ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
Time To Move, the Swatch Group press event held May 14 to 16 in Switzerland, was something of an experiment. When the group decided to pull out of this year's Baselworld, it had to make other arrangements for 17 of its brands to show their new watches to clients and the press.
Management decided that the group's six most expensive brands would meet commercial clients during Baselworld at the headquarters of the Hayek Group in downtown Zürich. (The Hayek Group is a private consulting company owned by the Hayek family, the Swatch Group's largest shareholder.) The other brands would meet with clients in local markets.
As for the press, the six prestige brands decided to invite 200 journalists to Switzerland in May for meetings at the brand's production facilities. "We are trying to change the concept," Blancpain CEO Marc Hayek, said. "We want to present the novelties in the place where they are created and born." The goal was to show not just watches the brands make, but where and how they make them.
So it was that for three days, 200 reporters from 21 countries, separated into small groups by language, traveled around Switzerland's watchmaking region in vans, visiting six brands in six towns.
Among them were our own Stephen Pulvirent and myself. Stephen reported on the new products; I focused on the factory visits. There we got a crash course on the Swiss system of mechanical watchmaking, essentially a T Tour (T for Terminaison, French for "finishing"). That's trade terminology for the five stages of watch production, from T0 (the making of movement parts) to T4 (packing and shipping).
What follows are one reporter's notes on the Swatch Group's whirlwind watch manufacture tour.
ADVERTISEMENT
Blancpain
On Day 1, bright and early, our group of 14 reporters from the U.S. and Australia piled into a van for the trip from our hotel in Lausanne up to Switzerland's legendary Vallée de Joux. The valley is nestled in the Jura Mountains that form the western border of Switzerland and France. The hour-long ride takes us up steep winding roads to the Col du Mollendruz, 3,871 feet above sea level, one of two mountain passes that lead to the Vallée below. First stop is the village of Le Sentier, home to the Blancpain manufacture.
More than 700 people work here, in every phase of watchmaking, from watch and caliber design to movement manufacturing, casing, testing, and after-sales service. (Blancpain sells 30,000 watches a year, we are told.)
Today we'll get a glimpse of movement manufacturing. Our hosts issue us white lab coats, embossed with our names, and off we go. In the basement is the first stage of watch production, T0: the production of movement components, first by machine, then by hand. We're led into a storage room holding the raw materials – brass sheets and steel bars. From the next room comes a loud, rhythmic pounding sound. That's the Atelier Decoupage. We enter and see Essa machines pounding out brass mainplates, 100 pieces per minute.
We move to the toolmaking workshop. There is a separate tool to cut each component in a watch movement, we are told. "If there are 300 components in a movement, you need 300 tools," our guide says. Blancpain makes almost all its cutting tools itself.
We move to the Usinage (Machining) section, containing a series of MTR 312 cutting machines that resemble NASA lunar modules. In the machines are 18 to 36 spindles programmed to mill, tap and drill brass components with a precision of 1 to 2 microns.
Then to Tournage (Turning), a workshop that fabricates gold oscillating weights for self-winding movements. All Blancpain rotors are made of gold, except one: Ladybird watches have platinum rotors, also made here. Next is the Ebauches section, where machines make plates, bridges, springs, levers and other steel components.
We want to present the novelties in the place
where they are created and born.
– Blancpain CEO Marc HayekIn the next workshop, Lavage (Washing), every component is cleaned ultrasonically in hot baths containing natural detergents. Finally, each component goes to a decoration workshop, elsewhere in the Vallée de Joux, where it is decorated and washed again. That completes T0.
The components then go upstairs to T1, and so do we. T1 is the stage where the components are assembled by watchmakers into complete movements. For these workshops, we must put blue plastic booties over our shoes so that we don't track dirt or dust into the ateliers.
Here men and women wearing white lab coats, with loupes fixed by a wire around their heads, do pre-assembly of the mainplate, bridges and crown. They use electronic screwdrivers that exert exact pressure on the screws, and eight different oils for lubrication. Then, by hand, they assemble barrels, fix pallets and silicon hairsprings to escapements, and perform all the operations to create complete calibers.
Every complete movement is tested and adjusted here and then sent to T2, watch assembly, done elsewhere in this building. We, however, head to Blancpain's high complication workshops in the nearby village of Le Brassus. There to greet us, wearing a white lab coat, is Blancpain CEO Marc Hayek.
