MATHIAS BUTTET ON THE DISRUPTIVE PROCESS BEHIND FUSION

Mathias Buttet never intended to become a watchmaker. Trained in bionics—prostheses that interface with the human nervous system—he entered watchmaking by necessity, not passion. Yet this outsider perspective would prove transformative. At Nouvelle Lemania in the 1980s, knowing nothing about tourbillons, he created the first wristwatch tourbillon in eight months: calibre 187 for Breguet. The achievement established a signature: doing what hadn't been done before, precisely because he didn't know it couldn't be done.

His career reads like a masterclass in creative disruption. At Vacheron Constantin, he built the technical unit that would produce the Mercator and push the manufacture beyond classicism. At Franck Muller, he invented the crazy hours revolving tourbillon. In 2004, he founded BNB Concept in his garage, growing from four people to 200 before the 2008 financial crisis brought bankruptcy. But failure, as Buttet sees it, isn't the opposite of success; it's part of the process. Jean-Claude Biver understood this, acquiring BNB's team, patents, and equipment for Hublot in 2010.

15 years later, Buttet remains at Hublot as Director of Research and Development, now under LVMH. His materials laboratory has achieved what others deemed impossible: scratch-proof magic gold using boron carbide, vivid ceramic colours that shouldn't exist, sapphire cases machined to tolerances that challenge physics. His team of 10 polytechnic engineers—none from traditional watchmaking—operates on a philosophy of controlled chaos: buy second-hand machines, run 10 projects knowing three will fail, and never confuse hardness with strength. For a brand born in 1980 among watchmaking's dinosaurs, Buttet's approach offered legitimacy through difference.

You entered the industry at Nouvelle Lemania during the post-Quartz Crisis revival when complications became essential to mechanical watchmaking's survival. What was the atmosphere like being at the epicentre of this renaissance, working with legends like Breguet and Daniel Roth?

BUTTET: I actually wasn't supposed to do watchmaking, because I had studied bionics, that is, prostheses for the human body, prostheses that are linked to nerves. There were few opportunities in Switzerland to do this job. I went into watchmaking completely by chance, only because I had to work to make money. But I had never touched a watch before going to Nouvelle Lemania.

So that's part of the answer. And then the atmosphere, you imagine a Switzerland with 40,000 unemployed in watchmaking, and a few people like Gérald Genta at the time who started in complicated watchmaking by saying the only solution is to make complicated watches, not quartz. And that's how it happened.

And they were incredible visionaries, because they were full of courage. And they still managed to establish themselves after a crisis where there were 40,000 unemployed in Switzerland. It corresponded to 80 per cent of Swiss watchmaking.

Moving from Lemania to Vacheron Constantin meant transitioning from movement supplier to a brand. How did working under the weight of Vacheron's heritage change your creative process compared to the relative freedom at Lemania?

BUTTET: When you're with a movement maker, it's true that there is a certain freedom, but you have to say it very, very quickly because this freedom is generally linked to an order from a watchmaker who is asking the movement maker to do something.

So, if I go back to Nouvelle Lemania, the first thing I was asked to do was a tourbillon for Breguet. It was the first mechanical wristwatch tourbillon. Of course, it's mechanical, but the first wristwatch tourbillon, because they were pocket watches before, and it was the first time in the world that calibre 187 was released. So, I made a kind of signature saying: "This watchmaker is special because he does things we've never seen before." And maybe it's because I wasn't a watchmaker and didn't come from a watchmaking background. So, every new problem that was asked of me was totally new. And when I first heard the word tourbillon, I didn't know what it was. When I was told to make a tourbillon, I had no idea. So, we did it in almost eight months, starting from nothing at all.

In 1987 we managed to present a tourbillon watch for the first time. It was Breguet and Daniel Roth. Now, in terms of leaving Nouvelle Lemania, it was because Nouvelle Lemania was acquired by the Swatch Group, and at the time, I really didn't want to work for a group because I thought that the group would stifle the creative process.

I found a role as technical director at Vacheron, because Vacheron had the intention to make these complications internally and at the time, very few brands made their complications in-house. And they chose to do it at the Vallée de Joux. And this is how I ended up creating the Vacheron Constantin technical unit. And we did all kinds of work. At the time, it was sheer madness because it was pieces like a tourbillon, a minute repeater, a skeleton, or the flattest in the world. So, these were records each time.

And for Vacheron we created things that were unique to Vacheron. For example, the Mercator watch. It was something never seen before, but it wasn't very complicated. But at the time, it was a bit crazy. And, for Vacheron, it was a move beyond classicism. And each time I joined a different brand, I brought a little bit of... not madness, I don't like to say that, but new perspectives on a 300-year-old profession. And when you ask someone like me, who doesn't have a watchmaking background, to say, try this or that, of course I had to go down a route that, inevitably, the others didn't go down. Because if you're not in watchmaking, you take other routes. And that's what made me do special things each time. That's it.

