Automatic movements, which harness the wearer’s movements to wind a watch, have been one of the greatest developments in watchmaking. But even as they improved a watch’s power reserve, the mechanism required a bulky case.
Recently that has changed, with the development of scaled-down automatic movements from brands such as Bulgari, Chopard, Piaget, Grand Seiko and Vacheron Constantin that can be tucked inside substantially smaller watches, the sizes that traditionally were produced for women but recently have become popular with men, too.
Bulgari’s BVS100 is the latest, and has one of the smallest of these movements. The company’s watch division, which specializes in ultrathin movements, introduced it in February in the previously all-quartz Serpenti collection, noting it was time to offer an option that would upgrade the collection.
“In a certain price bracket, starting at around $5,000, people are not buying time or just a nice watch,” said Jean-Christophe Babin, Bulgari’s chief executive. “They’re buying craftsmanship, artisanship, authenticity and that means mechanical movements. Men don’t even consider quartz anymore. And now we see the same trend with women.
“Think of it this way: Why would a jewelry watch that is sold anywhere between $8,000 and $800,000 and takes anywhere between 400 to 3,000 hours of manual work to create, have a $15 quartz movement?”
While it seems logical that switching from a quartz battery to an automatic movement would produce a considerable increase in price, the cost difference actually is minimal because there are so many other factors affecting the price of a luxury watch: case material, diamond application, finish and more.
Bulgari’s Serpenti Seduttori in two-tone steel and gold with the BVS100 movement is $16,800, for example, while the quartz two-tone version is $13,500 (both have diamond bezels). And Chopard’s Happy Sport 30 millimeter in its proprietary Lucent Steel alloy, which uses a similarly scaled-down automatic movement, the 09.01C, is $8,560, while the quartz version is $6,030.
Shrinking and Sharing
Creating these new movements has been a technical challenge, because the smaller a movement gets, the more complicated it becomes to engineer.
“It isn’t just a question of shrinking it,” Mr. Babin said.“ It’s about balancing the diameter and the thickness, eliminating some components, refining the gear train and ending up with a decent power reserve.
“The BVS100 measures 19 millimeters in diameter and 3.9 millimeters thick, with a power reserve of 50 hours. A manual movement has a power reserve of 30 or maybe 40 hours. And then it stops and you have to reset it.”
Developing the BVS100 was partly a commercial decision. “We were losing more or less half the potential of the Serpenti collection by not offering an automatic,” Mr. Babin said. “The new movement will unleash the full potential of the collection and increase sales in the Serpenti line by 50 to 75 percent.”
Bulgari’s parent, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, does not release brand revenues, but Mr. Babin said that he hoped the new movement eventually would ensure that half of all Bulgari watch sales were smaller models, up from 35 percent now. It also may increase such sales for other brands within the LVMH group, including Tiffany & Company, TAG Heuer, Zenith, Hublot and Louis Vuitton.
Piaget, like Bulgari, specializes in ultrathin movements and is readying a new, scaled-down automatic caliber, expected to be introduced sometime next year in Sixtie, the quartz-powered collection it introduced at Watches and Wonders Geneva this year.
“More women are asking for automatic movements, so it is important that we develop one for the new collection,” said Stéphanie Sivrière, Piaget’s creative director for jewelry and watches. “We will also use it for other collections that now only have quartz movements, including some jewelry watches. We have a lot of feedback from the markets and this is a true demand from Piaget clients.”
Time Has Come
Among the other brands that have developed scaled-down automatics over the past five years are Vacheron Constantin, which in 2020 introduced the caliber 1088/1 (20.80 millimeters wide and 3.83 millimeters thick) in its Égérie collection, and Grand Seiko, which in 2019 introduced the caliber 9S27 (20 millimeters wide and 4.49 millimeters thick) in its Elegance collection.
In 2023, Cartier added the caliber 1899MC (20.8 millimeters wide by 3.63 millimeters thick), to be used mainly in the Tank Américaine and Tank Louis Cartier models, new iterations of which were introduced at Watches and Wonders Geneva.
Chopard, an independent Swiss brand owned and operated by the Scheufele family, presented a scaled-down automatic movement in 2018, the caliber 09.01C (20.4 millimeters in diameter and 3.65 millimeters thick).
“Developing the 09.01C was an interesting project that was quite a challenge,” said Karl-Friedrich Scheufele, the brand’s co-president, “but it has turned out to be a very reliable and very good movement. It has been so successful we have produced 50,000 or 60,000 of them since launching it.”
Mr. Scheufele said the brand wanted an alternative to the quartz movements in its Happy Sport collection, the latest version of which was introduced at Watches and Wonders. “Quartz watches need batteries and do not ensure the same lasting value if passed on from generation to generation,” he said. “At one point even finding suitable batteries may be a problem. A mechanical movement can basically always be repaired.”
While this mini-revolution in movement design has been geared to smaller watches, the results have been turning up in the larger models traditionally sold to men, including the 36-millimeter watches of Chopard’s Alpine Eagle, a sports watch collection designed by Mr. Scheufele’s son, Karl-Fritz, who is the house’s business and client strategy manager.
Mr. Scheufele noted that there recently had been more demand for watches that were 39 millimeters or even 36 millimeters in diameter, down from the 43 millimeter or 42 millimeter sizes popular in past years. “So smaller-sized movements like the 09.01C can be helpful, especially looking at the younger male watch collector,” he said.
But creating a new movement to attract such youthful buyers wasn’t initiated by the younger generation, Mr. Scheufele said — his father, Karl, had long advocated the idea.
“In the 1950s, when he started his career in the watchmaking industry, small mechanical movements for sophisticated ladies’ watches were a more common occurrence,” Mr. Scheufele explained. “After the quartz crisis in the 1970s, companies producing such movements had disappeared.
“For many years my father had wanted to revive and expand on this tradition at Chopard.”
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