When Less Is A Whole Lot More

Bvlgari celebrates the 10th anniversary of its Octo family with a trio of special ultra-thin timepieces.

- Lynette Koh

Getting on one's knees to beg competitors for a favour is not typically in the job description of a company head, but Bvlgari Watches MD Antoine Pin says that is what he nearly had to do during the development of the Octo Finissimo Ultra, the brand's latest record-breaking blockbuster. On a Zoom chat with The Peak, Pin gave an amusingly dramatic answer when asked about the biggest challenge that he and his team faced when creating the world's thinnest mechanical watch with a barely-there thickness of 1.8mm. (That's thinner than a 50-cent coin.) The most complicated challenge, he says, was dealing with the patent landscape. The competitive world of high horology has many innovations that, quite understandably, are protected by patents.

The more complex a timepiece and the more innovations it houses, the more likely you are to inadvertently encroach on another's intellectual property. That happened with the Octo Finissimo Ultra, which itself has eight patent applications pending.

Pin recalls, On Dec 22 last year, there were 10 of us in a room, and there was a final challenge concerning the oscillator. We had two options, and one of them was to go to a competitor, get on our knees and ask, 'Please, can we use this technology that you have patented?

The other option was for the team to redesign one specific component of the watch's oscillator. Luckily for Pin and his knees, this alternative worked. He laughs, I'm glad. The first option would not have been easy.

WINNING STREAK

That said, one gets the impression that Bvlgari does not like to do things the easy way. This year, it marks the 10th anniversary of the Octo family, which debuted in 2012 with the Octo L'Originale. With its round bezel and octagonal case, and an eight-sided structure inspired by the arches of Rome's Pantheon, that model set the stage for the collection's distinctive look.