BNB's rapid growth from four to 200 employees and 30+ clients created incredible creative opportunities but also operational challenges. Looking back, what did this teach you about the relationship between creative ambition and business sustainability?

BUTTET: That's a good thesis topic! So, when I created BNB, I had just left Franck Muller, where I had already created bizarre and interesting things, like the crazy hours revolving tourbillon, things that really marked their time, because it was a turning point in watchmaking, where we started doing little crazy things, and these watches weren't necessarily made to tell the time, but to play with the mechanism, and the passage of time. I had a good time with Franck Muller, but at that time in 2004, Franck Muller and Vartan Sirmakes were making headlines because they didn't agree on the management of the company, and since they were the two shareholders, it was a fight every day. In the morning, Vartan was in my office saying, 'Mathias, let's make your brand, we have to do something together.' Then in the afternoon, Franck was telling me, 'Please don't leave, we have to keep working.' After a little while, I said, 'I can't deal with politics all day, it's not my life,' so I launched something for myself.

I started out with two associates, B&B Concept. We started from nothing at all. We had no money, we borrowed money to create the company, we had no orders, nothing at all. The first order I got was from a company in the United States that we know well now, but that no one knew back then. It was Jacob & Co. in 2004. And Jacob Arabo, I met with him, without speaking English, but communicating by doing drawings at the airport. We made the first watch for him, a tourbillon. He ordered 30 from me, and it was with this order that I went to the bank to say, 'We're starting a company, I need cash to buy machines and things like that, will you help me?' The bank said OK, and it started like that.

There were four of us at BNB as you said correctly. We were in my cellar, in my garage, in my house. So it was a true start-up, like the image of a start-up you have in your mind. And very, very quickly, but it's a stroke of luck, the market opened up, needed extravagant watchmakers, and I responded to this madness. Right away we got 30, 40 people, 60 people by the lake in Nyon, and from order to order, four years later, I asked my two associates to leave the company. They got paid out for that, and I was able to continue on my own because we were not aligned in what we thought watchmaking was supposed to be. They were very classic watchmakers who came from Patek Philippe, so you can imagine the classicism, and I wanted something else, to do what had never been done and not do what other brands had already done. And so we grew to 200 people, we had to build a factory, etc., and that was from 2006 to 2008, and then all of a sudden in 2008, the disaster.

Let's say someone turned off the lights in the United States, the global crisis. At the time I was at the head of BNB, we had made huge investments to pay for a brand new factory, a workshop with about 30 CNC machines, 200 people with monthly wages. Well, I promise you that even with imagination, you can't invent money, so every month I had to reduce the size of the company, and then I also learned to temper my dreams with reality, and the crisis was above all a crisis of cash. People, companies held onto their cash. But for me, my company ran financially on cash flow, that is, I asked for a third of the order of any complication up front, and I operated with this first third, and we received the other two thirds of the order when we delivered the watches.

So when all of a sudden it tightened and companies started to manage their cash differently, invoices were paid at 60 days, then 90, then 120 days, and when you have suppliers and banks who ask you to pay your bills and then the cash doesn't come in, there is only one solution: to lay people off, to reduce costs as much as possible. We held out until January 2010, so almost a year and a half, two years, each month by reducing. All along, and that was a bad idea, I was the main shareholder, administrator, general manager. I wore all the hats, and when, at least in Switzerland, when you wear all the hats in a company like that, well, you risk going to prison, and I didn't really want to raise my children from a prison cell, so I declared bankruptcy. And then, at the time, I had as a client, among these 30 clients you mentioned, I had Hublot, who was not the main client, but they were the only ones who continued to pay during the crisis. I got along well with Jean-Claude Biver, and he told me, 'Listen, you're not going bankrupt because your company is bad, but simply because there is a cash crisis, and we're going to take over everything, we'll buy everything from the liquidation.' Then we 'moved', because we were located in the village next door, with a team of 30 people.

So I arrived at Hublot with 30 people, 31 including me, with the machines, with about 50 patents that Hublot also bought at the time, with galvanoplastic workshops, with things that Hublot didn't have, and what was interesting is that I think it was a win-win situation. I see Jean-Claude Biver like a ray of sunshine in the middle of the darkness of bankruptcy. It was also an opportunity for him to change Hublot. Instead of being a brand that bought and resold movements, cases and things like that, all of a sudden he decided to become a manufacture, and at the same time he eliminated about 30 competitors in complications, so it was a masterstroke from Jean-Claude Biver. He was an opportunist, but in a very pleasant way, not opportunist in the bad sense, but in the good sense. He really saved us, because we found a house where we could continue what we always did in our own way. You know we had a special way of working, and we kept it at Hublot, because it was new, and Hublot became a manufacture as soon as we moved. So I declared bankruptcy in January 2010, and in late February 2010, we were actively working at Hublot, just like at BNB.

