Breguet, the illustrious Swiss watchmaker, can cast a spell over you. I know this is so. Back in 1999, a friend of mine from the online watch community read an in-flight magazine article on Breguet—about its rich history dating back to the 18th century and how it is still making modern high-end watches—and the story so captivated him that he decided to become a watchmaker. He promptly enrolled in a watchmaking school full-time, and is now a rising star at a major watch company.
Anatomy of a $189,000 Breguet Watch
Penta watch columnist Paul Boutros explains the technological innovations, and craftsmanship, behind two of Breguet’s latest models.
Breguet’s history is that inspiring. And now, on its 240th anniversary, the company has just introduced new versions of its Tradition watch series, where the movements re-imagine the firm’s elegant 18th century pocket-watch aesthetics. A new automatic Tradition has a cool seconds subdial counting down 60 seconds before snapping back; an all-new minute repeater delicately chimes the hours. But the brand’s essence starts with Abraham-Louis Breguet, universally considered the greatest watchmaker of all time.
Breguet was born in 1747 in Neuchâtel, now part of Switzerland, and was just 11 years old when his father died. He worked for a watchmaker during his early teens, and moved to Paris in 1762 to become an apprentice under a watchmaker close to the Royal Court in Versailles. Near the center of French power, Breguet was mentored by several important figures who helped pass on a profound grasp of science and watchmaking. Among them: Ferdinand Berthoud, a watchmaker famous for precision clocks and marine chronometers, and Jean-Antoine Lépine, whose eponymous movement paved the way for thin watches that could comfortably fit in a gentleman’s pocket.
Breguet founded his own watchmaking company in 1775 on the Quai de l’Horloge, on the banks of the River Seine near Notre Dame in Paris, setting out to technically advance watchmaking while placing equal emphasis on timepiece aesthetics. Thanks to the use of Lépine’s caliber, Breguet’s watches were, in the words of novelist Honoré de Balzac, “deliciously thin.” Breguet’s first major innovation was the Perpétuelle—the world’s first properly functioning self-winding watch. The Perpétuelle was perfected in 1780, and one of the first buyers was Queen Marie Antoinette, who purchased many watches from Breguet.
Famous for inventing the mesmerizing and gravity-defying tourbillon in 1801, Breguet also invented the pare-chute shock-protection mechanism—the basis for all modern shock-absorption systems protecting mechanical watches from damage when dropped. Perhaps less well known is his invention of the flat hammers and circular gongs used in nearly all minute repeaters, enabling striking watches to be thinner than ever.
Breguet also threw aside fancy ornamentation, common at the time, and instead created elegant and refined designs for his cases and dials. His numeral typography was made of slender and elegant Arabic numbers, known as Breguet numerals. In 1783, he introduced narrow pointed hands with an apple-shaped hole at their tips, now universally called Breguet hands. These timeless hallmarks of his style are still in use today, not only by the modern Breguet company, but also by brands like Patek Philippe and Cartier. Breguet collector Glen de Vries, co-founder and president of the life-science software company Medidata Solutions, says, “Are there really any hands more beautiful than Breguet hands? Are there really any typographic approaches more beautiful than Breguet numerals?”
Accomplished descendants took over the firm at Breguet’s death. His grandson and great-grandson were instrumental in developing the early telegraph and telephone, helping to launch their adoption across Europe. Their success in the electronics field finally led them to hand over the watchmaking company in 1870 to their top watchmaker, Edward Brown, while another descendant built Breguet Aviation, the firm that eventually became Dassault Aviation.
The Brown family led Breguet for the next 100 years, producing top-quality, Swiss-made luxury watches, while also supplying aviation instruments to Breguet Aviation, and military wristwatches, like the fiercely collected Type XX chronograph, to the French air force.
Enter the modern age. The jeweler Chaumet bought Breguet in 1970, and guided the brand through the low-cost quartz-watch revolution. Chaumet increased production but lost money on the brand every year until its bankruptcy in 1987, when the Bahrain-based private-equity pioneer Investcorp bought the watchmaker. In 1992, Investcorp acquired the movement maker Nouvelle Lemania, known for its exceptional chronograph movements found in many brands’ watches, including Omega’s legendary Speedmaster.
But the investment that was needed never happened under Chaumet or Investcorp, and Breguet’s sales and image lagged behind rivals’. Competitors like Patek Philippe and A. Lange & Söhne launched all new, in-house movements with state-of-the-art features, and offered them at lower retail prices than similar Breguet watches. That is when Breguet caught the eye of watch impresario Nicolas Hayek and his rapidly growing Swatch Group.
