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Bulgari Steps Up
Guido Terreni, Managing Director of the Watch Business Unit, Bulgari Group.
Acquisitions are nothing new in the watch industry. Before the Second World War, small, independent makers joined forces for ‘strength in numbers’ and the wave of post-1990 mergers and takeovers have been mainly motivated by simple corporate practice: growth is everything. But as MD Guido Terreni explains, this is not the case for Bulgari and its absorption of two auteur houses, Daniel Roth and Gérald Genta. Ken Kessler
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The automatic Octo Chronograph QuadriRetro with white gold case and black cloisonné dial features retrograde minutes, date and chrono counters.
The companies Daniel Roth and Gérald Genta were – and are – notable for having been born during the quartz era, at a time when no sane individual would establish a new company producing mechanical watches. Regardless of what the two brands might ever do from this point onward, they rank alongside Chronoswiss, Franck Muller and the other members of the ‘first wave’ for their importance in the rebirth of the mechanical watch. Daniel Roth’s and Gérald Genta’s eponymous founders were, respectively, known for complicated movements and adventurous aesthetics. When they were acquired in the 1990s by the Asian retail empire, The Hour Glass, they complemented each other, both sharing premises in Le Sentier. It was this plum that Bulgari purchased in 2000.
Guido Terreni, Managing Director of Bulgari’s Watch Business Unit, understands the controversy that surrounded the company’s decision in 2009-2010 to refocus the individual houses’ images and marketing positions. For pessimists, it seemed to mean that the two brands would fade away, relegated to ‘double-branding’ logos on watch dials, with ‘Daniel Roth’ or ‘Gérald Genta’ below the dominant Bulgari. But this assumption ignores Bulgari’s original reasons for acquiring the Roth/Genta atelier, as well as the way the relationship between the three has evolved over the past decade. One needs to understand Bulgari’s history in watchmaking in order not to regard the venture as mere brand-gathering. Terreni explains that, before producing the
company’s own Bulgari-Bulgari and Diagono, “it was more a situation of designing watches for VIP customers who wanted customisation. If you look at our recent retrospective exhibition, you see certain samples of both female and male watches that are designed by us and manufactured with double-branding: Audemars Piguet, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Vacheron Constantin, Movado, Juvenia.” Although both brands’ names featured on the dials, it was not a case of joint ventures in the modern sense of comprehensive partnerships such as Breitling-Bentley. “We are talking about very few pieces, one-of-a-kind mostly. In the 1940s, we didn’t have a watch division, and pieces were made one-by-one for select clients. So the double logo is something that goes back into the history of the house.”
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Solid foundations Prior to acquiring Roth and Genta, Bulgari was already an established watch brand that had a huge market with the Aluminio and Bulgari-Bulgari models. But unlike the manufacture of today, Terreni says: “We were designers of watches and we were assemblers of components that were manufactured externally, like many brands at the time. I think the 1990s was a decade in which the business of watchmaking was still driven by brands and by aesthetics, while the content was not the main driver as it is today.”
The Bulgari Daniel Roth Tourbillon Chrono Rattrapante features a 46mm double ellipse case in rose gold with convex, split-level, white lacquered and satinbrushed dial, housing a handwound movement, tourbillon regulator, split-second chronograph, date and 48-hour power reserve.
Terreni is quick to point out that, “the industry developed over the past decade by growing the content, by growing the watchmaking expertise of the whole industry. And the brands that performed the best were the brands that were quicker and that had in their tradition that content and were ready to take off again. “Filling a generational gap of watchmakers – quartz interrupted the training – was not easy at that time and still is not easy, even though there are more skilled watchmakers available today than there were in those years.” Industry figures reveal that the part of the market that grew the most was mechanical timepieces priced above SFr.12-25,000. “That is the segment that was really boosted in the last decade. At that time, we were very strong because we were making far more pieces than we are today. We could say that the history of Bulgari watches starts with the Bulgari-Bulgari and it was boosted by the sports line that we later on called Diagono.” Although Terreni describes the pre-2000 Bulgari as an ‘assembler’, the watches were not mere re-casings of prosaic movements. “In the beginning, movements came from a strong partnership with Girard-Perregaux, or mechanical movements on an ETA base, Dubois-Depraz, these kinds of suppliers. We always customised the movements – we never used standard components. We were doing it to individualise them, but we were not doing it ourselves – we were doing it with our suppliers.” With hindsight, one might suggest that a Girard-Perregaux connection should have been sufficient to add much ‘street cred’, given the admirable pedigree, but this is one of the watch world’s footnotes, “because it was not on a large scale. At the time they didn’t have the capacity to do more.”
Bulgari Gérald Genta Octo Retro Tourbillon watch with 43mm pink gold case and black cloisonné dial with retrograde hours and minutes, exposed tourbillon cage at 6 o'clock, selfwinding movement with tourbillon functions and 64 hour power reserve.
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For 2011, the year the Rubgy World Cup was held in New Zealand, Bulgari and the ultimately victorious All Blacks joined forces to create the limited edition Endurer Chronosprint.
Developed from the Daniel Roth Chronosprint, the 56mm case is DLC-coated and has a dial featuring a Maori tattoo motif. The piece is powered by the in-house DR 1306 automatic movement.
