Bulgari was founded in Rome in 1884 by Sotirios Voulgaris, and for the century that followed it was a jeweller. The watches came late. The marque entered horlogerie in 1977 with the BVLGARI BVLGARI, a watch that set the house name twice around the bezel and left nobody guessing whose it was.
Naming a watch is not the same as making one. In the early 1980s, to oversee all production of Bulgari watches, Bulgari Time was founded in Switzerland. The Swiss subsidiary responsible for watch production today is Bulgari Haute Horlogerie SA, founded in 1980 and headquartered in Neuchâtel, where about 500 people mix Italian design and Swiss watchmaking.
The mechanical half of that sentence arrived by purchase. In 2000 Bulgari acquired two houses that already knew how: Daniel Roth and Gérald Genta. Daniel Roth had been created by its namesake in 1989, with workshops in the Vallée de Joux at Le Sentier and in Geneva. To a collector the address carries more than the name does; Le Sentier is where complicated Swiss movements come from.
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Gérald Genta brought a drawing hand instead. Genta, who lived from 1931 to 2011, is regarded as one of the most influential people in the history of horology, on the strength of the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak of 1970, the first luxury sports watch, and the Patek Philippe Nautilus of 1976. Bulgari bought his company, its trademarks, its patents and its designs. Genta went on to found Gerald Charles, sold it in 2003, and stayed its designer-in-chief until his death.
Ownership then changed above the marque. Bulgari signed a strategic alliance with LVMH in 2011; the acquisition concluded on 4 October 2011, Bulgari was delisted from the Borsa Italiana, and the all-share deal, valued at about €4.3 billion, doubled the size of LVMH’s watches and jewellery division.
The collections divide the way the house has always divided. Octo, BVLGARI BVLGARI, Diagono and the Haute Horlogerie pieces are the men’s side, where the mechanics are argued. LVCEA, Serpenti, Divas’ Dream, B.zero1 and the high jewellery watches are the women’s, where the jeweller’s hand shows first. The Octo is where the two arguments meet.
It is also where they were settled. In 2021 the Octo Finissimo won the Aiguille d’Or Grand Prix at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, the highest award the industry gives itself, and a Roman jeweller carried off the Geneva prize outright.
Not all of the inheritance survived. Daniel Roth production ceased in 2015, and the brand returned to the market in 2023 with plans for fewer than 100 pieces a year, made at La Fabrique du Temps, the Swiss factory that had been producing Louis Vuitton’s watches.
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So a Bulgari mechanical watch is an Italian design with a Vallée de Joux inheritance behind the dial and a Neuchâtel factory around it. The window display is Roman. The movement is not.