You talk about that in terms of feelings. I think no one can truly understand what's going on in the head of an entrepreneur who's poured their heart into their business, and then suddenly someone turns off the light, and then they have to fight every month to get money, when it's the thing they hate most. My job is to do research, development, novelties, and at that time, my job was to beg for money to pay salaries at the end of the month. So I was delighted, let's say, to go bankrupt, because I think it's not human to bear this for so long. In fact, I think that bankruptcy put me back in my place, that is to say, we experienced extremely strong growth initially, going from four people to 200 people, in 30 métiers, and we were a start-up of the year, etc., we got a bit of a big head, and we thought we'd made it big, and in fact, life is not like that. When it's going well, you have to make the most of it, but you have to expect it to change. It's like the weather. You go out in a swimsuit on the balcony, and then a storm comes, and that's what happened with BNB. But I have to say that being at Hublot now for 15 years, with Jean-Claude Biver at the beginning, who still gave me a lot of freedom, telling me to keep being crazy, that's what's working really well, and we continued with another adventure, with the materials, with new things, and I needed new things, and I think the team that I brought here, who came from BNB, also needed this rhythm of novelty, of proposition, of things that are a little crazy. And in fact, that's the characteristic of Hublot products today, and I'm pretty proud of that, because I think we were at the origin of it all. I don't know if I answered your question, but it's a life experience that I wish for anyone with good intentions, because while it shakes you up and hurts a little at the beginning, for example my divorce was connected to this, so all the misfortunes happen at the same time, but it makes you more humble. It's a lesson in humility, a lesson in life, and that doesn't hurt. That's it.

The transition from BNB to Hublot wasn't just a career move - it was a rescue. How did experiencing both the exhilaration of rapid growth and the reality of business constraints shape your approach to innovation within a more structured environment?

BUTTET: So, there's really no difference in the mindset of people in the research and development team. People are as they are, we don't really change. What changed? The context. We had to have new ideas for BNB to work, but, as you said, with 30 clients.

And they were 30 completely different clients. When you have clients like Hermès, Chaumet, or Jacob & Co., you are at two extremes. When you have Hermès on one side and Jacob & Co. on the other, I think they are two styles that are not opposed, but that are really at the two extremes of watchmaking.

And so, when you have ideas, let's say it's easy. Because you have an idea, then you ask yourself which client it might work with. There are 30 clients and we consider a first one, a second one, and very quickly, the idea, we know which client to offer it to. Whereas when you change company and you only have one company, you only have one client, you must first have ideas and adapt them to the DNA of this brand. And it's not always that simple.

That's to say, there are some ideas we still had from before, but that we didn't bring up because they weren't sufficiently aligned with the Hublot DNA, but they were good ideas, innovations that could have served any brand. So that's what needs to be changed all of a sudden. Because ideas, we come up with ideas quickly, we have desires to do new things, and then sometimes you have to limit yourself a little bit. So I think it's very difficult to say why things happened. They happened because they happened. But when we started in materials, with magic gold, with ceramic, with sapphire, with all that, it was also the goal of creating a new DNA for Hublot and then to have ideas that were only for Hublot. It was suddenly easier to have created a new DNA and to put our ideas for materials in this category, which in watchmaking was not very common. Very few people used materials to make innovations. It's quite rare. And very often a brand uses another supplier of materials and it's still the case now. Very rarely do manufactures make their own materials. It's the case for Hublot because we did that at Hublot but it's very rare. There's Rolex that has a foundry to make gold. But I can't think of another example to give you because most of the time brands use suppliers of materials that are specialised in materials. And we did it in-house. The big difference is that we continued to make masterpieces, very nice complications. When you take the MP-05, that is to say the Ferrari watch, this tourbillon with an engine like a Formula One engine, it was these kinds of innovations that marked Hublot with La Clé du Temps, with different pieces like that. And in addition, we created this material unit that is specific to Hublot. There are few brands that can extend like that. We call it the art of fusion in marketing speak, but these are still materials unknown in the watchmaking world: iridescent gold, sapphire crystal and vivid coloured ceramics that can only be produced in-house thanks to our patents and the facilities we developed ourselves. It's really a first.

The question was the transition between BNB and Hublot. It all went really well. It took a few months to set up, but we quickly found a 'highway' so to speak, and we feel really at home. And above all, and I want to clarify that because it's important, Jean-Claude Biver, whom I respect enormously, you may not agree with him, but he's really someone I respect a lot as a human because he left the BNB team as it was, a team that had created a lot of things. He gave them a level of freedom that no one can imagine. The specifications we received were not 'we want this, this, this, and this' with specific things. He said, 'What are you doing for us next year?' So I think that for any researcher, any engineer, it's the most amazing way to receive specifications, being asked what are you doing for us next year? It's fantastic. So we started like that and I think we can't dream of anything better. And I'm not saying this because I want a pay rise at the end of the month from the boss because he's not the same boss anymore.

