A Question of Balance: An Interview with Parmigiani Fleurier CEO Guido Terreni

Shortly after becoming Parmigiani Fleurier's CEO in 2021, Guido Terreni created the company’s most important line, the Tonda PF collection, which represents the brand’s contemporary image and expresses its values through a combination of understatement, sophistication, and concentration on the essentials. The Tonda PF Micro-Rotor is the basic model, on which the dial’s micro-guilloché embellishment is given almost the entire stage. This is achieved by downplaying the other elements: shortening the indexes, skeletonizing the hands, and shrinking the logo. This original model, which Terreni calls “the matrix,” serves as the basis for all further derivations and complications.

The brand surprised everyone last year with a new function: the GMT Rattrapante. With it, when you return home from a different time zone, you can press a button that triggers the local time hand to jump back in hourly increments until it reaches its desired position directly above the home time hand. Another new complication followed with the Minute Rattrapante in 2023: Pushers at 8 and 10 cause an additional hand, concealed beneath the minute hand, to move in 5- and 1-minute increments until it shows the time at which you are planning to do something specific. When that time arrives, a simple push of a button returns the hand to its original position under the regular minute hand.

Guido, my favorite watch among the novelties of 2023 is the Tonda PF Micro-Rotor in platinum. Its dial has only two hands, the brand’s logo, the date, and a circle of short hour markers, yet the face never seems empty. Why is that?

It’s a question of balance. This is the most puristic version of our Tonda PF design. I appreciate your comment because it shows that we have indeed struck the right balance with this watch. What I like about the Micro-Rotor in platinum is that we have taken the core product of the Tonda PF line, the Micro-Rotor in stainless steel, and raised it to an extraordinarily high level in terms of finesse, discretion and style. By the way, I share your feelings about this model. I simply can’t put it down. I would like to wear it every day.

Which watch do you wear?

I still wear the matrix [the Tonda PF Micro-Rotor in steel]. It’s the starting point of everything we’ve created in recent years and I’m very fond of it. Whether or not we would succeed with our reorientation of the brand depended on this first model — and it worked.

Platinum unfortunately doesn’t play a big role for most brands.

I like platinum very much because it combines very high prestige and a touch of understatement. So far, we’ve used this precious metal only occasionally in limited edition models, but now we’re giving platinum a permanent place in our collection. This exquisite material allows you to experience our brand and its special design at the highest level. Now whenever we want to launch a watch in a white precious metal, we will always opt for platinum.

You can’t compare platinum and white gold. It’s not just that platinum is more prestigious. It also has better material properties and greater brilliance. Furthermore, traces of wear can be polished up much better because platinum is so pure and natural. The Micro-Rotor is comfortable on the wrist because it’s not that heavy: 215 grams isn’t very heavy for a platinum watch. It’s about the same as the weight of a gold watch with a gold bracelet. The steel watch I wear weighs 125 grams, and that’s not such a big difference.

The Minute Rattrapante is your most important innovation in 2023. How did you come up with the idea for a watch like this one?

I was sitting in my office in Fleurier and asking myself: What could come after the GMT Rattrapante? I was looking for a function that would not only be new, but also popular. Dive watches came to mind and I thought: Such an important function is controlled by the bezel, not the movement. I wondered if we could interpret this kind of control in a different way, for example, by marking an upcoming moment in time when the wearer needs to do something specific. By linking this mechanism to the movement, we created a whole new function.

We call it “Minute Rattrapante” because it lets you preset the minute when you plan to do something, for example, when you have to go to the gate to board your plane at the airport. If I give myself a few extra minutes, I can see exactly how many extra minutes I have left. It was important to us that everything could be operated intuitively. That’s why we decided on two buttons: one for 5-minute increments and another for 1-minute increments. If we had relied only on a single button, you might have had to press it 20 or 30 times. But this way, you can advance the hand in 5-minute steps by pressing the button at the 8 and afterward fine tune the presetting to the exact minute by pressing the pusher at the 10. Once you’ve finished your time management, pressing the button in the crown only once suffices to send the rose-gold hand hurrying back to its position under the minute hand. So here again, we have a small complication that’s also useful, relevant, and very discreet — because when you don’t need the rattrapante hand, it’s concealed and you simply have an elegant two-hand watch, which allows you to read the time without any distractions. To me, that’s very Parmigiani-like.

It’s not easy to develop an idea for something that hasn’t been done before, but you’ve accomplished this twice in a row. How did that happen?

By taking our customers’ point of view and asking which functions make sense for them. That’s how I personally felt with the GMT Rattrapante. I do a lot of traveling, so I know how annoying it can be to lose the precise minute when I reset my watch for a new time zone. And when I get home, I want to be able to return my watch to home time as quickly as possible. We give our customers a smooth and uncomplicated experience by leaving out everything extraneous and making the function as simple and understandable as possible.

By the way, the mechanism of the Minute Rattrapante is far more complex than that of the GMT Rattrapante. The former has 140 additional components, but the latter has only 51. That’s because the pushers need to interact. They have to “remember” where the rattrapante hand needs to go after use so it will again be hidden. In manufacturing the Minute Rattrapante, everything is much more complex than with the GMT. Still, the price is not much higher: the Minute Rattrapante in steel costs $30,600, which is only slightly more than the GMT Rattrapante in steel at $29,500.

Let’s talk about two other new products of 2023: the Tonda PF Flying Tourbillon and the Tonda PF Split Seconds Chronograph.

The idea behind the tourbillon can be told quickly. In 2022, we launched the Tonda PF Flying Tourbillon in platinum with a platinum dial in a limited edition of 25 pieces. They have long been sold out, but we had more than twice as many requests for the watch, so we asked ourselves what we could do to satisfy the remaining customers. Finally, we decided to launch a new, unlimited Tonda PF in platinum with a Milano blue dial. This shade of blue is perfect for a model that’s destined to remain part of our collection for a long time. It’s fascinating to see how this color interacts with different materials: for example, with the sandblasted platinum case, the blue dial looks darker and more matte.

And the chronograph?

Our split-second chronograph is the best chronograph in the world. I’m not afraid to make such a statement because that was already my opinion before I joined Parmigiani. This model has a very a fine hand-wound movement in gold, manually decorated, with numerous finely beveled edges, plus two column wheels — one for the chronograph and another for the split-second hand —along with [founder] Michel Parmigiani’s signature on the barrel because it truly is a masterpiece. We unveiled it in a platinum case when we presented our collection for 2021. All 25 pieces sold out. So now we’ve released a second limited edition of 30 watches in rose-gold cases and again with platinum dials because that matches the case color very well. By the way, we don’t guilloché the platinum dials; they are always sandblasted.

If you buy the chronograph, you also get an alligator strap with a pin buckle. That was Michel’s idea: He thinks it’s a shame that you can’t get a good look at the movement inside a watch with a metal bracelet and a folding clasp because the bracelet always blocks your view. He wants to give every aficionado the option of fully opening the wristband, laying the watch on a table with its transparent back facing up and then admiring all the details of the various finishes with a magnifying glass. That’s why we designed a pin buckle with the PF logo especially for this model.

Have you ever thought of equipping a watch with a quickchange strap system?

No. We haven’t yet seen a solution that would be high-enough quality for our watches. Besides, you need a certain amount of space for the quick-change mechanism and that would mean we would have to make compromises to our design. Maybe we can find a solution that lets the owner change the wristband at home with the aid of a small tool. That’s an idea for later. And we already have a lot of ideas up our sleeve, so to speak — more than enough to keep us busy until 2029.

This article was originally published in the Design 2024 print issue. To subscribe to WatchTime Magazine, click here.