he history of watches at Tiffany & Co. is not a linear one. That may be due to the company’s unique history. Beginning as an important New York jewellery and gemstone business founded in 1837, the house was also a major distributor and retailer of Swiss watches in the United States.
Then, in 1874 it established a manufacture in Geneva – the first non-Swiss house to do so – with the aim of applying the efficiency of American productivism to traditional Swiss watchmaking. In its manufacture in Cornavin, it produced timepieces with diverse complications – often richly decorated with enamel, engravings and precious stones.
During the twentieth century, upheavals in the watch market led the house to refocus its business more on jewellery and the retail trade, rather than on producing its own timepieces. It was in this context that it co-designed the dials of brands it distributed in the United States.
These models were very popular with collectors and even today, the collective watchmaking memory instinctively associates Tiffany & Co. with the double-signed dial.
By the end of last century, under a series of different owners, the brand had adopted a policy of volume sales – a change of direction that led it away from the heart of the watchmaking industry, which was then shifting back to mechanical watches and moving upmarket.
This whole chapter, marked by several strategic turnarounds, is now something that Nicolas Beau – appointed watch director at Tiffany & Co. after its acquisition by LVMH – must ’close’. Beau, who has many years of experience in the sector (including at Chanel and Richemont), aims to give watchmaking the prominence it deserves, under the leadership of CEO Anthony Ledru and Alexandre Arnault.
A symbolic timepiece
For Tiffany & Co., this marks a “return to its original intention” when it all began back in the nineteenth century – occupying a place in Swiss watchmaking that it perhaps should never have left, while fully embracing Tiffany & Co.’s status as a celebrated jeweller.
“For the past four years we’ve been reconstituting all the watch archives of Tiffany & Co., because that’s fundamental to this work,” underscores Nicolas Beau. “We’ve discovered incredible, more-or-less forgotten documents about the manufacture in Cornavin in the centre of Geneva, as well as folders of bills for movements from Zenith, orders for clocks from L’Epée and, above all, 300 archived watches kept in New York.”
Symbolising this quest for its horological roots, at auction last November the house acquired an 18k gold Tiffany & Co. pocket watch. Dating from 1912, the watch was presented to Captain Arthur H. Rostron of the R.M.S. Carpathia, the first ship to arrive at the sinking Titanic to save its passengers. Fetching a price of $1.97 million, it is the highest-valued piece of Titanic memorabilia ever sold.
Since its acquisition by LVMH, Tiffany & Co. has more strongly than ever asserted its presence on the high jewellery scene and extended its global presence beyond its historical markets. Given the evolution of the watchmaking industry, it seemed natural that the watchmaking facet of the house should echo the elevation of its core jewellery business.
The new watches, presented in 2025 after four years of preparation and maturation, certainly reflect this. They are so richly gem-set that it’s difficult to say whether they are watches or jewellery. After a necessary period of silence, Tiffany is back!
The Bird on a Flying Tourbillon model pays homage to Jean Schlumberger’s iconic 1960s Bird on a Rock design (inspired by a yellow cockatoo) for Tiffany & Co., combining it with the brand’s first flying tourbillon.
“Today, complications are widely used in watchmaking and for a jewellery brand like ours, the way we express complications has to make sense,” comments Nicolas Beau. “I love the idea of a faceted crystal over the flying tourbillon – a design that required quite a bit of ingenuity from our partners at Artime. Additionally, all the components had to be arranged at the base of the movement to leave room for the three-dimensional birds on the dial, in a case that remains thin.”
A distinctive ‘Tiffany style’
At Tiffany & Co. jewellery has always influenced watches,” stresses Nicolas Beau. “It’s this mindset that interests me, with the best possible synchronisation between these different skills. And – unlike other maisons in the same market – at Tiffany & Co. you don’t find one line that dominates all the rest and that you reproduce endlessly. This gives us a wider scope and more of a free hand, in a way.”
The house’s heritage means that its watch collections are unlike those of any other brand, with a distinctive ‘Tiffany style’. One of the best examples in the new collections is the Eternity by Tiffany Wisteria model, which picks up on an iconic Tiffany Lamp design from the early 1900s, featuring a plique-à-jour enamel dial.
As in the nineteenth century, a kind of decentralisation has taken place: while the jewels are designed in New York, the watches are “conceived and created in Geneva – although we’re in constant communication,” says Beau. The R&D laboratory in New York develops new materials and new jewellery techniques, and the stones are sourced from New York to ensure the best quality and origins.
This expertise has, for example, been channelled into the one-off Carat 128 Aquamarine, with its 34-carat aquamarine ‘glass’ cut in the style of the Tiffany Diamond, and the Jean Schlumberger by Tiffany Twenty Four Stone watch. Working with gemstones adds to the complexity of the regularity and uniformity required to ensure the watch’s water-resistance, among other technical constraints.
The Bird on a Rock watch epitomises the technical developments that bring horology and jewellery together: an ingenious system of bearings, generally used for oscillating weights, but skilfully adapted with the help of a specialist in the field, enables the eponymous bird to spin freely around the dial.
A return to a more assertive presence in mechanical watchmaking is also in progress: “Once all the new watches have come onto the market, we’ll be at 60% quartz movements and 40% automatic calibres. However, we won’t abandon quartz, which is appreciated by many of our customers and which we also intend to develop in new directions this year – I can’t reveal much about that yet!”
Besides its exceptional jewellery watches, Tiffany & Co. is also presenting extensions of its more affordable lines – HardWear, Union Square (its square watch, showcased last year) and especially Atlas, a collection that has been in continuous production since the 1980s.
“Everything we do is jewellery-inspired and relates to our heritage,” concludes Nicolas Beau. “And with models like the Bird on a Rock representing the new face of the brand, our jewellery and horology worlds are merging in total harmony.”