But Jean-Claude Biver was an exceptional person and in the transition between BNB and Hublot, for it to work both for the former Hublot employees and for Hublot as well, and it's not about one side benefiting over the other, but about both moving forward together, and that's thanks to someone like him. I think we all, on a personal level, owe him for that, and the company itself is also indebted to him because it was a huge turning point for Hublot.

You've said creativity requires permission to fail. How does working within LVMH's structure affect your ability to take creative risks, and what does "permission to fail" actually look like in practice at Hublot?

BUTTET: I'll try not to be too long but it's still my life. I would say that there are two key factors that are more important than others. The first thing: failure is allowed in a group like LVMH in my opinion, on one condition, that this failure doesn't happen too many times. You have the right to fail because when you're doing new things everyone understands that when it's the first time you have the right to fail. You have the right to fail. But this failure mustn't be too expensive. That's the first thing.

Because when you fail and there are a few million lost in a study that didn't work, and if this study cost a lot, it's normal. The company, the group, is managed by people who are more on the financial side and we will be blamed for having lost money. So the first way is not to spend too much. It's easy to say that but how do we do it? If I take the example of the research and development department, we need machines, we need resources. So instead of buying new machines, recently manufactured, I do the opposite. I take second-hand machines that we buy at auction.

After the machine is delivered we repair it with the team, we renovate it, we make some minor modifications and then we learn what this machine does, what it's capable of giving in addition to what it did before, and since it didn't cost too much we do a lot of tests and we allow ourselves to do tests because they're not new machines so we take more risks, so we find more things. Well, that's a mentality to put in a team, to make prototypes with pieces of string and second-hand equipment. It motivates the team, gives energy to the team which is beneficial. In addition, you do development without spending too much money so when we stuff up, you know when something doesn't work, well, we can say, 'Ah, well, we researched this but it didn't work.' Then people say, 'Yes, but how much did it cost?' Well, when we give the figure, they say, 'Oh, but that's okay, it's not too bad. We didn't spend millions on something that's useless.'

That's the first thing. And then there is a second thing. It's the team I built, the team I have around me, because we don't do anything alone. You always have to have confidence in your team and that the team has confidence in you, and then you do things well. There aren't many of us in R&D, around 10. And no one comes from watchmaking really. These are polytechnic engineers who are in mechanics, in robotics, in materials, but not from watchmaking. So, because there are 10 of us, I have about 10 projects underway. So I ask for funding for these 10 projects, but done, I don't want to say DIY, but done without spending too much money.

And when the finance director, and that annoys him all the time, tells me, 'Oh, but 10 projects, that's a lot, and you know very well that they won't all happen, couldn't we reduce the number and do three or four projects only?' I say no, because I have 10 and I'm sure there are at least six or seven that will work out. But I know there are three where we won't get there. And he tells me, 'But which ones?' And I say, 'Well, I don't know yet. I don't know yet which ones won't work, otherwise I wouldn't have started.' So the secret, I think, to get this way of working inside a group that is used to saying, 'I invest one franc and then I want to earn 10,' is to say, well, the group invests 10 francs in 10 projects. And then there are three projects that are not going to happen because we don't know why yet. But maybe competitors came out with something faster than us. Maybe we realised that it was too difficult, that we wouldn't get there, etc. There are a thousand reasons to give up a project. But you know, when you say, 'Wow, they invented this, they have patents, it's beautiful.' There is something that I always say to journalists: before inventing something that works, the inventor has invented 200 things that don't work.

But for the rest of your life, you do things that don't work. So I'll soon be on par with inventions and it's exactly the same thing. So again, I think it's a state of mind. And it's not a way of working, it's not a method. But it's a state of mind, a state of mind that we have to infuse into a team. And then when a team has this state of mind, well, it can live inside a group, a group that is financed and that wants returns on investment on each franc that it has deposited. And there we have the right not to succeed in a mission or a project.

And for the moment, and it's been 15 years anyway, that I've been with Hublot and therefore LVMH, it's going very well. And LVMH appreciates the work we do. There has never been any criticism of something that didn't work. Every time they tell me, 'It's normal that sometimes it doesn't work.' So, I hope I answered your question.

Your background spans movement manufacturing, heritage brands, and volume production. Hublot had limited horological heritage when you joined. How do you create legitimacy from scratch in Swiss watchmaking?

