Entering A New Dimension

Bulgari celebrates the 10th anniversary of its award-winning Octo collection with the Italian maison's eighth world record, the thinnest mechanical watch ever produced. Meet the 1.8-mm thick Octo Finissimo Ultra.

- Roger Ruegger

-1.80 mm. One point eight millimeters for the watch as a whole, from the case-back to the top of the sapphire crystal. That's exactly half of an ETA 2829-A2 automatic movement. More importantly, 1.8 mm means that the Octo Finissimo Ultra (Ref. 103611) is an impressive 0.2 mm thinner than the previous record holder, the Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Concept watch from 2018. "Can we do it?' No sooner was the question asked three years ago than our teams answered, ‘How are we going to do it?',” recalls Antoine Pin, Managing Director of the Bulgari Watch Division. "This ability to meet challenges is embedded in the brand's DNA." And he adds, “As for the word 'ultra,' it expresses this desire to go beyond the limits, to play with extremes - an idea that we love in-house!"

To create the world's thinnest, and at the same time still reliable and robust mechanical watch, the designers, engineers and watchmakers had to start from scratch. Fabrizio Buonamassa Stigliani, Bulgari's Product Creation Executive Director, explained, “The challenge of this eighth record was the most difficult to overcome since we had to break the rules not only in terms of movement design, but also of the case, the case-back, the bracelet and the folding clasp. To achieve this degree of thinness, you not only have to review your way of thinking, but you must also draw upon a wide range of skills, play with multiple materials and adapt to a multitude of new constraints. In this sense, the Octo Finissimo Ultra is unquestionably the ultimate complication in this vast field of possibilities represented by ultra-miniaturization."

A traditional winding crown obviously would not have worked on a 1.8-mm thick watch. Instead, Bulgari uses two horizontally placed knobs - one for winding and the other for setting.