Bulgari Creates The World's Thinnest Watch With $440,000 USD Octo Finissimo Ultra
The eighth time an Octo has broken a watchmaking world record.
Bulgari is celebrating the 10th Anniversary of its Octo Finissimo collection with an eighth world record by creating the world’s slimmest mechanical watch.
The Octo Finissimo Ultra measures just 1.8mm from front to back, beating the previous record-holder – the Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Concept – by 0.2mm.
Like the Piaget, the concept of case and movement has been abandoned in favour of building the 170-component manually-wound movement into the caseback of the 40mm sandblasted titanium case. The caseback had to be fabricated from tungsten carbide to stop the watch bending when worn.
Bulgari spent the past three years developing not just the watch, but engineering an integrated bracelet and folding clasp of matching dimensions.
The Octo Finissimo Ultra also packs in a power reserve of 50 hours using a large mainspring barrel, something ultra-thin watchmaking often struggles with. Instead of a standard crown, Bulgari has fitted two thumbwheels, one for winding and the other for adjusting the time.
A QR code engraved on the mainspring barrels of the first 10 Octo Finissimo Ultra watches provides a link to unique NFT artworks that also serve to authenticate the watches.
“This fabulous benchmark that we are setting today with the Octo Finissimo Ultra is in fact for me and for all the teams an apparently impossible dream come true,” says Bulgari CEO Jean-Christophe Babin. “One that guarantees that Bulgari will forever be recognised as a company that has written some of the finest pages in Swiss watchmaking. And the fact that this is an Italian house makes us particularly proud.”
The Octo Finissimo Ultra is limited to 10 pieces and is available now via Bulgari, priced €400,000 (approximately $440,000 USD).
In other watch news, Jacob & Co. honors Bugatti legend with retrograde chronograph.
