Tudor : from design to production
Collected statements between the designer and the engineer, in the Tudor’s watches creation backstage.


Everything moves faster in this proximity where the workshop is a laboratory which lets intuition run freely. «We get around in an intuitive way. We are looking for something, then a door opens, and we discover a universe that we can exploit in another way by going further », Ander Ugarte explains.
« We introduce elements, historical codes of the establishment and, like a recipe, we have to find the right balance between the object itself, the brand and its story. And that is the Tudor style. The fact, for instance, of putting a red piece on a model’s hand can change everything. »

The new Heritage Black Bay Bronze is a good illustration of that. The designer wanted to adapt this historical model for bronze. « There are many bronzes, all different. Which one should we choose, which one fits us, which one passes the tests? », Ander Ugarte explains. Eric Pirson continues : « The establishment never made bronze so we were starting from scratch. Ander had an additional constraint: we wanted a patina watch, which lives. But that did not correspond to Tudor’s DNA, to the typical reliability of the brand’s offer. So we worked on an alloy giving a patina and where some of the risks linked to reliability and durability are annihilated. » Ander Ugarte adds : « “This project required a lot (three year) of work. We chose a material which we subjected to very advanced tests. We wanted a homogenous patina, not one that would look dirty or stained. It was a very important technical argument and, once we found the good potential alloy, there was all the industrial process.»
