When the watch industry saw one of the worst one-year declines in demand for Swiss timepieces last year, Montblanc put on a brave face. In fact, it put on two. Newly released this year and one of the highlights at the SIHH fair, the Montblanc TimeWriter 1 Metamorphosis is the realisation of a dream two watch specialists shared - a dream of 'one watch, two faces'.
'When things get difficult you change the speed, but not the goal,' says Jean-Marc Pontroue, executive vice-president of product strategies and development at Montblanc.
'Three years ago, we said we would develop the Metamorphosis movement, and now we have the fruits of our labour. We have a watch that provides people with a new way of telling time.'
The idea behind Metamorphosis was to develop a timepiece with one dial to indicate the present time and another to measure time, with a mechanism that allowed one dial to transition smoothly into the other. The watch was created by specialists Johnny Girardin and Franck Orny through Institut Minerva de Recherche en Haute Horlogerie, which was founded by Montblanc to foster young talents and to combine tradition with innovation.
'We had imagined a concept for this watch,' Orny says. 'We had envisioned a watch with two faces, with the metamorphosis from one to the other achieved through a mechanical transformation.'
This transformation is made possible through the layered dial arrangement. A horizontal bar across the dial acts as the top layer, with cut-outs for the function displays at 12 o'clock and six o'clock.