MOVEMENT: Japanese OS Quartz Working Chronograph CASE DIAMETER: 45mm THICKNESS: 16mm DIAL COLOR: Black CF Dial with Black Subdials with Stick Markers CASE MATERIAL: Black PVD Coated on Solid Stainless Steel 316L BRACELET: Nylon Strap with Tang Buckle FRONT GLASS: Sapphire Crystal with Double AR Coating BACK GLASS: Solid Case Back with detailed engraving BEZEL: Uni-directional Bezel HACK MOVEMENT: Yes CLASP TYPE: Tang Buckle DATE INDICATOR: At 6:00 GMT HAND: OTHER REMARKS: Water Resistant Running Secs @ 6:00 Top Pusher starts/stops chronograph Botttom Pusher resets Chronograph **Please read webstore Q&A before you use the chronograph functions.

MOVEMENT: Japanese OS Quartz Working Chronograph CASE DIAMETER: 45mm THICKNESS: 16mm DIAL COLOR: Black CF Dial with Black Subdials with Yellow Numerals CASE MATERIAL: Black PVD Coated on Solid Stainless Steel 316L BRACELET: Nylon Strap with Tang Buckle FRONT GLASS: Sapphire Crystal with Double AR Coating BACK GLASS: Solid Case Back with detailed engraving BEZEL: Uni-directional Bezel HACK MOVEMENT: Yes CLASP TYPE: Tang Buckle DATE INDICATOR: At 6:00 GMT HAND: OTHER REMARKS: Water Resistant Running Secs @ 6:00 Top Pusher starts/stops chronograph Botttom Pusher resets Chronograph **Please read webstore Q&A before you use the chronograph functions.

  MOVEMENT: Japanese OS Quartz Working Chronograph CASE DIAMETER: 45mm THICKNESS: 16mm DIAL COLOR: Black Dial with Black Subdials CASE MATERIAL: Solid Stainless Steel 316L BRACELET: Nylon Strap with Tang Buckle FRONT GLASS: Sapphire Crystal with Double AR Coating BACK GLASS: Solid Case Back with detailed engraving BEZEL: Uni-directional Bezel HACK MOVEMENT: Yes CLASP TYPE: Tang Buckle DATE INDICATOR: At 6:00 GMT HAND: OTHER REMARKS: Water Resistant Running Secs @ 6:00 Top Pusher starts/stops chronograph Botttom Pusher resets Chronograph **Please read webstore Q&A before you use the chronograph functions.

  MOVEMENT: Japanese OS Quartz Working Chronograph CASE DIAMETER: 45mm THICKNESS: 16mm DIAL COLOR: Black CF Dial with Black Subdials with Stick Markers CASE MATERIAL: Black PVD Coated on Solid Stainless Steel 316L BRACELET: Nylon Strap with Tang Buckle FRONT GLASS: Sapphire Crystal with Double AR Coating BACK GLASS: Solid Case Back with detailed engraving BEZEL: Uni-directional Bezel HACK MOVEMENT: Yes CLASP TYPE: Tang Buckle DATE INDICATOR: At 6:00 GMT HAND: OTHER REMARKS: Water Resistant Running Secs @ 6:00 Top Pusher starts/stops chronograph Botttom Pusher resets Chronograph **Please read webstore Q&A before you use the chronograph functions.

MOVEMENT: Japanese OS Quartz Working Chronograph CASE DIAMETER: 45mm THICKNESS: 16mm DIAL COLOR: Black CF Dial with Black Subdials with Yellow Numerals CASE MATERIAL: Solid Stainless Steel 316L BRACELET: Nylon Strap with Tang Buckle FRONT GLASS: Sapphire Crystal with Double AR Coating BACK GLASS: Solid Case Back with detailed engraving BEZEL: Uni-directional Bezel HACK MOVEMENT: Yes CLASP TYPE: Tang Buckle DATE INDICATOR: At 6:00 GMT HAND: OTHER REMARKS: Water Resistant Running Secs @ 6:00 Top Pusher starts/stops chronograph Botttom Pusher resets Chronograph **Please read webstore Q&A before you use the chronograph functions.

    MOVEMENT: Japanese OS Quartz Working Chronograph CASE DIAMETER: 45mm THICKNESS: 16mm DIAL COLOR: Black CF Dial with Black Subdials with Red Numerals CASE MATERIAL: Solid Stainless Steel 316L BRACELET: Nylon Strap with Tang Buckle FRONT GLASS: Sapphire Crystal with Double AR Coating BACK GLASS: Solid Case Back with detailed engraving BEZEL: Uni-directional Bezel HACK MOVEMENT: Yes CLASP TYPE: Tang Buckle DATE INDICATOR: At 6:00 GMT HAND: OTHER REMARKS: Water Resistant Running Secs @ 6:00 Top Pusher starts/stops chronograph Botttom Pusher resets Chronograph **Please read webstore Q&A before you use the chronograph functions.

