Ask any collector: as exciting as it may be, the box your beautiful new watch comes in is hell to store! Stashed away in a cupboard, cluttering up the garage, gathering dust in a spare bedroom, throwing it away is never an option: if the watch is resold, the buyer will expect the original box, too. Fortunately, certain brands have thought about the problem and transformed the box into a desirable object in its own right – an additional vector for their history and expertise.
The most authentic: Louis Moinet
From its very origins some fifteen years ago, Louis Moinet partnered with artisans in Geneva to create a book-shaped presentation box, inspired by the treatise on watchmaking that Moinet himself wrote in 1848. Handmade in wood with a leather binding, it captures the brand’s legacy and can later join the volumes in the owner’s personal library.
The most precious: Breguet
Breguet takes presentation boxes to the height of refinement with its box for the Marie-Antoinette: its consummate reproduction, presented in 2008, of the Queen of France’s watch. The sculpted box is made from 3,500 pieces of oak wood from the tree at Versailles whose shade the queen enjoyed three centuries ago. Its exterior replicates the parquet floor of the Petit Trianon. Opening the box reveals a second, smaller one whose lid is decorated with a handcrafted wood inlay of over a thousand pieces that depicts Marie-Antoinette’s hand holding a rose; a detail from a portrait of the queen by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun.
The pioneer: Audemars Piguet
The brand from Le Brassus paved the way for out-of-the-ordinary presentation boxes, such as the chess set-box of its Millenary Kasparov, or the wood basketball enclosing the Royal Oak Offshore Limited Edition Shaquille O’ Neal.
The first eco-box: Alpina
The award for the first eco-friendly watch box goes to… well, who? The first brand to do away with the instruction leaflet? The first to use recycled wood? The first to make an ultra-light box? There are as many candidates as there are criteria. One noteworthy initiative is that of Alpina for its recently launched Seastrong Gyre: an outer box in FSC Mix paper contains a presentation box made entirely from recycled plastic (ABS) with a lining made from recycled plastic bottles (rPET). The warranty and authenticity certificate are combined in a single leaflet, printed on FSC Recycled paper. So as to reduce its environmental footprint even further, Alpina has opted for a paperless user manual, accessed by scanning a QR code.
In a similar vein, SevenFriday uses a recyclable material, wood, for its boxes whose deliberately simple design means they can be repurposed in multiple ways. Elsewhere, Maurice Lacroix appears to be the first brand to have designed a box, for its Eliros, in Piñatex, a leather alternative made from fibres extracted from pineapple leaves.
The most extravagant: Schwarz Etienne and MB&F
Never one to balk at a challenge, Schwarz Etienne pulled out all the creative stops for the box of its Ode au Printemps. This “tribute to spring” came with a lamp whose base hides a secret drawer for this trio of watches together with their accessories. A “bright idea” but not the first of its kind from the brand, which already presented certain of its ladies’ timepieces in genuine leather handbags.
Not far away, we can also find MB&F, which had developed boxes in the form of Saturn and a cosmo-nautical ship for its HM7 Aquapod and LM FlyingT respectively, in the purest spirit of the house.
The most technical: Jaeger-LeCoultre
Where complications are concerned, the Reverso Hybris Mechanica Calibre 185 from Jaeger-LeCoultre eclipsed every other creation at Watches and Wonders. Its presentation box is on a par. If the watch has been left unworn for a certain period, an intuitive mechanism, built into the box, enables the wearer to set the calendar and astronomical displays. A two-position crown on the side of the box indicates the number of days that have elapsed since the watch was last worn. Rest assured there is no risk of overcorrecting or of damaging the movement, as the entire process is controlled by the corrector mechanism.
