REVOLUTION_International_Vol 54

INNOVATIVE MATERIALS
Hublot’s innovations in terms of high-tech materials really
started in 2010 when the maison acquired BNB Concept
and its founder, Mathias Buttet, who was then named
Director of Research and Development of Hublot and given
colossal resources to start experimenting with materials.
Called “Confrérie Horlogère Hublot”, Hublot’s R&D office
is more of a laboratory than a department inside of a watch
manufacture; and is labelled as the F1 team of watchmaking,
how Hublot is that? The team is formed of 30 watchmakers,
design engineers, micro-dynamics and micro-chemistry
technicians, who are led by Mathias Buttet under the
coordination of Ricardo Guadalupe, CEO of Hublot.
For their first outing, Buttet and his team presented the
“Magic Gold” in 2012, an unscratchable “fused” 18K gold
alloy, a world’s first, created by injecting gold into porous
ceramic. Said like this, it might sound easy but as Buttet
himself puts it: “It’s not a technology you can just deliver
to a production, tell people to press a button and it works.
It’s a small window of coincidences which allow us to pass
through a tiny door lock.”
Not someone to rest on his laurels, Buttet and his
team immediately got to work on what would eventually
become Hublot’s “Red Magic”, a consistent bright red
ceramic material that is the result of fusing iron oxides into
ceramic by heating the two together up to 1,472 degrees
Fahrenheit and then adding a pressure of 600 tonnes per
square centimeters for three hours, which would then create
again a tiny window of coincidences where the fusion of
elements could happen perfectly. “With the Magic Gold,
it was like Hublot acquired a black belt in a martial art, and
with this, we got the first dan. We managed to master these
two techniques,” Buttet explains. Hublot has gone on to
be the first brand to have a lineup of watches made with
Clockwise from
top left
Ricardo Guadalupe,
CEO of Hublot; the
Big Bang MP-11 Red
Magic, a bold red
ceramic material
made by fusing iron
oxides into ceramic;
Mathias Buttet, the
director of research
and development
at Hublot; the
Big Bang Unico
in Magic Gold, a
special fused gold
alloy made by
injecting gold into
porous ceramic.
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