Sharing the knowledge Acquiring Roth and Genta in 2000, “was intuition – it was an opportunity to develop the company internally in high-end watchmaking. It was not the initial idea to fuse the brands, but to upgrade the culture of the product we had for the male clientele.” Terreni describes the past decade as “step-by-step acquisition of savoir faire, of strategic know-how concerning the components. The Roth and Genta brands were managed completely autonomously from Bulgari; they were two separate watch business units. We started having exchanges amongst the brands because we had briefs to have movements made specifically for Bulgari models. You can see it in the Bulgari Tourbillon that we did with a Daniel Roth base, and the complications for the Diagono Moonphase with a patented development just for us. It’s not a movement we took from the existing assortment; these were brand new developments through the team at Le Sentier.” Concurrently, Bulgari was absorbing, “know-how on the rest of the components. At the beginning, we had acquired the dial maker– Cadran Design – that was supplying Roth and Genta. The developers of the dials are really entrepreneurs. We take out all the managerial and financial issues and we give the dial makers support and we let them express potential. “After one year, we moved the factory completely to a new building that was conceived for quality with the rooms devised so that the particles in the air would flow out. That was all conceived for the
quality of the dials. And Cadran Design is a dial maker of the highest levels of quality that you can have.” Bulgari does not absorb Cadran Design’s complete output. “The aim is not to take 100 per cent of the production. The integration is to acquire the know-how and to master the product at the end. “Once everything was complete from an understanding (of disciplines) point of view, this gave us a lot of competence in development. If you look at the male segment, we have grown basically at adoubling of the price in five years. Roth and Genta were operating at a very niche level, appreciated by a select clientele of watch lovers and connoisseurs, but they deserved a much wider audience. “Our segment was becoming very close to Roth’s and Genta’s clients. The bestseller we had was the Diagono 303, which has a Frederique Piguet base and a four-level dial inside a case of 75 components. At around SFr.12,000, it sells alongside the steel watches of high-end brands.” Although much smaller in 2000 than it is now, with 70 employees on the technical side, the Roth/Genta manufacture in Le Sentier possessed, “an extraordinary level of skills in making complicated movements, modules to go on top of a base calibre, or fully-integrated complications. Now at Le Sentier, we do all the development, construction, mechanics, QC, and majority of components internally. Decoration, finishing, chamfering, champlevé – I say without embarrassment, we are among the best.”
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The 10-piece edition, show-stopping Gérald Genta Tourbillon Saphir has a case consisting of a 53mm-diameter, 14.89mm thick sapphire crystal set with 45 brilliant cut diamonds. Water resistant to 30m, the piece is manual wind with 70 hours of power reserve.
An evolution of thinking On the vexing subject of incorporating Roth and Genta into Bulgari, Terreni defines it as, “an evolution of thinking – you don’t have everything in mind like a computer. The purchase of the two brands was done on purpose, to acquire knowhow. And then, when the brand was ready to integrate, in 2009-10, all the efforts of the group were to serve the best possible watch to the male customer. “Bulgari as a brand, and as an iconic style, can add a lot. I think it has refined the Roth and Genta collections. We worked with my design department to take away that overdesign that the Genta brand had. Genta was able to do fantastic watches from a brand point of view, from a style point of view, but it wore you out in terms of taste. What we did, if you look at the Octo Bi-Retro, the cleanness and the balance that you see on the dial, we took out all the edges, all the squares – the case was already iconic. You don’t need to have the eye falling on each single element of design, because it wears you out.” Terreni and his team worked on the dial’s legibility, “because the beauty of this watch is the iconic case plus the combination of the bi-retrograde with the jumping hour, which
Gérald Genta Octo Répétition Minutes Retro features a mechanical self-winding movement, minute repeater, jumping hours and retrograde minutes display in a 43mm white gold case with transparent caseback.
needs to be normalised in the reading of the information. And because of a design like this, we won the ‘Best Watch of the Year 2010’ award from the French magazine, Montres Passion. “The design is Italian, it goes down to our roots,” says Terreni. “It is our culture to be elegant, balanced by Swiss watchmaking expertise – you cannot have a fine design if you don’t execute it industrially. Otherwise it remains in the head of the designer and you don’t see it.” As for the identities of the Roth and Genta brands in the presence of the Bulgari name, the names will be kept alive as much for respect as for anything else. “The respect for models that already existed is there. With Roth, we kept certain collections that we also redesigned, but with a different scope. This is clearly the Roth shape, but we tried to add a bit of contemporaneity to the design.” With Bulgari’s catalogue now bursting with innovative complications, and with the models still clearly of either Roth or Genta lineage, Terreni feels that it remains only for Bulgari to consolidate. “It’s clear that the female clients know what they want of Bulgari, they have a clear a sense of the aesthetic of the brand. Yet there is a shift in the clientele.
We have women purchasing high-priced pieces, accompanied by men who weren’t finding pieces that appealed to them. So we felt that there was room for increasing the high-end. “From a distribution point of view, we have to improve because it’s a different game. From a content point of view, a cultural point of view, we are very strong in products. And we did it the hard way. We did it vertically, we did it internally, not just by asking two or three suppliers and assembling as we used to do 10 years ago.” What Terreni wants to do with the brand, “depends on what the client wants from a watch. If you only look at the technical aspects I think that is a cold relationship with a watch. What we are trying to do is to have something that is long-lasting. Long-lasting means tasteful – but not necessarily conventional. I don’t want to sit in a comfort zone. I want my client to have the guts to stand up to a design that is different from the others and have the personality to match.”
Further information: www.bulgari.com