MOVEMENT: Japanese OS Quartz Working Chronograph CASE DIAMETER: 45mm THICKNESS: 16mm DIAL COLOR: Black CF Dial with Black Subdials with Yellow Numerals CASE MATERIAL: Black PVD Coated on Solid Stainless Steel 316L BRACELET: Nylon Strap with Tang Buckle FRONT GLASS: Sapphire Crystal with Double AR Coating BACK GLASS: Solid Case Back with detailed engraving BEZEL: Uni-directional Bezel HACK MOVEMENT: Yes CLASP TYPE: Tang Buckle DATE INDICATOR: At 6:00 GMT HAND: OTHER REMARKS: Water Resistant Running Secs @ 6:00 Top Pusher starts/stops chronograph Botttom Pusher resets Chronograph **Please read webstore Q&A before you use the chronograph functions.

Jehan-Jacques Blancpain

The initial decision to enter the promising watchmaking trade was Jehan-Jacques Blancpain’s. He perceived perhaps more clearly than others the advantages which this new activity offered. There is little doubt that by 1735, for instance, the first floor of his house in the village of Villeret, still standing today, served as a watchmaking workshop. The venture owed its rapid rise to success at least in part to its generous policy with respect to apprenticeships. Jehan-Jacques and his successors always saw it as their duty to pass on their craft know-how to the next generation.

On the road to growth

As the years passed, Jehan-Jacques Blancpain worried about his succession. While his son Isaac did occasionally work with his father, he wanted to continue teaching school. But the company’s steadily growing success called for someone fully committed to the business – Isaac’s son David-Louis, born on December 21, 1765, fitted the bill. He joined the company late in the century, delivering Blancpain watches to customers in neighbouring countries. Whenever the workshops had turned out six dozen watches, he would set off to sell them in the cities and towns of France and Germany.

The Manufacture

By 1815, David-Louis Blancpain’s eldest son Frédéric-Louis had himself become a practicing watchmaker. He would gradually turn the company from a craft-based operation into a full-fledged industrial venture. It was by then making some of its own movement blanks, and was thus an integrated “manufacture”. Over the years, more and better machine tools enabled Blancpain to develop its production and steadily improve product quality.

E. Blancpain & Fils

In 1830, Frédéric-Louis turned the business over to his 19-year-old son, Frédéric-Emile. To avoid any confusion with his father, the young man began using his second given name only, and the company’s style became “E. Blancpain”. After Frédéric-Emile’s death in 1857, his son Jules-Emile, Nestor and Paul-Alcide became partners in a company now called “E. Blancpain & Fils”. Trained as a watchmaker in Switzerland and abroad, Jules-Emile took over management of the company.

Changing times

In those days, traditional piecework was still being practiced in the farmhouses of the area although batch production had already led to some division of labour. But bitter competition and pressure on prices foreshadowed radical change. In Switzerland as everywhere, there was no denying that the machine age had arrived, with its demand for ever greater precision and output. So in the late 19th century Blancpain set about building a two-story factory on the River Suze to harness its hydraulic energy to drive a generator providing electric power to workshops and machine tools.

Rayville Ltd.

Before the First World War, Frédéric-Emile Blancpain (the second to bear that name) turned the company toward the future – that of the wristwatch. In the early 30s, he made Blancpain enter the annals of automatic wristwatches by launching Léon Hatot’s rectangular “Rolls”, an automatic wristwatch using “roller winding“, whereby the movement could move back and forth in the case - a revolutionary idea at that time. But his unexpected death in 1932 ended two centuries of Blancpain family management, a saga extending over seven generations. As Frédéric-Emile’s only child, his daughter Berthe-Nellie, had no desire to carry on, in June 1933 the firm passed to her father’s closest assistant, Betty Fiechter, and her associate, André Léal. They acquired its assets and liabilities and continued the business under the name “Rayville Ltd. [anagram of Villeret], successors to Blancpain”. In the early 50s, Betty Fiechter and her team launched the diver’s automatic “Fifty Fathoms” wristwatch and the first Ladybird whose presentation in 1956 caused a sensation in watch circles: its tiny round movement was the smallest of its generation.

The SSIH

Rayville-Blancpain remained to some considerable extent a craft operation, turning out a few thousand watches a year by traditional methods. But as it lacked marketing resources, its future was uncertain. Despite this situation, or perhaps because of it, it decided to accept the protection of a major watch-industry holding company set up in 1930, called SSIH (Swiss Watch Industry Corporation Ltd.).
In 1971, a new management team at SSIH decided on a radical change in business and industrial strategy that had no use for mechanical niche products. Since Blancpain lacked the brand awareness needed to survive as a marketer of “me too” quartz products, it soon disappeared from the market. In hindsight, this proved a blessing in disguise. Like Sleeping Beauty, Blancpain sank into a deep sleep.