BUTTET: Yes. So, I don't know if I'm going to answer your question exactly, but it makes me think of something else. That is to say, Hublot, if we take this example, dates back to its creation in 1980. And when we talk about watchmaking, and when we want to compare what I call the dinosaurs of watchmaking, that is to say, Blancpain, Vacheron, etc., where they are lucky, where they are proud to say, 'We have been here since 1735, 1755,' and others since 1825. And when we arrive, we say, 'Oh, we are Hublot, we started in 1980.'

And it's as if a three-year-old goes to university and says, 'I want to play with you.' So there is a huge gap. There is a visible lack of legitimacy to do, for example, complications and things like that.

So if you want to exist in an environment where watches are historical, when we say, 'We're going to do a minute repeater,' for example. We know what it does. You look at your watch, it reads 10:10 a.m. You press a button and it goes ding, ding, ding, then it tells you it's 10:10 a.m. It's a completely stupid machine. Yes, the watch is beautiful, the minute repeater is an extraordinary, complex mechanism that's really interesting to work with. But the function is completely stupid.

There are no other terms. You see the time, you know the time, and on top of that, it tells you the time with sound. So I've always struggled to try and get a brand to dare to remove the time display and the visual minute display and only leave the sound. Because we're in an era where we look at our watch, we say, 'Oh, it's pretty.' We don't know what time it is, but to know the time, we press the button and ding, ding, ding, we hear it.

That's it. So when you're too young as a brand, and that's the case with Hublot, legitimacy can only happen through the modification of these complications or simply revisiting the environment. When we say, 'We're going to make watches with gold cases.' Well, Jean-Claude Biver arrives and says, 'Yes, but we have to do this in a special way. We need scratch-proof gold.' Specifications that had never before been given to me. And scratch-proof gold, no one did it. Rolex didn't do it. Audemars Piguet didn't do it. Patek didn't do it. But all of a sudden, the little Hublot does it. And how? Well, by being a little crazy. And I like a word in French, I don't know if you can translate it into English, but it's the word 'espiègle'. Espiègle, it's the children who are with Peter Pan, they are mischievous and impish. It's the desire to joke around, to mischievously say to someone we made scratch-proof gold, etc. And the same thing when you say, 'We're going to make bright red ceramic for Ferrari, bright yellow for Ferrari purists.' No one in the world had managed to do that. And all of a sudden, we get there. So to exist with a young brand like Hublot, inside a world that is as old as watchmaking, I mean, in an environment with dinosaurs, we must be completely different and propose things that are a little crazy. And that's what we did.

When you look at the MP, our MP collection of masterpieces, and the materials. And now we're managing to combine materials and masterpieces. I don't like to say we're the only ones, but despite everything, in terms of the proportion of everything we do, I think we've made a mark for ourselves and we can exist in this world by being 'espiègle', by being little jokers, mischievous.

You've said creativity is like a muscle and spoke about preventing stagnation. After 15 years at Hublot, how do you keep that creative muscle from becoming comfortable with its own success?

BUTTET: Wow. That's interesting. That'll teach me to talk rubbish! No, I'm kidding. Yes, and success, in fact, motivates us to keep going. That is to say, when you do research and the experiments that you started actually work and end up in a watch product, you have succeeded.

And in fact, this success is like a competition. I was talking about bodybuilding because an athlete will take part in a competition, get results, and depending on the results, will maybe correct their way of doing things, perhaps train differently. And this is the way we motivate researchers to find something special.

Because in school, you learn a lot of things, but you don't learn to do research. Research is a state of mind. It's like in childhood where for a child everything is new. And I love the people around me because I'm surrounded by engineers who, I don't know, you put them by a lake or the sea with sand, they're going to take the sand and then all of a sudden, there's something going on in their heads while everyone is on the beach having fun, sitting in the sun or doing nothing, they're on holiday. But this engineer, in his head, he's already playing with what's around him. And it's funny because it's often when you come back from holiday that's when the biggest ideas emerge. That's been my experience over the past 30 years.

As soon as you have a moment where these engineers, these people in the business, you give them a bit of peace. In fact, they're not calm, they're always thinking about things, and the calmer they are, the more they think. Holidays bring out ways to do things. It was a way to explain that it's a muscle that you have to work on.

Onto more things technical. Sapphire crystal cases seem almost impossible to machine - the material is second only to diamond in hardness. What's the actual manufacturing process, and how many cases break during production?

BUTTET: I'd like to correct something first because sapphire is not the second hardest material. It's wrong to say that. It's even very wrong. Diamond is the hardest, that's true. But the second hardest material in the world is boron carbide. And boron carbide is already used in magic gold. Magic gold is a matrix of boron carbide into which gold is injected. That's why magic gold is extremely hard. It's very difficult to make because it's the second hardest material in the world. That's why it's really very difficult. Now, sapphire is not the second hardest material in the world. It's hard, but it's not the hardest. So, manufacturing sapphire is not complicated. I don't like to say that it's complicated.

