The Montblanc 4810 Chronograph Automatic, a good-value watch starting at €3,990, has all the visual codes of the 4810 series, with its red-gold-plated Roman numerals with a modern design, the star-shaped silver-white guilloché dial, and the circular dots of SuperLuminova on odd-numbered hours. The guilloché is very effective at catching the light and changing with…
Montblanc has created three limited editions of the ExoTourbillon Slim, with hand-painted maps. The editions are of North America (36 watches), Asia (38 watches) and Europe (36 watches), so that in total there 110 watches, celebrating the brand’s 110th anniversary. The watch itself is basically the same as the 4810 ExoTourbillon Slim, with its new…
Montblanc has now completed its set of watch families and from this year begins a process of consolidation, reinterpreting existing models. But this doesn’t mean that the brand is resting on its laurels: just in the 4810 range, this year there are three new in-house movements, accompanied by a lot of design work. The new…
Montblanc seems to be taking on Rolex head-on with this piece. It has the classic day-date format with day at the top and date near the crown, and the case’s water resistance, though not at Rolex Oyster standards, is still higher than most watches, at 5 bar, corresponding to 50 metres. Above all, it has…
This watch by Montblanc is the second, more prestigious watch in the new 1858 Collection presented at SIAR, Salón Internacional Alta Relojería, Mexico City, on 20 October 2015. It is a direct reference to the Minerva tradition, 1858 being the year of foundation of the watch company that Richemont Group purchased in 2006 and allocated…
The Montblanc 1858 collection was unveiled yesterday (20 October 2015) at SIAR, Salón Internacional Alta Relojería, Mexico City. The name of the collection refers to the year of foundation of Minerva, the brand that the Richemont Group purchased and assigned to Montblanc in 2007, and that had developed an important heritage of experience in chronograph…
Apple’s ambitions to enter the luxury sector with its Apple watch, one of the versions of which has a gold case like a traditional high-end watch, seems to have got the classic watch brands thinking. The quartz crisis is still a painful memory, and its destruction of about two-thirds of Switzerland’s watchmaking companies was due…
A watch with a moon phase indicator is a very familiar pattern, but Moongarden by Montblanc does something different. It also displays the name of each month’s full moon name, from Ice moon and Snow moon through to Harvest, Hunter and Oak moon (scroll down to read all the lunar month names and meanings). So…
The Montblanc Bohème Day & Night is a 34 mm watch (the first watch of this size in the Bohème collection) in steel, 9.53 mm in thickness, with a bezel set with 72 top Wesselton diamonds. The caseback has a transparent sapphire window revealing the movement; the crown is in stainless steel, with the Montblanc…
This watch has had a long development. It began in around 2006 from a concept by two young watchmakers, Johnny Girardin and Franck Orny, who were inspired by Transformers-type robots and wanted to create a watch that would change appearance and function. Metamorphosis I, presented in 2010, had a teardrop shape, and a transformation process…
Company profile: Montblanc was founded in 1906 in Hamburg as a company making pens. In 1977 it was bought by Dunhill, and subsequently became part of the Richemont Group. Montblanc Montre S.A. was founded in 1997 in Le Locle, Switzerland, manufacturing timepieces. In 2006, the Richemont Group purchased the Fabrique d’Horlogerie Minerva SA (founded 1858), with…
You think you’ve seen this watch somewhere before? In a way you’re right, because it is very similar to the Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Calendar (reference 1558420) launched in 2013 and replaced this year by the Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Calendar Meteorite Dial. Comparison with the Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Calendar The similarities aren’t just visual: the Montblanc piece is (like…
This watch is a limited edition version of the Montblanc Heritage Chronométrie ExoTourbillon Minute Chronograph, basically the same watch, but with a sapphire caseback decorated with a drawing of the São Gabriel, the ship that Vasco da Gama used for his pioneering voyage to India in 1497. In addition, the upper part of the dial…
This is a good example of Montblanc’s push to make complication watches more accessible. €38,000 sounds a lot, but for this sort of watch is an extraordinarily low price when compared to most tourbillons, particularly considering that it features the ExoTourbillon, a Montblanc exclusive rather different from the normal tourbillon, and a monopusher chronograph, with…
Montblanc’s products for 2015 confirm the brand’s strategy of attacking the market on two fronts, high-priced complication watches with in-house movements (reflecting the Villeret manufacturing unit, previously Minerva, where watches are made by hand using antique machinery) and very competitively-priced pieces based on third-party movements with small additional complications. The Montblanc Heritage Chronométrie Dual Time…
The Montblanc Bohème Perpetual Calendar Jewellery was first presented in August 2014 in Shanghai and so it was also part of Montblanc’s watches highlighted at SIHH in January 2015. It is the women’s version of the men’s perpetual calendar watch that caused a real surprise at SIHH in 2014, becoming the world’s most accessible perpetual…
At SIHH (January 2015) Montblanc confirmed their power and prowess as a watch brand, with an exceptional collection of new products ranging from sophisticated pieces with in-house movements developed at their Villeret manufacture, previously the historic brand Minerva, to watches with third-party movement and modern design to appeal to a younger section of the market.…
The 2015 Oscars ceremony gave a lot of fashion designers the chance to showcase their garments, and there were some watches as well. Presenter Naomi Watts wore a Giorgio Armani Privé gown, and she was wearing a jewellery bracelet that looked like a watch but was in fact simply the Wallis Simpson bracelet by Anna…
One of the things that is happening in the watch industry is that some manufacturers are beginning to make use of innovative technology to tell prospective customers about their products. At SIHH in January, Montblanc had a huge model of their tourbillon with cylindrical balance spring suspended over their display, very beautiful, but a fundamentally conventional…
SIHH (19-23 January 2015) is the first major watch show of the year, and even though it includes just 16 brands, all part of the Richemont group, it provides some indications on trends and developments in the watch industry. The brands exhibiting at SIHH were A. Lange & Söhne, Audemars Piguet, Baume & Mercier, Cartier,…