"The Farm," as Blancpain calls the factory, is a series of small ateliers in what was originally a mill located next to a stream on a hill above Le Brassus. Here master watchmakers make Blancpain's highest complications: minute repeaters, split-second chronographs, tourbillons, carrousels, and complex calendars. Outside one atelier is an amazing display that dramatizes what goes on here: it shows each one of the 740 parts in Blancpain's 1735 Grande Complication watch of 1991, at the time the most complicated automatic wristwatch ever made.
Here, too, are ateliers devoted to decorating and engraving movement components and dials. We move from atelier to atelier, for the new product presentations by Blancpain executives, including Hayek himself, who presents the new Fifty Fathom watches.
ADVERTISEMENT
Breguet
In the afternoon, we ride down the road to Manufacture Breguet, in L'Orient, the village next to Le Brassus. We are welcomed by Thierry Esslinger, CEO of Montres Breguet, and Emmanuel Breguet, vice president/head of patrimony & marketing. They pay tribute to two extraordinary watch entrepreneurs.
This first is Emmanuel Breguet's ancestor, Neuchâtel-born Abraham-Louis Breguet, the genius Swiss watchmaker (and inventor of the tourbillon, patented in 1801) who opened a watch shop in Paris in 1775. The other is Nicolas G. Hayek, Sr., the Swatch Group chairman whose acquisition of the Breguet firm in 1999 revived the company, and who served as its CEO until his death in 2010.
As we soon see, the spirit of both men inhabits this place. Our first stop is the Restoration Department. "This is where Abraham-Louis's DNA lies," our guide says. In this atelier, master watchmakers restore Breguet watches going back to the founder's time. We see one watchmaker working on a movement from 1810. Each year, about 20 vintage Breguets are restored here.
We're also shown the Breguet No. 1160 watch, an exact replica of Breguet's celebrated No. 160, the "Marie Antoinette" watch, which stood for a century as the world's most complicated watch. It was stolen from a Jerusalem museum in 1983 and later recovered. While it was still missing, Hayek Sr. decided to recreate it. "It was a challenge that Nicolas Hayek wanted his house, his baby, to take on," our guide tell us. It was unveiled in 2008.
Buried under a cornerstone at Breguet is a time capsule containing a VHS video cassette with a message from Hayek Sr. to the future.
The restoration department is in a landmark building that was for a century the Lemania factory. Nouvelle Lemania, as it became known, was part of the Breguet Group when the Swatch Group acquired it. It made movements for Breguet and third-party clients, most famously for Omega's Speedmaster. Hayek Sr. restored the Nouvelle Lemania building. Then, in 2001, he expanded and upgraded the facility in the first of three major expansions, changing the name to Manufacture Breguet in 2004.
We leave the original Lemania building along a corridor leading to the modern three-story extension. On the way, we come upon a marker set into the floor, engraved as follows: LA 1ere PIERRE A ETE POSEE / LE 28 09 2001 / PAR Monsieur NICOLAS G. HAYEK & SON FILS NICK ("The first cornerstone was laid on Sept. 28, 2001 by Mr. Nicolas G. Hayek and his son Nick.") Buried under the cornerstone is a time capsule containing a VHS video cassette with a message from Hayek to the future. And a video cassette player to play it on, in the event there aren't any around in the future! There are also newspapers from that time, with articles about Hayek's revival of the Breguet company.
Breguet employs 800 people in the Vallée de Joux, most of them here. We quickly pass by the T0 machine-manufacturing operations on the ground floor. T0 continues on the top floor, with components hand-finished by artisans.
To me, the most striking section was Guillochage, where literally dozens of artisans sit operating engine-turning machines. Also called rose engines, the machines engrave dials with intricate patterns of intersecting lines. Abraham-Louis loved the look of guilloché, and employed it extensively on his thin-cased pocket watches that revolutionized watch design. He was the first to use guilloché on dials, we learn, and liked the way diamond-shaped patterns reflected light. At Manufacture Breguet, there are 35 rose engine machines.
T2, assembly of the watch (fitting of the dial and hands; casing; complications assembly) takes place on level 1, the middle floor. Since Breguet was the inventor of the tourbillon, we get a short class on tourbillons, and learn that the company has six different types of tourbillon cages.