Marketing will say it's very difficult, etc. They're right in a way, but at the same time we have to be precise. Because we're talking about technology, we have to be precise. It's not the manufacturing that's difficult, but the finishing, the polishing. We have to make it very transparent, with sharp angles or rounded edges, etc., so that it doesn't distort the image when you look through it.

There's a lot of difficulty in making sapphire. No, not in making sapphire, but in creating sapphire watches. But the difficulties are not in the manufacturing, they are in everything that happens after manufacturing, in the finishing stage. It's transforming a piece of sapphire that's not very pretty into a very pretty watch. Between the two, it's not the manufacturing that's difficult, it's actually the polishing, for example, that's the most difficult thing to master in sapphire.

That's what you have to keep in mind. And we have to be very careful when we say that a material is very hard. It may be an erroneous marketing message that all the brands have been using for years. People say, 'Ah, but sapphire is very hard. Ceramic is very, very hard.' But when I hear the word hard, I want it to be unbreakable. And in fact, when we talk about something hard in materials, the harder it is, the more it breaks. Take diamond, for example. We say, 'Ah, it's very hard.' Well, yes, it's very hard, but if you take a diamond, put it on the table, and hit the diamond with your phone, you'll make diamond powder. So what's the hardest, the phone or the diamond? Well, now we say, 'Ah, well, the phone, it was more solid.' Obviously, the diamond is the hardest material. But that doesn't mean unbreakable. Ceramic is the same thing. And sapphire is the same.

So we shouldn't describe it as 'hard', but rather as scratch-resistant, resistant to wear, but not resistant to shock. Under impact it breaks very quickly. It's similar to steel. In its normal state you can't break it, but once it's tempered to make it harder, it becomes brittle. You can break tempered steel the way you would break a piece of glass. So this word, hard, must be removed from... But hey, marketing has already used it for 30 years by saying diamond, sapphire, and ceramic are hard. So yes, it's hard, but it's not a quality. It makes things more brittle. You have to be aware of that. So there you go, that's the first thing. And again, I don't remember the question anymore.

How many cases are broken during production?

BUTTET: Yes, yes, that's it. So, I feel like saying that it depends on the human being. And you'll tell me that's a stupid answer, but when someone is very professional and understands what I just said, that it's hard but it's brittle. And when someone does it consciously, they break fewer pieces than someone who rushes and says, 'Yes, but it's hard material,' and then they go all out and they break a lot. But to answer that, I think out of all the components, we have a good 50 per cent that ends up in the rubbish during the whole manufacturing process.

So it's a delicate material. The worst part is for the technician who does the work because in general, the piece breaks at the very end. That is to say, there are lots of different operations, it can last weeks, months, and then all of a sudden the piece will break, but it doesn't break at the beginning, it breaks right at the end of all the operations. So you have to be really mentally tough and resilient because sometimes it's months of a person's work that have to be thrown out. But I would say there is 50 per cent and sometimes there will be 80 per cent that have to be binned because nothing is working. And then there are times, a bit less, but on average, I think it's around 50 per cent of the total.

Not to mention the customers who end up breaking pieces the first day they have them. It's already happened. They leave the store, go home, and call us saying, 'I broke the piece.' Because what they do while wearing the watch matters. You wouldn't go gardening or tinkering in the garage with a sapphire watch. That's not what it's made for. It's better saved for a party, where the toughest thing it will endure is a bit of dancing or raising a few glasses. But not working in the garden or doing repairs in the garage. That's it. But the sapphire is extremely complex, extremely difficult to work with.

We produce synthetic sapphire blocks internally, which is a valuable learning process. When sapphire is sourced from Asia, and when a watchmaking brand orders sapphire from Asia, it often becomes a financial calculation to determine what percentage falls short of delivery expectations. Here, however, we manufacture sapphire in-house, right on the same floor where we create our magic gold and ceramic components. And so we know these problems well. But we can't just resolve them all at once because that's the very nature of sapphire.

Chemically speaking, the sapphire formula is Al₂O₃ and that makes it brittle anyway. And we can't change it. So the customers, everyone has to understand that this material is brittle. It's hard, of course, but it's brittle. And that's what makes all this beautiful. I don't want to say that the more beautiful a person is, the more fragile they are, but we're not far from that. That is to say, the person in the middle of the mountains, who is used to difficult things in life, is perhaps more solid than someone who lives in the middle of the city, who goes to the beauty parlour every day, and who, at the slightest illness, at the slightest cold, is going to be broken. So we're pretty much in the same context. Or when we try to be too perfect, we're fragile. Well, sapphire is beautiful, sapphire is expensive, sapphire is difficult to make, but at the end of the day, it's brittle. That's its flaw. And I think that, as humans, we're the same. But that's just my opinion. That's it for sapphire.

