Largely credited for catapulting Tudor to success and making it the cult must-have timepiece on every collector’s list, can Cerrato replicate this success with Montblanc?
Davide Cerrato.
I was already looking over at Montblanc when I was at Tudor. I was quite impressed with the novelties released and the path of development of the brand. It was really booming and you could really feel the energy of [CEO for Montblanc] Jérôme Lambert behind all this.
Some products that I liked were… the 1858 line, and in particular the Chronograph Tachymeter with a monopusher, with its strong vintage look and reference to the 1930s. The TimeWalker ExoTourbillon Minute Chronograph caught my attention for its design and technical dimension, and for the fact of combining a chronograph with a tourbillon isn’t the most evident thing for sports watches.
But what really caught all my attention was Minerva. I knew a little about the manufacture and its story, but I wasn’t aware of the richness and depth of this asset. It produced an incredible array of stopwatches and counters from 1858 to the first half of the 20th century, and it was really ahead in terms of technology. Because a single family has owned it for the most part of its life, everything has been preserved. We have an incredible amount of watches from any period of its story, stopwatches, components, original movements; it’s quite unique. Even the watches in the museum are in mint condition.
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We launched last year the TimeWalker Pythagore, an ultra-light watch. It is linked to dematerialisation. We were investigating technological, light materials with our R&D department, and we found a clever way of coupling ITR2, a special, composite material, with Kevlar. This gives two main advantages: lightness and rigidity. It’s four times lighter than steel, eight times lighter than titanium. In terms of movement, we decided to take the well-known Minerva movement from the 1930s, Pythagore, and skeletonised it with sophisticated hand work and hand finishing.
To keep the prices of our watches competitive, we need to integrate in the beginning of the development the dimension of cost, so that you need to include the price dimension the technical solutions you will need during the development process. That’s the only way you can reach that price in the end.
Read the full story in the August issue of Jewels & Time, out on newsstands now.