Omega
The next morning, we head north from Lausanne, past large Lake Neuchatel and smaller Lake Bienne, into the town of Biel/Bienne (the German and French versions of the town's name; it has been officially known by both since 2005) to Omega's brand-new factory, which opened in 2017. There, CEO Reynald Aeschlimann, in his opening remarks, says that this is "a great time for Omega."
The new, state-of-the-art factory, opened in 2017, is a symbol of a resurgent Omega. It is Switzerland's clear number two watch company, in terms of annual revenue (after Rolex), with sales estimated by Ventobel Equity Research at $2.26 billion wholesale for 2018. Two big anniversaries this year are sure to boost those sales: the 125th anniversary of the creation of the Omega brand and the 50th anniversary of NASA's Apollo 11 mission, when Omega became the first watch worn on the moon.
There has been an Omega factory on this spot for 137 years, and Aeschlimann is proud to show off the gee-whiz wonders of the new plant. The five-story building was designed by Pritzker-prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban, built with concrete, glass and Swiss spruce.
Here we see industrial, not artisanal, production. Omega produces 3,000 watches a day, Aeschlimann tells us. Which means Omega produces in two weeks what Blancpain does in a year. All of Omega's manufacturing is now under one roof: T2 (assembling the watch head and casing), T3 (bracelet assembly), and T4 (packaging and shipping). (Movement making, T1, is done elsewhere at ETA factories.) Also here is Omega's METAS testing center for Master Chronometer certification.
At Omega, four robotic arms move at four meters per second to fetch boxes of components and deliver them along 500 meters of conveyors.
A highlight of the factory is its fully automated storage system, which delivers components to the workshops without human intervention. Located in a three-story, fireproof, 3,660 cubic foot space in the center of the building, the storage area holds more than 30,000 boxes containing all the parts necessary for T2 and T3.
A system of four robotic arms -- our guide, Mariano Samudio, calls them John, Paul, George, and Ringo – and two vertical lifts, moving at breath-taking speed (4 meters per second) fetch the boxes and deliver them along 500 meters of conveyors. They perform 1,400 operations per hour, which visitors can observe through windows on the ground floor, or from above, through a window in the floor on level 4.
Once the components get to the workshops, however, the watch head is created the old-fashioned way, by hand. Ninety percent of the work of casing the movement, placing the dial, setting the hands, adjusting the stem, and so on, is done by hand.
Unlike in the Vallée de Joux ateliers, we don't go into Omega's workshop, but view what goes on through glass dividers. To keep dust out, Omega does not allow any paper – or visitors – in the workshops. All communication there is done via touch-screen tablets.
ADVERTISEMENT
Jaquet Droz
After lunch, we ride back up into the Jura Mountains, to La Chaux-de-Fonds, the self-described "metropole horlogère" (watchmaking metropolis), population 40,000, that has been a watchmaking town for 300 years. We drive along Rue Louis-Joseph Chevrolet. (Yep, that Chevrolet: the car pioneer was born here. So was renowned architect Le Corbusier.) We turn onto Allée du Tourbillon and arrive at Montres Jaquet Droz.
Jaquet Droz, which the Swatch Group acquired the year after Montres Breguet, is named for a local watchmaking wizard. Pierre Jaquet-Droz was born La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1721. His genius was to create not only watches and clocks, but automata that helped promote his timepieces.
His automata were considered wonders of the world. Three androids – the Writer, the Draughtsman, and the Musician – brought him international fame. Finished in 1774, and presented for the first time in La Chaux-de-Fonds, they caused a sensation. They "performed" for Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in Paris in 1775, followed by a tour of various Royal Courts around Europe. Today, they are in the permanent collection of the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire in Neuchâtel, and are still working (the Museum demonstrates them to the public regularly).
Montres Jaquet Droz continues Pierre Jaquet-Droz's legacy, CEO Christian Lattmann tells us. In its workshops, 60 watchmakers and craftsmen create watches that are objets d'art. They range from off-centered Grande Seconde wristwatches, inspired by a Jaquet-Droz pocket watch with two intersecting dials forming a figure 8, to limited-edition pieces featuring exotic dials and wrist automatons.
Last year, Jaquet Droz sold all eight of its CHF 650,000 Tropic Bird Repeater watches in eight months, one to an American.
We begin in the showroom, where we meet "Charlie," an android built in 2012 based on the Johnny Depp character Willy Wonka in the movie "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." Charlie's hands hold two bells, which he raises to reveal current Jaquet Droz models. He is made of 2,693 mechanical parts and is animated by a system of 12 cams and 7 electric motors.