Hublot's first brightly coloured ceramic watch was the Big Bang Unico Red Magic - why red, and how does Hublot decide which colour to pursue next when each seems like a unique technical challenge? And what challenges do working with ceramic present?

BUTTET: So, first question, why red? Two answers. Coloured ceramics, when Hublot started looking at doing this, coloured ceramics already existed, but in pastel colours. That is to say, there was never a vivid colour. Why is it like that? Well, I'm going to explain very quickly.

The base of the ceramic used in watchmaking is called zirconium oxide. Zirconium oxide is a white powder. If you go through customs with it, you'd likely get arrested for carrying drugs because to the customs officer it looks like drugs. But anyway, it's a white powder. And in fact, this white powder, when you mix it with coloured pigments, it's like painting.

If you take a white base, add a little bit of red and mix it, what happens? It turns pink. And when you do that with all the other colours, the colours tend to be pastel, quite simply. It's like painting. So, when you want vivid red, it means you're only going to use pigments because there is no longer the white base that is ceramic. Because pigments are not ceramic. Pigments are metal oxides. So, you can't only put metal oxides because it's not ceramic. So, at most, you put 10 per cent. So, I go back to painting. Imagine 90 per cent of white paint and 10 per cent of red paint. You mix the two, what do you have? You have a beautiful pink. And in fact, in watchmaking, at that time, no one could make vivid colours. And we asked all the specialists at the time why. This is the second answer to the question. We asked because at the time, it coincided with wanting to get a licence from Ferrari to make Ferrari watches by Hublot.

And what does everyone associate with Ferrari? It's red cars. And in the head of Ferrari purists, it's yellow cars. But a very Ferrari red, very bright, and a bright yellow too. And when Jean-Claude Biver had the idea to approach Ferrari, I was there during the discussions with Jean Todt at Ferrari, he said, 'We're not going to work with Hublot because you're too young as a brand and you don't have enough sales outlets globally. So we're not going to do it.' And then Jean-Claude said, 'Yes, but we're working on a ceramic that would be a Ferrari red ceramic and no one can offer that except us.'

And then Jean Todt said, 'OK, if you do the red, why not? Maybe we'll see what happens.' So that's where it all started, but we discovered how to do the red. So we filed patents for that. We discovered how to do not only red, not only yellow, but we discovered how to make bright colours. So we created machines where the technology heats the ceramic without burning the pigments inside. Because that's what was happening. That's why the others couldn't do it. How did we go about not burning them? Well, we heated to the maximum temperature, which is not enough for the ceramic to be very hard, and we added pressure. So by mixing heat and pressure, we can put enough energy in the ceramic to make it hard, but to keep the colours. That's a very quick summary of the technology, but we patented this technology. We're still the only ones to be able to make bright colours in ceramics. Others make ceramic colours, that's normal, but no bright colours.

Our patents protect our technology. So what is extremely difficult in ceramics is the temperatures that we have to use. To be specific, we heat up to 1,720 degrees, and at 1,720 degrees, all the colours burn. In any case, they oxidise and change colour during heating. So what we did with our method is to heat up to 900 degrees, but still get very, very hard ceramics, because we press, and we don't just press with our hands, we add about 600 tonnes of pressure. 600 tonnes, it's like putting 600 cars on top of each other, pressing down at the same time on the ceramic, while it's heating up.

So the temperature and pressure are extreme. And so, the difficulty of ceramics was to find the idea, the combination that no one had found, to be able to preserve the brightness of the colours, and not lose them with the high temperatures. And that's what we did.

From King Gold's unique copper content to carbon fibre composites, each new material brings its own challenges - oxidation, brittleness, thermal expansion. How do you decide which materials are worth the inevitable headaches, and what's the real technical advantage versus marketing advantage?

BUTTET: OK. So, when we talk about corrosion with materials, firstly it's something that is natural, it's normal. All materials will at some point oxidise. That's nature. You can't do anything about it. Now, we can slow down, we can stop oxidation in certain materials.

And what do we do when we make new materials, or even when we use materials like gold, which has been used for a long time? Before making watches and putting them on the market, a multitude of tests are run on the materials. First, on the material itself, and then this material in relation to the other materials that are used in the watch. Because the watch never has just one material. The watch, for example, has gold, but with steel, with titanium, with all that. And we have to analyse whether, if we combine titanium with another material, there will be interactions between the two, electron exchanges. If such exchanges occur, they can lead to staining, oxidation, and other effects.

