Breguet’s manufacture in L’Orient promises very little from the outside, a purely nondescript edifice that could have been built any time in the previous century. And even inside, initial impressions are that this is not going to be a visit that excites in the way that passing through the portals of Rolex or Panerai might. But that’s a reflection of Breguet’s style; the most revered name in horology doesn’t need challenging architecture or have any requirement to excite you with robotic component distribution systems. And while the brand is somewhat conscious that its manufacture should represent the same brand values as you’ll find on Bond Street or Place Vendôme (getting an invite took years), there’s still plenty to fascinate within. Dare one say it, Breguet actually promises less than it delivers.

Breguet would have every right to be the most bombastic brand name in the business, Abraham-Louis having no rival as watchmaking’s touchstone name, but to understand why it isn’t, it helps to know a little more about Breguet’s recent past. Breguet’s modern history begins when the Chaumet family acquired the business in the early-’70s. Jacques and Pierre Chaumet (descended from jewellers to the court of Napoleon) wanted to bring new life to a brand that had become near moribund. They moved production to the Vallée de Joux and hired new talent in the shape of Daniel Roth to develop product lines. Roth added new complicated movements and, perhaps more importantly, brought back the guilloché dials and “Breguet-style” pomme hands that have come to define the brand since. Financial difficulties forced the sale of the brand to Investcorp in 1987 whose nascent watch group went on to include Ebel and, crucially, the movement maker, Nouvelle Lemania.

It’s fair to say that the Investcorp period was not Breguet’s most successful as despite the house having acquired a manufacture in Nouvelle Lemania, Breguet had almost no exclusive movements as Nouvelle Lemania continued to supply clients such as Audemars Piguet and Omega on an equal basis with the perverse result that a number of Nouvelle Lemania movements were in watches that undercut Breguet’s own prices.

Worse than that, Breguet took flak for re-introducing the Type XX, a stainless steel cased chronograph that Breguet had produced under a contract with the French air force in the 1950s.

The relatively unexceptional movement, steel case and entry-level prices were thought to devalue the brand just as Blancpain, Lange & Söhne and Franck Muller were attracting a new generation of high-end collectors.

Happily for Breguet, the stars re-aligned in the brand’s favour. The main cause was that fine watchmaking in the late-’90s was at last looking like a profitable game to be in, prompting a round of acquisitions that saw brands such as Jaeger-LeCoultre and TAG Heuer get swallowed up by the likes of Richemont and LVMH. Meanwhile Nicholas Hayek, the force behind the Swatch Group, had been close enough in the race to snap up LVMH (a group that included A. Lange, IWC and Jaeger-LeCoultre) to start sharing his plans for the brand.  So when Investcorp decided to pull out of the watch business, Hayek had both a war chest and thwarted ambition to fuel his interest. That Nouvelle Lemania supplied chronograph movements to Omega made securing the deal a vital strategic move.

What happened next defines what Breguet is today. Hayek might have treated Breguet as just another brand, a decorative extra that came free with the meat of the deal, however, Hayek quickly realised that Breguet was worth so much more and acquired the necessary magic ingredient to revive the brand: a genuine passion. Hayek was the big beast of the watch industry, famous for never selling himself short and for never downplaying his role in saving the industry from terminal decline in the mid-’80s. He was the man that Jean-Claude Biver looked up to. But when dealing with Breguet, Hayek turned on a genuine humility that was inspired by the watch business’s original showman, visionary and entrepreneur: Abraham-Louis Breguet.