Taking over the brand in 2017 as its first female CEO (and one of a handful in the Richemont Group’s history), Chabi Nouri’s driving force at Piaget has been to marry the brand’s deep roots in watchmaking with its well-earned reputation for magnificent jewellery.
Nouri’s path to the head of one of Richemont’s biggest brands has been imbued with a passion of traditional craftsmanship and savoir-faire. Her multilateral approach made her an ideal candidate to enter the Richemont group in 1997, where she rose in the ranks to eventually become Head of Retail Operation for Europe and the Americas at Cartier in 2003, then Jewellery Group Manager in 2005. She stayed with the renowned watch and jewellery maison for 11 years, and after a short stint at the British American Tobacco company, the call from Richemont came again, except this time from Piaget to be their Chief Marketing Officer in 2014. There, her experience in the watchmaking and jewellery field paid off as she steered Piaget towards rejuvenating and modernising its global image.
While Piaget is justifiably well-known for its jewellery collections, the brand also has a rich history in ultra- thin watches, dating all the way back to 1957. Nouri has focused on that aspect, introducing the Altiplano Ultimate Concept in 2018. This revolutionary model broke the record set the previous year for the world’s thinnest automatic watch with its 2mm thickness (case included). Production of this concept watch proved to be an entirely different challenge, one that Nouri decided to capitalise on. Not until almost two years later did the brand announce the commercial version of the Altiplano Ultimate Concept, still just as thin, yet entirely customisable for the client. As such, it vividly embodied Nouri’s doubling down on Piaget’s two opposite yet united identities, thus proclaiming that craftmanship manifests itself as much in beautiful gemsetting as it does in innovative mechanics.
*On the occasion of GMT Magazine and WorldTempus' 20th anniversary, we have embarked on the ambitious project of summarising the last 20 years in watchmaking in The Millennium Watch Book, a big, beautifully laid out coffee table book. This article is an extract. The Millennium Watch Book is available on www.the-watch-book.com, in French and English.
