The prize for this year’s best complication goes to TAG Heuer for its Carrera Heuer-02T, a COSC-certified automatic chronograph combined with a titanium and carbon flying tourbillon. What’s so revolutionary about a complication that has been on the market for over 200 years, I hear you cry? Well, not much as it turns out…that is until you take a sneak peak at the price tag of this particular timepiece — CHF14,900!
There are numerous ways to amaze a watch consumer, but one way that will always win their hearts is exceptional value. And when it comes to value, TAG Heuer knows how to wow the watch fans.
When the brand’s CEO Jean-Claude Biver challenged his team to create an accessibly priced tourbillon, they told him that they didn’t think they could do it for under CHF45,000 — and that was just a tourbillon, not a tourbillon chronograph as in this case. But there is something about Mr. Biver (also the winner of Revolution’s Lifetime Achievement Award, by the way) — he always seems to know what the market needs, and just how to provide it for them.
And before you start imagining magical miracle tourbillons from faraway lands, the reason we have selected this particular complication is that its incredible price comes from a new and groundbreaking in-house production process that allows the brand to respect the highest quality, technology, expertise and performance for a fraction of the cost of every other tourbillon on the market.
It is being called “affordable haute horlogerie” — a term that would have been considered an oxymoron a couple of years ago. So, it seems that Mr. Biver isn’t only shaking up the watch industry; he is changing the way that we talk about watches, too!
