We quickly understand that three words sum up the Maison’s ambition: tradition, innovation and emotion. Through engineering, creativity and storytelling, the ultimate goal remains to convey an emotion. And one guiding belief inspires the teams: to look at these watches through a child’s eyes, allowing oneself to be enchanted and amazed. Yet achieving this requires standards of excellence that are anything but childlike, and experience measured in decades.
Keeping In-House What Makes the Difference
To join the Poetic Complications workshops, Van Cleef & Arpels requires its employees to have many years of experience. This requirement speaks volumes about the Maison’s philosophy: prioritizing expertise in areas where the greatest added value lies. The 20-year retrospective illustrates this perfectly. The first movements were developed with talented partners, such as Agenhor and Christiaan van der Klaauw. The Maison then decided to bring this expertise in-house by establishing its own movement development department. Unveiled in 2022, Heures Florales was the first watch to be developed entirely in-house, including its movement.
Manufacturing movement components, however, is not part of the Maison’s remit. Its focus lies further upstream, on creativity, design and engineering, the development of movements and cases, as well as métiers d’art such as enameling, movement assembly and casing-up, not to mention prototyping.
The bee rarely features among the Maison’s sources of inspiration, but the enameling workshop could well be described as a hive, given the constant activity within it. Training and the transmission of expertise are central to the Maison’s priorities, both in enameling and in automata. Together with its longstanding partner François Junod, it established a workshop in which team members spent several months learning part of his expertise, adapted to the Maison’s creations. The team, small enough to count on one hand, brings together young yet already experienced professionals from fields including micromechanics, machining, assembly and decoration. Indeed, there are currently no schools specializing in artistic mechanics. Applicants are therefore expected to have a background in watchmaking or micromechanics, as well as an interest in artistic creation.
Heures Florales: A Case Study
Heures Florales has its roots in an unrealized idea conceived by a nature lover. The story dates back to the 18th century and the botanist Carl von Linné. Having observed that certain flowers open at specific times of the day, he imagined a garden where visitors could simply stroll around to tell the time, although he never managed to bring the concept to life. Van Cleef & Arpels drew inspiration from this idea. On the watch, the time is read by counting the open flowers, which are constantly changing.
Like all the Maison’s creations, the project began with a gouache painting, a signature inherited from high jewelry. The first drawing placed the minute indications on the dial. There was nothing technically impossible about this, but it reduced the aperture and made the central carpet of flowers smaller. The teams suggested moving the minutes to the side of the case, giving the story the entire dial to unfold. The Maison owes this freedom to its development department: Heures Florales was the first movement to benefit from it.
The engineers added a subtle feature, a kind of simulated randomness, since the opening sequence follows a 36-hour cycle. As a result, the combination of flowers does not repeat from one day to the next. Naturally, this is difficult to remember, so the flowers have to be counted each time.
These requirements explain the length of the projects. Developing a Poetic Complication generally takes between four and seven years, depending on its complexity. Ballerine Musicale required almost seven years. Once the story and aesthetic have been established, development follows a conventional watchmaking process, with chronometric and shock-resistance tests carried out by external laboratories to ensure compliance with watchmaking standards.
Exploration, Then Exploitation
Every Poetic Complication starts with a blank sheet of paper, and that is precisely what motivates the teams. Each project pushes them to explore a technique or area of expertise they have not yet mastered. Rather than following a succession of compartmentalized stages, the Maison favors a collaborative approach in which creativity, métiers d’art and watchmaking move forward together. The story remains the guiding thread, and every technical constraint becomes an opportunity to tell it in a different way.
Innovation is not limited to movements. The Maison regularly files patents in the métiers d’art. The most striking example is enameling combined with gem-setting. Others relate to color research, an area in which the Maison does not proactively communicate its work. Still others protect techniques involving shaped enamel, such as three-dimensional raspberries and blueberries crafted in enamel. The teams regularly meet to share their respective progress. These presentations are collective, with every craft represented. Depending on the circumstances, the purpose may be to present the progress made or to put forward alternatives and recommendations for the Maison to decide between.
During our visit, the various department heads were keen to talk about their crafts and placed their trust in us by describing the different stages and their creative processes. These behind-the-scenes insights are almost as confidential as the technical drawings they shared to support their explanations and help us better understand the feats of engineering behind these poetic tales. We naturally respect this trust and have exercised the necessary discretion in preparing this report.
Van Cleef & Arpels loves nature so much that it draws inspiration from it to the point of working in the same way: in symbiosis.