With the sales of Speedmasters rising fast in the late 1990s—the result of Swatch’s Omega turnaround (see Penta’s “Omega’s New Beginning,” Nov. 29, 2014)—Hayek wanted to buy the model’s movement maker, Nouvelle Lemania. Investcorp had united the firm with Breguet under the name Groupe Horloger Breguet; Hayek had to acquire the watch brand, as well.
Hayek did so in September 1999, and quickly realized that Breguet could be his vehicle to take on the industry’s most exclusive high-end watch brands. He promptly invested 15 million Swiss francs ($15.5 million) to refurbish Nouvelle Lemania, while integrating it with Breguet. Renamed Manufacture Breguet, the outfit could suddenly make entire Breguet watches, not just the movements.
All-new, in-house Breguet movements were created with the house’s signature invention—the tourbillon—at the core of Hayek’s early offerings. No slouch at promotion, Hayek trumpeted the 200th anniversary of the tourbillon’s patent date with a 2001 blowout party at Versailles. Sales of the gravity-smoothing tourbillon watches went from 150 in 1999 to 1,000 within five years. Other brands took note, and tourbillon production skyrocketed across the entire mechanical-watch industry as a direct result of Breguet’s intense marketing efforts.
Today, Breguet’s most prestigious tourbillon is the 2013-released La Tradition Tourbillon. Building on the original tourbillon from 1801, it incorporates modern materials throughout its in-house movement and components. The Tradition elements are mostly aesthetic, hearkening back to the brand’s original 18th and 19th century designs. It features, for example, an enormous tourbillon cage made of titanium. A constant-force mechanism ensures tightly regulated timekeeping as the watch’s power source—the mainspring—unwinds and loses energy, and that, too, affects the watch’s look. The tiered conical gear it uses is visible at 5 o’clock; a 155-link finely finished steel chain that connects to the mainspring is found at 9 o’clock. Available in rose gold, yellow gold, and platinum, it retails from $174,800 to $189,700.
But La Tradition’s innovations are mostly evolutionary. In contrast, the 2014 Classique Chronométrie 7727 deploys a revolutionary magnetic based escapement, which significantly improves timekeeping precision, and best captures, I feel, the technical ingenuity of Abraham-Louis Breguet. Marc Hayek, the current CEO of Breguet and other brands, and grandson of Nicolas Hayek, agrees. “The quest for precision was so important to him,” he says of Abraham-Louis.
In an unexpected twist, Breguet employed magnetism, the bane of mechanical watches, to re-engineer the most important component of accurate timekeeping—the escapement. Generally, the escapement’s balance wheel and its coiled hairspring oscillate back and forth to regulate the unwinding of the mainspring. The wheel itself is mounted on a shaft with pivots at each end, which for centuries have been inserted into pivot jewels. But since the pivots are in constant contact with the pivot jewels, the shaft is subject to varying amounts of friction due to gravity, and that hurts accuracy.
Breguet “broke free of horological taboos,” claims Hayek, and used magnetic force to redress the pivot friction errors. Two powerful micro magnets capped by jewels replace the pivot jewels, inducing a magnetic field in the balance staff. One more powerful than the other, the magnets effectively suspend the balance wheel, keeping it centered, its pivots merely touching the magnets’ jewel caps. Since the magnetic force far exceeds the force of gravity, frictional position errors are eliminated while overall friction is significantly reduced. The result is superb accuracy; an average rate performance of between -1 to +3 seconds per day easily beats the industry standard of -4 to +6 seconds. The watch, priced around $40,000 in rose or white gold, has collectors baying with excitement. Collector de Vries, an engineer at heart who loves Breguet’s focus on new technologies, purchased the Classique Chronométrie as soon as it was launched.
“When my grandfather took control of the brand in 1999, he had the vision to restore it to greatness by reviving its cultural and emotional dimensions,” says Hayek, 44. Following a similar path, the grandson has been busy acquiring original Breguet watches, displaying some 80 historic pieces in a museum at Breguet’s Place Vendôme boutique in Paris. Opened in 2000, the museum is headed by Emmanuel Breguet, the seventh-generation direct descendant of Abraham-Louis.
Smart move. Hayek is in effect buying in Breguet’s “shares outstanding,” and pushing the value of collectors’ stock further north. In 2012, for example, Breguet bought at auction a pocket watch, originally sold in 1814, for a record-breaking $4.25 million.
Today, Breguet offers five collections spanning ladies, classic dress, and the Type XX sport-watch lines, ranging in price from $17,800 to $734,000. Compared with the 4,000 watches made in 1999, a Bank Vontobel analyst today estimates 35,000 watches and sales of CHF720 million. Expect to see more cutting-edge materials in a new line of aviator watches, drawing on the brand’s aviation heritage. The firm’s biggest challenge, Hayek tells us, is to increase production to satisfy the brand’s growing demand—proof that the Swatch Group has Breguet well oiled and wound up.
