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During LVMH Watch Week, Bulgari made it clear that women are a priority audience for the brand, even as many of its recent award-winning Finissimo watches are targeted to male collectors. This explains in part why Bulgari debuted a new set of Serpenti watches during the debut event. 

But Bulgari also took the opportunity to enhance its offerings to women with a renewed attention to technical breakthroughs that in some ways match the cutting-edge thinness of Finissimo. 

Indeed, Bulgari’s highlight debut earlier this month, the Serpenti Seduttori Tourbillon, features the world’s smallest tourbillon, a technical coup that does double duty for the jeweler and watchmaker. In addition to emphasizing its collections for women, the new watch symbolizes Bulgari’s plans to expand the use of mechanical movements within a broader range of its feminine collections.

 As Bulgari Managing Director, Watch Business Unit Antoine Pin explains below, “Since we are a fully integrated manufacturer, why shouldn’t we make high-end complications for ladies?”

We discussed this and other topics with Pin during the Watch Week debut event.

(The new Bulgari Serpenti Seduttori Tourbillon features the world’s smallest tourbillon.)
   

iW: Why is it important to place mechanical movements inside watches for women?

Antoine Pin: We have two important reasons.  First, Serpenti was born with mechanical movements. And today there are very few mechanical movements in small sizes.

Secondly, we have built up incredible experience in micromechanics in our quest to reduce the size of movements while maintaining their performance. With this experience comes the appetite to go further. To see what we can do.

 

Why focus for now on complicated movements? 

It is somewhat easier to work on a small size tourbillon in limited numbers then to work on large mechanical movements. It is more technically complicated, but because of the production process, the questions you are tackling are different. 

Being a fully integrated high horology company, we have a better understanding sometimes of these smaller volume, highly complicated movements. Underlining this is the fact that we have a majority of clients who are women.  And since we are a fully integrated manufacturer, why shouldn’t we make high-end complications for ladies?

(The new Bulgari Divas’ Dream features a peacock feather dial and a mechanical movement.)

Some would say that there are no clients for this, but we get requests for this. We especially saw this with the Divas’ Dream. So what we are trying here very much fits in with our philosophy.

 

(Bulgari’s Divas’ Dream Lapis Lazuli)

Will you extend this work into additional, simpler movements?

We should clearly. It makes sense. Yes, a few movements of the small size do exist, from Rolex and Jaeger-LeCoultre, but these are very limited.

Will you continue with movements like the thin repeater inside the Divas Dream Finissima Minute Repeater?  

We will arrive with new innovations every year. It is also a matter of matching new markets.  But again, there is no market until there are products to offer. This is something we are monitoring. We do have demand for simpler complications, mechanical pieces with one or two functions. It is less of a collector’s spirit and more of a regular users spirit.

The new Bulgari Octo Finissimo Automatic in Black Sandblast and Polished Ceramic.

How did you decide to launch the new steel Octo Finissimo Automatic? 

It was obvious.  We have this amazing success with the titanium Finissimo collection and we had pushed to the ultimate stage in the innovation. 

The Finissimo has such high recognition from all of our partners, so there was no question of the idea to expand the product to meet the today’s standards with steel on steel, gold on straps, which are basics in ninety-five percent of watch company collections. It is also a way for us to expand our reach with watch connoisseurs. 

 So we have launched this well-known category of products while maintaining our standards for the Finissimo collection. This is also another way to introduce Bulgari as a watchmaker.  This gives our staff more possibilities to present Bulgari as the watchmaker against other watchmakers in the same classic categories.

 

Can you offer us any hints as to the April Bulgari debuts?

We have additional debuts in April and in September. We are now showing you pieces that are available very soon, not many months down the line. Clients can get confused when they hear about new products but don’t see them in stores.  

We will be debuting more jewelry pieces, plus new pieces in the other collections as well. 

What is interesting about the pieces we are showing right now is that they highlight our capacity to innovate both from a design perspective and from a mechanical perspective. We are not a jeweler making watches; we are true Swiss-born watchmakers making watches for more than 100 years, including more than forty years in Switzerland.  

The leadership we have on micromechanics like the small tourbillon is a way to say look at us for what we are.  We are a watchmaker with a different origin, with a different perspective on watchmaking that gives us new designs. We have a talent for creating designs that are different. 

