Recently Cartier, the king of haute joaillerie, has started storming the bastions of haute horlogerie. Within this full-length feature from your October 2010 problem, WatchTime’s Joe Thompson explores the intriguing roots and bold future initiatives of Manufacture Cartier.
In April 2008, Cartier startled the timepiece world with the development of its first Geneva Seal watch, the Ballon Bleu Flying Tourbillon. At that time, some watch industry experts (including this reporter) considered it a stunt.
Cartier is really a genuine watch energy it’s either the 2nd- or third-best-selling Swiss watch brand on the planet after Rolex watch. (Omega and Cartier both tell you they are) However, notoriously French Cartier didn’t have tradition of creating mechanical actions in-house with no watch manufacturing roots whatsoever within the canton of Geneva, that is a key requirement to generate the allegedly exclusive Poin?on p Genève. Just how did Cartier obtain the Geneva Seal?
In 2007, Cartier’s parent company, Richemont SA, acquired the development facilities of Manufacture Roger Dubuis in Geneva, which focused on making Geneva Seal actions. Cartier quickly required over an atelier within the Dubuis facility and installed 10 master watchmakers there. The flying-tourbillon quality they created there, the 9452 MC, is dependant on a Roger Dubuis design. Voilà: Paris-based Cartier, with watch plants in La Chaux-p-Fonds and Fribourg, Europe, was changed right into a Geneva Seal brand. Technically it had been legit. However the question lingered: Was the expertise really Cartier’s or maybe it was Dubuis behind a Ballon Bleu facade?
2 yrs later, it’s obvious it actually was Cartier. What some saw like a stunt was really a go, a dent salvo announcing Cartier’s emergence like a genuine mechanical movement producer with serious ambitions in high horology.
Cartier watch manufacturing company assembles movement
A watch manufacturing company at Manufacture Cartier examines an analog movement throughout the ultimate stage of set up.
Cartier – putting together movement
Above and below: putting together and designing actions at Manufacture
Cartier – designing movement
Previously 2 yrs, Cartier has rushed with Usain Bolt-like speed in to the high-mechanical men’s market. It’s revealed 17 new men’s mechanical watches and nine new manufacture actions (including another Geneva Seal movement), a minimum of six of these created, developed, prototyped, and created entirely in Manufacture Cartier, the firm’s giant the watchmaking industry facility in La Chaux-p-Fonds. Included in this is really a new base automatic quality, 1904 MC (for Manufacture Cartier), the very first Cartier has created in-house.
It had been released this season inside a new Cartier men’s watch collection, Calibre Cartier. Quality 1904 MC would be the base movement for future Cartier automatic models, including individuals with complications.
Possibly probably the most surprising new development at Cartier – and also the best proof of its burgeoning high-mech might – was the presentation last November from the Cartier ID One, an idea watch produced by Cartier engineers that might be the world’s first watch that never needs modifying. The timepiece is packed with innovative systems and materials, inside and outside, for example hairsprings made from Zerodur, an account balance wheel made from carbon very, an oscillating weight covered with amorphous gemstone-like carbon along with a niobium-titanium situation. It’s presently ticking away within the research-and-development department within the manufacture underneath the engineers’ careful eyes and offers to deliver new advances in high horology for future Cartier watches. (For particulars, see “Cartier’s Concept: A No Adjustment Watch” within the The month of january-Feb 2010 problem of WatchTime.)
All of these developments have remaining watch enthusiasts and aficionados surprised, impressed, and confused. They identify Cartier more like a maker of jewellery, jewelry and purses for his or her spouses than of high-mech marvels on their own. What, they question, is happening?
What’s happening, based on top Cartier professionals from Paris and La Chaux-p-Fonds, is really a new chapter within the firm’s lengthy, frequently illustrious watch history. Cartier executives acknowledge that Cartier today is much more of the ladies’ line: it’s the world’s top producer of jewellery watches. Within the U . S . States, for instance, women’s models take into account two-thirds of Cartier watch sales. Cartier executives also acknowledge that they’re somewhat late towards the luxury-mechanical-watch party and, at this time, don’t bring lots of high-mech credibility together. Nonetheless, they explain their conversion to mechanical movement manufacturing is consistent with Cartier’s identity like a maison (French for “house”) whose craftsmen and ladies in the past produce its very own luxury items, with its heritage like a pioneer in men’s wrist watches with symbols such as the Santos and Tank.
