Manufacturers
Montblanc
Overview
A Hamburg writing-instrument house founded in 1906, part of Richemont, which began making watches in 1997 at Le Locle. Richemont acquired Minerva — a Villeret manufacture founded in 1858 by Charles Robert and his brother Hyppolite, with a serious chronograph tradition — and attached it to Montblanc across 2006-07; sources differ on which year, probably because the purchase and the integration fell in consecutive ones. The output therefore divides into two quite different things sharing a logo: volume production at Le Locle on Sellita and ETA-family movements, and low-volume hand-finished Minerva calibers at Villeret at many times the price. The 1858 collection is named for Minerva's founding year, not Montblanc's, and includes watches with no Minerva content.
Notable innovations
- · Villeret Minerva monopusher chronograph calibers descended from the 1920s 13-20
- Official name
- Montblanc Montre SA
- Country
- Germany
- Founded
- 1906
- Headquarters
- Hamburg, Germany; watchmaking at Le Locle and Villeret, Switzerland
- Group
- Richemont
- Status
- active
- Manufacturing sites
- Le Locle, Switzerland, Villeret, Switzerland