Blancpain

RayStantzPhD
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It's quite fascinating...

... even when they were producing 'volume' some years ago, they never had huge manufacturing resources. C'était toujours un atelier d'arts horlogers. Of course they could do 5 pieces of some automaton because it's almost like prototyping anyway. But mainly the HQ is a place for all the designers, artists and craftsmen, micro painting, stone cutting, engraving and so on.
It's a bit funny because Blancpain is quite small by industry standards and anyway within Swatch, but still 10x bigger than J*D. They needed compact and high quality base calibers with special adaptions and there came the Piguet heritage at Blancpain to the rescue! Marc Hayek controlling BOTH brands created a synergy there.
In case of my watch, you blow the diameter up by elongating the bridge's ends and fix a rotor bigger than the base movement, but you still end up with less than 42mm and around 13mm thickness despite the multi layered design, plus two barrels and almost 70h of power reserve. That's some Piguet magic that brought the slim 120h Léman watches to Blancpain in the old days.
Cheers, Alex

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