Montblanc

Montblanc was born in 1906, when engineer August Eberstein and banker Alfred Nehemias founded in Hamburg, Germany, a small fountain pen manufactory meant to solve a very concrete problem of the time: ink pens of the era leaked and required separate ink bottles. The company, registered in 1907 as the Simplo Filler Pen Company, quickly established itself as a byword for high-quality writing instruments, culminating in the 1924 launch of the Meisterstück line, which still defines its identity today. In 1913 the six-pointed white star was registered, stylizing the snow-capped summit of Mont Blanc seen from above, with its six glaciers: an emblem that has accompanied the brand for over a century and that, from the 1990s on, also migrated onto watch dials.

The link with watchmaking is relatively recent compared to the maison's history: Montblanc launched its first watch collection in 1997, with production starting in Le Locle, in the heart of the Swiss Jura arc. These are the years in which the brand, having entered the orbit of the Vendôme group in 1993 and then that of Richemont from 1998 (born from the merger between Vendôme and Rothmans International), began building a true watchmaking division alongside its core writing-instruments and luxury leather goods business.

The decisive turning point comes in the 2000s with the acquisition of the Fabrique d'Horlogerie Minerva in Villeret, in the Bernese Jura: a manufacture founded in 1858, among the oldest in Switzerland, specializing in chronographs and high-precision complications. Passed in 2000 to an Italian investment fund, Minerva was acquired by Richemont on behalf of Montblanc, with the integration completed in 2006-2007; in 2007 the Villeret site was renamed the Minerva Institute for High Watchmaking Research and became Montblanc's center of excellence for the development of in-house movements, to the point that from 2008 the brand began producing its finest calibers in-house, often presented under the double signature "Montblanc Minerva".

From that acquisition stems the brand's current watchmaking architecture: collections designed for a broad audience such as Star Legacy and Bohème coexist with lines that dialogue more directly with the Minerva archive, such as 1858 and the (now historic) Heritage, while the challenge of wearable technology has been taken up since 2017 by the Summit smartwatch line. The result is a catalogue that holds together the dressy elegance of the writing-instruments maison and the chronographic craftsmanship of Villeret, under the supervision of creative directors such as Davide Cerrato and, more recently, Marco Tomasetta.