Bianchet
Brand History
Bianchet was born in October 2017 out of the meeting between Rodolfo Festa Bianchet, an Italian entrepreneur who had developed one of the first smartphone trading apps, and Emmanuelle Festa Bianchet, who comes from a family of French artists with backgrounds in journalism, music and painting. After selling his fintech company, Rodolfo Festa Bianchet decided to devote himself to his passion for watchmaking, founding, together with his wife, a brand that combines Italian entrepreneurial sensibility and French artistic heritage with Swiss micromechanical engineering.
The first prototype was presented at Baselworld in 2019, but it was in 2021 — with the launch of the Tourbillon B 1.618 at the Geneva Watch Days and the opening of the first showroom in Neuchâtel — that the brand made itself known to the public and trade press. The manufacture, with its operational base in La Chaux-de-Fonds, develops and assembles its own calibres entirely in-house, with hand-beveling work that the brand claims as a distinctive trait compared with mechanized production.
From its earliest days Bianchet has chosen to specialize in a single, complex complication: the tourbillon, often in its flying variant. The name of the main collections, B 1.618, explicitly references the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence, placed at the foundation of the movements' architectural proportions: an unusual design approach in the independent watchmaking landscape, which the brand presents as its identifying signature from its very first model.