Next, we see why Pierre Jaquet-Droz was considered a wizard. A technician shows us the master's "Singing Bird Cage," made in 1780. It's a large, ornate, hanging cage, with a clock on the bottom, containing two birds. In the center of the cage, running top to bottom, is a crystal column. The technician winds the clock, and for 40 seconds a melody plays while the mechanical birds, with real bird feathers, chirp, moving their wings, beaks and tails, while 12 turning "streams" in the column create the illusion of a waterfall. The clock has six melodies, which can play on demand or on the hour. For our 21st century audience, it is amazing. For an 18th century audience, it must have been pure magic.
Knowing that we have just come from giant Omega, whose budgets for world-renowned "ambassadors" Lattmann can only dream of, he laughs as he tells me, "The automata are our Cindy Crawford."
Jaquet Droz's newest automaton wristwatch is the Magic Lotus Automaton. The dial features a small round watch face surrounded by a flowing steam. The watch dial is onyx and has two gold hands. The rest of the dial is brimming with decorative art creations that are Jaquet Droz's specialty.
It depicts the four stages of a lotus flower: seed pods, bud, spring flower and fall flower. Two blue disks represent the stream. Also on the dial is a koi fish, a blue dragonfly, lotus leaves, water lilies, diamonds, sapphires, a ruby, and more.
Push the button on the crown and the stream comes to life. The large disk rotates and the koi moves around the dial, flapping its tail and diving beneath the green lotus leaves. The water lilies bob up and down as the water flows. The entire animation runs for a full four minutes, with eight rotations of 30 seconds each.
All the elements on the dial are made in workshops here. The koi and dragonfly are hand-carved in gold and painted; the lotus leaves and reed stems are made in Grand Feu enamel on a gold base; the lotus petals are carved from mother-of-pearl with a thin coat of translucent paint.
In the Atelier de Haute Horlogèrie (T2), each watch is assembled by hand by one watchmaker. Blancpain supplies Jaquet Droz with movements, which JD then modifies. Automata are manufactured in the Atelier Automaton, complete with a small sound studio to create chirping birds and other sounds. The movement in the new Magic Lotus watch, which took three years to develop, has 616 components; 500 of them are for the automaton.
Painting, enameling, engraving, and sculpting are all done by hand in sunlit, monastery-quiet ateliers devoted to each craft.
The Magic Lotus watch costs 200,000 Swiss francs before tax. JD will produce 28 pieces in red gold and 28 in white gold.
The main market for these pieces is Asia, Lattmann tells me. But demand is global. Last year, it sold all eight pieces of its remarkable Tropic Bird Repeater watch (price: CHF 650,000) in eight months, one to an American.
Harry Winston
On Day 3, we head to Plan-les-Ouates on the outskirts of Geneva to visit the Harry Winston Manufacture. The Swatch Group acquired the famous New York diamond jewelry house in 2013 for $1 billion. Waiting to greet us is Nayla Hayek, CEO of Harry Winston, who is also chairwoman of the Swatch Group board of directors. "You are very lucky," she tells us, underlining one of the reasons for the "Time To Move" press event. "In Basel, you see only a few novelties. Here you will see all the novelties."
In fact, we are lucky to be allowed inside this ultra-secure fortress at all, where millions of dollars worth of diamonds and gemstones are stored. We soon learn that the Time To Move press guests are the first outsiders ever shown the manufacturing ateliers.
While diamond jewelry is Winston's signature product, 180 employees here work on watches, Ms. Hayek tells us. Most of the watches are ladies' jewelry pieces.
Inside the gem-setting atelier, jewelers peer into Olympus SZ51 microscopes as they set cases, bracelets and dials with precious stones. We see jewelers setting the diamond-encrusted rectangular case of Harry Winston's Avenue Classic 20th Anniversary watches. The top-grade stones, set in Winston's famous "invisible settings," are dazzling. It takes a jeweler four to five days to complete one case.
Harry Winston watches use ETA movements primarily, mostly quartz in the ladies' pieces. The company gets its moon-phase complications for both ladies' and men's watches from Blancpain.
The last Harry Winston Histoire de Tourbillon watch is the first wristwatch ever to have four separate tourbillons.