But we test it. And we have machines, devices, and a measuring bench to simulate accelerated ageing, to see what will happen with the client. The day the client sweats a lot, it's hot, it's more humid, they change country, etc. All this is tested before making watches. And we don't put a watch on the market. In any case, we must not put a watch on the market that has not been tested because the conditions of wearing a watch are very different from one place to another around the world.

The client's perspiration is not the same in southern countries compared to the north, etc. Already just with that difference, the acidity is not the same, the humidity is not the same. I like to say that oxidation has always been a watchmaker's enemy. Because in the movement, for example, if there is oxidation, well, the movement will stop. When something is affected by oxidation, it will deteriorate and the watch, instead of doing tick-tock, it does plick-plock and then it's all over. So, oxidation really is the enemy.

Now, I like to say that at Hublot, again we are a little weird, a little crazy, we use oxidation to sell pieces. If I take sapphire, oxidation allows us to create the colour in sapphire. If there was no oxidation, there would be no colour in the ceramic, etc. So we are able to use oxidation as an ally who helps us to make beautiful materials. So it's a question of management.

So, in the question where you talked about the difference between marketing and technique, well, I don't want to talk about a daily fight, but obviously, marketing, via sales, driven by the need to market something and make money, wants sometimes to tell beautiful stories, but that are not 100 per cent true. And that, sometimes, is a real problem. At Hublot, it's okay. But there are other brands where all of a sudden I read things that are terrible because what is said is almost the opposite of what happens in reality. So we have to be very careful and I think at Hublot we've made an effort on this. The marketing and technical teams at Hublot talk to each other. And then, they will show each other, for example, if marketing writes a text, it will ask for the technical team's opinion. Because, obviously, the technical people will be too honest about what's on their mind. That is to say, it's often the annoying parts that the engineer will love in a project. It is almost as if he loves the bad moments the most. It is the battle he engages in to make it work. Whereas the marketing people, they want to gloss over these things. The proof, earlier you told me, 'The sapphire is very hard.' I told you, yes, it's nice, but it's terrible that it's hard. Because if it's hard, it's brittle. And that's not a marketing message. Marketing will never say that. Because we broke the watch. We must not say it. And when we talk to someone who comes from the technical side, they will say, 'Yes, the sapphire is nice, it's very pretty, it's beautiful, but it breaks quickly.' And then the journalist will say, 'How does it break? And you told me it's the second hardest material in the world.' No, it's not the second hardest material. You see, there is a world of difference between the marketing message and engineers and technicians. And it's normal. It's like an online marriage. The photo I put on the site to introduce myself will show I'm a handsome man, I'm looking for a beautiful woman. I'm not going to put an ugly photo. I'm going to put a good photo.

And when you look at the photos on dating sites and things like that, the photos are often retouched. And when you see the reality, both sides can be disappointed. And that's the difference between being human, between reality, and what marketing presents as reality. I think we would often be happier if we accepted reality instead of being misled by marketing. Perhaps one of the flaws of our civilisation today is that we struggle to accept imperfections. You have to live with the things that don't go well. You don't have to sing a song when there is the sound of bombings in the background. That's my opinion, you have to tell the truth. When it goes wrong, we do everything to make it right, but we don't say it's going well. We have to correct it, but that's it. There is always this balance between marketing and the reality of the technique. And when there are no lies, it's perfect. It works everywhere on the market, it works everywhere. And when there starts to be too much of a difference, well, all the troubles start, with the product, the communication. It's my opinion, of course, it's not the policy of the company or the group, but that's it. Marketing, in my opinion, to be correct, must tell the truth. So to put words on the truth, but it must tell the truth. And that's not always easy.

Yes, stories are often beautiful, but they have to be true. The stories we tell to children, for example, when we say, 'The big bad wolf will eat you if you do this or that,' there is a little bit of truth in it each time. One truth is enough, then we can paint beautiful colours around this truth, etc., but for me, marketing's job is to dress up the reality. It's getting someone to take a medicine that tastes terrible but will make them better. That's what marketing is for me. It's creating packaging that will make you try it anyway. And then, if there is truth in it, the client will say, 'OK, I appreciate that, I'm going to take this medicine because it doesn't taste good, but it will help me get better.'

Well, a watch or an art object, it's the same thing. If you say it's beautiful, it's incredible, it's extraordinary, and then the first time you put on your watch, it doesn't work or it doesn't tell the time. You'll never trust the marketing again. So the marketing must be respectful of the technique. It has the right to disguise it, to put make-up on it, to dress it up, but it must respect the truth behind it. A bride may be beautifully dressed and perfectly made up, yet she remains the woman she truly is. Marketing should work the same way to amplify and highlight genuine beauty and qualities, not to deceive, never to claim someone is highly intelligent when in reality they are not.

The client must not discover the reality after having made a purchase. For me, that's fundamental. We must remain true. We must always tell the truth. With added colours, but the truth. Thank you.