At LVMH Watch Week in Dubai, the Italo-Swiss watchmaker and jeweler added a tourbillon to Serpenti and debuted the first steel Octo Finissimo Automatic. 

Serpents and gold co-star in Bulgari’s desert debuts this past January during Watch Week in Dubai where the brand joined its LVMH brethren to showcase new watches for 2020. 

The jewelry and watchmaking company, which capitalizes on its deep Italian design and Swiss watchmaking prowess, adds several effervescent new models to its snake-head shaped Serpenti collection while also adding new gold, steel and ceramic finishes to its record-holding ultra-thin Octo Finissimo collections.

Serpenti & Dreams
Emphasizing a host of new and updated watches in its Serpenti Seduttori and Divas’ Dream collections, Bulgari sets the bar high by hatching a newly complicated Serpenti, the Serpenti Seduttori Tourbillon, with which Bulgari welcomes mechanical movements back to its collection of small watches for women. 

Within the snake-head-shaped Serpenti Seduttori Bulgari places its new tourbillon caliber (BVL150) in the watch’s most prominent position just below the center to leave no doubt about the highly complicated nature of the watch’s movement. 

Bulgari designed the movement specifically to fit and be clearly visible within the small Serpenti case. Bulgari watchmakers assured full transparency by developing a clear sapphire bridge to better display the tourbillon. Likewise, the tourbillon is highly visible from the back thanks to a sapphire crystal caseback. Bulgari also hand-decorated the entire caliber and then rhodium-plated it for extra brilliance, while utilizing a special diamond setting technique to ensure a thin case while also maximizing the watch’s high-carat glitter.  

The Serpenti Seduttori Tourbillon is being offered with either a rose gold or a white gold case on a leather strap, or in white gold with a full diamond bracelet. Prices start at $78,000.

More for Women
While the tourbillon model highlights Bulgari’s 2020 offerings for ladies, look for at least five new Serpenti Seduttori watches in 2020, including at least one with diamonds and another that combines steel with rose gold and with white gold.

Also for women, Bulgari’s Divas’ Dream collection expands this year with a Divas’ Dream Minute Repeater Malachite, featuring a beautifully striped malachite green dial, surrounded by a diamond-set bezel. You may recall that this GPHG-award winning design is currently the thinnest minute repeater made for a women’s watch.     

Bulgari also adds two new gold Divas’ Dream watches without the repeater. One features a rich blue lapis lazuli dial while another is finished with a colorful peacock feather dial. 

Octo Repeater in Gold
Another highlight among Bulgari’s Dubai 2020 debuts is the new Octo Finissimo Minute Repeater in rose gold, powered by the ultra-thin (3.12mm) manual-wind minute repeater movement, the BVL 362 caliber. 

This all-new version ($170,000) of the much-heralded record-breaking titanium-cased Octo Finissimo Minute Repeater from 2016 now glows on the wrist with an impressive sandblasted rose gold case.

 As seen on earlier models, this rose gold edition retains the dial’s cutout hour and small seconds markers that serve to amplify the repeater’s chime. The pusher that activates the striking mechanism (at 9 o’clock) is wisely fitted with an “all or nothing” safety device. When fully wound, the movement delivers a 42-hour power reserve.

New Finishes
Throughout the Octo Finissimo collection, Bulgari in 2020 again focuses on the Italian design aspect of its Swiss engineered three-hand Octo Finissimo Automatic models. 

Looks for three new models in this collection. First, two emphasize their new satin-polished non-monochromatic timepieces. These are the Octo Finissimo Automatic Satin-Polished Steel (priced at $12,000, it is the first steel watch in the collection) and the Octo Finissimo Automatic Satin-Polished Rose Gold ($22,700). Both watches show off the thin BVL 138 Finissimo caliber (2.23mm) and feature a polished black lacquer dial. 

While the highly lauded Octo Finissimo Automatic in steel (which brings the entry level into the collection down to $12,000) features a nicely integrated steel bracelet, the rose gold version comes on an alligator strap. 

The third new Octo Finissimo, the Octo Finissimo Automatic in Black Sandblast-Polished Ceramic, features a new sandblast-polished ceramic case and bracelet and sandblasted ceramic dial. This monochromatic look alternates its matte and polished surfaces, an effect that allows the light to play off the case and bracelet angles