Winston, of course, isn't only about women's watches. It has made high-profile forays into the high-mechanical world with its series of Opus and Histoire de Tourbillon watches and its use of exotic metals like zalium, a zirconium-aluminum alloy; the platinum-group metal ruthenium; and Winstonium, its exclusive platinum alloy.
This year's men's headliner is the 10th and final piece in the Histoire de Tourbillon series. It's the first watch ever to include four separate tourbillons. The four tourbillons are positioned at the corners of the giant case, which extends horizontally along the wrist (45 mm x 32 mm x 12.85 m). They rotate once every 36 seconds, unified by three differentials. Histoire de Tourbillon 10 is a limited-edition of 21 pieces: 10 in rose gold, 10 in white gold (CHF750,000 each); and one in Winstonium (CHF770,000).
HW's newest zalium watch is Project Z13, also known as the Ocean Retrograde Automatic 42MM watch, with a zalium case and buckle. It's the first watch in the Zalium collection with a moon-phase display. This one, exclusive to HW, is unique: its shape is not round, but 12-sided, and it is suspended above the cut-out dial by transverse arms. Its automatic movement is made exclusively for Harry Winston.
As for the Opus, we do not see the long-awaited Opus 15 (it's been nearly four years since the last one – the Opus 14 "Jukebox For The Wrist"). However, the company says it expects to unveil it by the end of the year.
ADVERTISEMENT
Glashütte Original
We spend the afternoon with Glashütte Original in a hotel near the Geneva airport. GO's manufacture is nearly 500 miles away as the crow flies, in the famous watchmaking village of Glashütte in eastern Germany. Since the company can't bring the press to the manufacture, CEO Roland von Keith tells us (it's a long way from Geneva to Saxony), it brought the manufacture to the press. It set up a few manufacturing operations in the hotel ballroom. We're issued the obligatory white lab coats and head into the faux factory for a final round of novelties and technical presentations.
In a temporary lab in the center of the room, two technicians perform some of the quality-control torture tests GO runs for shock-resistance and water-resistance. Elsewhere, around the room, watchmakers and technicians are performing demonstrations at benches.
At one, a watchmaker is blueing screws. First, he mirror-polishes the tiny steel screw by hand, rubbing it on a polishing plate until it is glossy. This process protects it from corrosion. Then he places the screw, which is gray, on a small heating device on the workbench. The screw soon changes color, turning yellow, followed quickly by brown, red, violet, and then, at a temperature of 290° C, the color he desires: a deep blue, at which time he lifts it off the grill.
At Glashütte Original, we see a heated screw go from gray to yellow, brown, red, violet, and, at 290° C, deep blue.
At the dial printing station, a technician from GO's dial factory in Pforzheim, Germany, demonstrates the "pad printing" process of manually applying logos on dials, one at a time. The pad-printing method uses a silicone or rubber "balloon" to pick up ink from a negative engraving, called a "cliche." Pulling the arm of the machine, the technician lowers the pad onto the negative. Then she slides the pad along a track to position it over a blank dial, and lowers the pad onto it. Voilà: the logo appears on the dial.
At another station, a watchmaker using a microscope is screwing 18 infinitesimal screws into a gold screw balance. The screw thread measures a ridiculous 0.35 mm – hence, the microscope. The watchmaker asks for a volunteer to perform the operation. Adam Craniotes, the irrepressible founder of the RedBar group, offers to be the guinea pig. Craniotes, like the rest of us, is sleep-deprived, which will hamper his dexterity. There's also a good chance he's sipped some of the fine Swiss wine served at lunch at Harry Winston, which won't help either. Amazingly, after a few tries, he manages to pick up a screw with the tweezers. But, alas, he drops it. Our gang groans when he lets us know. One of the group points to the screw, which landed on the counter top. It looks like a single speck of table salt. Craniotes doubles down. After repeated attempts, he manages to pick up another screw, and, mirabile dictu, screws it into a hole. He gets a hero's applause from his admiring peers. Now, only 17 more to go. He leaves those for the pro.
The episode drives home a major theme of the trip. We knew fine watchmaking was complicated. But we come away with a new understanding of just how devilishly difficult it is. And a deeper appreciation for those special souls who master its crafts.
Top Discussions
Breaking News Patek Philippe's Ref. 5711 Nautilus Is Back As A Unique Piece For Charity
Found Three Of The Best Tourbillon Wristwatches Ever Made, For Sale This Week
Photo Report A Visit To Nomos Glashütte