Renewal

At a moment when the Swiss watch industry was betting everything on quartz and beginning to destroy its production equipment and, in part, the culture of the mechanical watch, Jean-Claude Biver and Jacques Piguet, who agreed that traditional mechanical watches still possessed a surprising and indeed highly promising lease on life, combined forces on January 9, 1983, to revive the Blancpain Company two and a half centuries after its foundation. Close scrutiny of all available records confirmed to Jean-Claude Biver that there never had been such a thing as a Blancpain quartz watch. And none will exist in the future. Jacques Piguet, the son of Frédéric Piguet, the reputed maker of rough movements, or blanks, stood ready to contribute his very considerable expertise.

The Vallee de Joux

Many specialists were predicting the death of the mechanical watch due to the arrival of quartz. The traditional watchmaker’s art and know-how was rapidly falling into decline, and as the former Blancpain workshops in Villeret had been taken over by Omega, the two men decided to relocate Blancpain wherever craft traditions were still vigorously upheld. They finally settled on the Vallée de Joux, in the Jura mountain range of western Switzerland, a centre of fine watchmaking since the mid-1700s and today still the birthplace of 90% of all high-end mechanical complications.
Here, in a village called Le Brassus, stands a fine old Piguet family house, inhabited by the very soul of watchmaking – just the place for Blancpain’s new home. It would now turn out watches made in the most genuinely traditional manner, similar in spirit to those that Jehan-Jacques Blancpain and his descendants fashioned more than two centuries ago some one hundred kilometres away.

Reviving tradition

Vital watchmaking information and secrets were saved just in time, treasures from the past that had not yet been destroyed or set aside. At Frédéric Piguet’s in the Vallée de Joux, a large number of old movements were found for which there were no plans at all. After studying them individually, plans were created for each of these movements.
By turning to the past to relive the beginnings of watchmaking as it existed among the isolated farms of the Jura, Blancpain was able to allow the culture of mechanical watchmaking to endure, as well as the traditional watchmaker’s art of the region and of an entire country.

The Super Trofeo racing series, named The Lamborghini Blancpain Super Trofeo, started on Saturday, May 16th. The world’s fastest one-make series, organized within the FIA GT championship on the famous Adria racing track, is the result of the alliance between Swiss watchmaker Blancpain and Lamborghini. The title sponsor of the sports event Blancpain not only sponsored the championship, but also participated in the racing series. Blancpain President and CEO Marc A. Hayek was behind the wheel of a specially decorated Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 car and competed with the well-known racecar driver from the Netherlands Peter Kox. As a result, the president of the watchmaking company ranked third after the second round.

The first leg of the Super Trofeo symbolizes partnership Blancpain Lamborghini, united by devotion to technical performance and distinguished aesthetics. The championship, including six events held from May through October, provides an opportunity to see 30 new Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 cars with top speed of over 300 km/h on racing tracks in Italy, Germany, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Spain and France. Marc A. Hayek, President and CEO of Blancpain, will pilot the racing car painted in the brand’s colours.The alliance between Blancpain and Lamborghini has resulted in a limited edition watch, specially designed for this occasion. The edition of the chronograph is limited to a number of only 3000 pieces. It was introduced at Baselworld 2009.

The case of the Super Trofeo Chronograph, inspired by the sleek profile of the Lamborghini Gallardo, measures 43.5 mm in diameter. Made from steel and treated with DLC (Diamond Like Carbon), the case is 100 metre water-resistant. DLC coating is used for enhancing resistance and reducing surface friction of metal. An individual number of the watch is engraved on its case-back.

The Blancpain Super Trofeo Chronograph is powered by a mechanical self-winding movement Calibre F185, having a power reserve of 4 hours. The movement of the chronograph was treated with electroplating solution, used to completely blacken the movement bridges and main plate. The blackened gold central rotor is decorated with a “Super Trofeo 2009″ inscription. The movement, making 21,600 vibrations per hour, enables the timepiece to measure independent time periods with 1/6th second precision. Besides hour, minute, second and date functions, the movement provides a flyback chronograph.

The over-sized numerals (9 and 12) in red and white on the black dial of Blancpain Super Trofeo Chronograph remind of the numbers painted on the Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 cars.

The strap of the watch is made of alcantara, a composite material used to cover surfaces and forms, developed in the 1970s by a Japanese chemist. The same material is used to cover the seats in the Lamborghini Gallardo. The strap of the chronograph is fitted with a steel folding clasp.

Replica Blancpain Watches are available on our site, as well as replica chronographs of other leading brands. These replica watches are distinguished by high quality of materials, reliability and moderate price.