Paul Picot

Paul Picot was founded in 1976 on the initiative of Mario Boiocchi, an Italian entrepreneur linked to a family — the Boiocchi family, in fact — that since the 1920s had owned a watchmaking and goldsmithing business already carrying the Picot name. It was at that very moment, in the midst of the quartz crisis that was pushing much of the Swiss industry toward low-cost electronics, that Boiocchi decided to go in the opposite direction: he relaunched the historic name as a brand dedicated exclusively to classically crafted mechanical watchmaking, in open defiance of the industry's drift toward mass production. The chosen name, "Paul Picot", takes up — according to the account most widespread in trade sources — that of an artisan watchmaker active in the eighteenth century, capable of designing, finishing, decorating and assembling his own watches entirely by hand: a symbolic reference to pre-industrial craftsmanship rather than a direct corporate lineage.

The manufacture has always kept a dual Italian-Swiss soul: production remains entirely Swiss, concentrated in the Jura arc at Le Noirmont, while the historic seat of distribution and administration is in Valenza, in Piedmont, an Italian city with a long goldsmithing tradition. In the 1990s the Boiocchi group also took over the historic Levrette house, founded in 1832, broadening its portfolio without, however, affecting the main brand's identity. Paul Picot describes itself as a "partial manufacture": it does not produce every single component in-house as the great vertically integrated maisons do, but develops exclusive complications — rattrapante chronographs, power reserves, double dates, moon phases — starting from base calibers (largely ETA/Valjoux) and from restored historical movements, with annual production estimated at a few thousand pieces distributed across more than thirty countries, with Italy always its leading market.

The brand has cultivated over the years a recurring bond with the world of motor racing and sailing: already in the 1980s Paul Picot's chronographs accompanied offshore powerboat racing, with podium finishes in the Class 1 world championship, while in 2013 the brand became the official timekeeper of the ORC world championship aboard the TP52 Aniene. Nor is there a lack of tribute to Italian history: in 2013 a chronograph dedicated to the winners of the 1927 Mille Miglia and, in 2014, a model inspired by the Savoia-Marchetti S.55 seaplane, evidence of a constant attention to the industrial and sporting memory of its commercial country of origin. Remaining independent from the large watchmaking groups, in more recent years the brand's direction has passed to Eric Oppliger, who has guided it toward a higher positioning, with more elaborate finishes and increasingly original complications, while keeping intact the underlying philosophy the brand itself defines as "revisited classicism": respect for traditional proportions and aesthetic codes, without pursuing ornamentation for its own sake.

Independent sources on Paul Picot are scarcer and more fragmentary than those available for the great manufactures: much of the finer historical narrative — exact production figures, internal corporate changes, details on the early 1980s — comes from retailers, Italian trade magazines and the brand's own official website, with relatively few independent cross-checks; the information reported here is that on which the sources consulted converge with the greatest agreement.