilloche patterns, fumé colors, and rare materials for the dial. You can have diamond indices on an otherwise sporty black DLC watch. If you prefer to have a different-colored crown or slider than the case metal, that's no problem either. Even the movement itself – whether the plates, chime, or rotor – can be customized in different colors and finishing. If price is no object, neither are creative or technical restraints.

"Basically, the things that we can't change are the dimensions of the case, the case construction, or the dimensions of the movement," Stoll tells me. "Earlier, a gentleman was designing a watch and wanted a gold bracelet, so we designed a gold bracelet for him."

"You can bring us any Pantone color," Bonina says. "We had a customer in Zurich want to have a fuchsia-colored movement, so we made it as he requested."

The app only has about 100 different combinations you can create and save, but the point isn't necessarily to lock in a design but to inspire. And even with my imaginary blank check, I'm struggling to imagine that people would order a watch for hundreds of thousands of dollars with only two hours' experience.

"Normally, they are extremely excited. And this makes the whole process very emotional and unique," Bonina explains. "It's certainly happened that the customer just said, 'I'll take it, that's it.' But often they say, 'I have so many ideas. How can I put them in one watch?' So we help them, obviously, with renderings, ideas, and suggestions. We sometimes bring our designer from our headquarters out on these meetings, or have them meet online, to help our customers on their journey."

Maybe my creativity is more limited, but what I settle on for a design is relatively simple and classic. A Manero Minute Repeater Symphony in rose gold with a blue fumé dial and matching blue-toned and sparkling movement. Classic enough for my tastes, but interesting enough to be worth a pièce unique. But I start to wonder how long it will take to get – or well, in my case not get – my new watch. Once a design is agreed upon, the team will formalize costs. If all the components are available, the timeline might be a few short months.

"For the tourbillon, if we have all the components, it takes about two months until everything is done, from assembly to quality control which alone takes three weeks," Bonina says. "For the minute repeater that process is four months. But from the beginning, we always tell clients that the entire process could take around 16 months, especially if they request a case material or design that we don't have or haven't tried before. There is sometimes research and development required and at the end, you still have those two to four months to even complete the watch."

As we shake hands and say our goodbyes, I can't help but be hung up on my daydream of a wealthy industrialist from the turn of the last century with bigger dreams than what I just saw, so I press Bonina on just how far I could take the program.

"If Henry Graves Jr. walked in the door right now and asked you to make something completely novel that Carl F. Bucherer had never made before – say a minute repeating perpetual calendar tourbillon – would you do it?" I ask.

"It happened to us already," says Bonina, smiling. "If the customer can wait five years, with all the development time, creation, and even join in the journey of the development, they're welcome."

"There was a customer who had our tourbillon and told us that his dream for many years was to have his own unique minute repeater. So he called me and said 'Can Carl F. Bucherer do a minute repeater for me?' I told him, 'Let's talk to our engineers.' Within two days he called back and asked yet again," he tells me, laughing. "After a week we told him that we can do it, but it will take us five years.

"But now, here we are. He has his unique piece – we call it 'the one' – with unique touches only he knows about, and Carl F. Bucherer was able to introduce a production model of our most complicated watch."

And now it's a watch you, too, can make your own.