A Visit to the Chopard Manufacture Fleurier

by Edward Hahn

November, 2006

The Chopard Manufacture occupies a building on the Rue des Moulins in Fleurier, originally built in 1903 and expanded several times, and tenanted in the past by Fabrique d'Ebauches de Fleurier (FEF), one of the many companies that in the past supplied movement blanks to the Swiss watch industry under the auspices of Ebauches SA (now ETA). The interior, however, has been completely renovated, and has state of the art ventilation and lighting.

Ground Floor

We began our tour on the ground floor, where movements come into being in one wing and watches are prepared for shipping in the other. In a room filled with highly automated CNC milling and electric discharge machines, raw materials are turned into roughed-out watch cases and movement plates. The air is filled with the scent of machining oil used to lubricate and cool the cutting heads of the milling machines. The temperature is warm from the output of the large machines.

In the other wing of the building, the opposite environment prevails: it is cool and clean in the quality control and final casing areas of the manufacture. The Fleurier Manufacture concentrates on the creation of the in-house movements, as well as the steel watches in the L.U.C, Mille Miglia, and Happy Sport lines. Production at Fleurier includes 3,000 movements (all COSC certified) and 25,000 wristwatches per year.

Quality control ensures that every watch conforms to the specifications for the particular reference number, and that all parts are blemish free. The final assembly and casing is performed in a positive-pressure room, so that dust and other possible contaminants are more likely to be blown away from any joints that aren't air-tight.

First Floor

Up the stairs to the first floor are the facilities for movement component decoration (e.g. polishing, anglage, engraving), case and bracelet polishing, watch testing (e.g. for proper operation prior to COSC testing), and movement manufacturing including complicated watches.

The component decorating and engraving area contained a mix of traditional and high-tech means of decoration. For example, one polishing machine is a very traditional set of tapering wood discs that are set to spinning, to which a watchmaker carefully applies the movement part. In contrast, the engraving machine is a minature CNC mill, that literally has a tool path programmed that spells out the wording to be engraved on the bridges.

Quality control of the movement components and parts is extensive, consisting of checking 50,000 components per year, with 400 points of control, and 4000 individual tests. Sophisticated computer-aided optical comparison with the CAD designs, for example, indicates the dedication that Chopard brings to movement manufacturing.

One of the parts being checked includes the hairspring; if they happen to be for one of the movements that calls for a Breguet hairspring, there is a single watchmaker (a "Regleuse") with over 40 years experience, who has the responsibility to manually shape by hand the overcoil from a flat hairspring in the traditional way. She was trained in Fleurier, and has been at Chopard for 7 years.

Another watchmaker's bench was the domain of Chopard's youngest watchmaker, an apprentice aged 16 who has been with the company for one month. He is the first apprentice that the Fleurier Manufacture has brought on-board, and won't be the last, as now that the Fleurier facility is standing on solid ground, they wish to give back to the educational system that produces the geniuses that are behind Chopard's products. As an apprentice, he spends two days each week at the Fleurier watchmaking school, and three days at the Chopard facility.

For Chopard, complicated watches include the L.U.C Tourbillon introduced in 2003, and the "L.U.C Strike One" - a new (2006) watch that chimes once on the hour without need for a separate strike train barrel and spring. Christian, one of the two specialists within the complications area, was hard at work assembling a tourbillon cage when we arrived. The son of a watchmaker, he started watchmaking at age 17, and has since built up 23 years of experience. He has been with Chopard the last two and a half years.

Finally, on our way out of this wing of the building, we caught sight of an unfamiliar automatic movement that didn't bear the trademark L.U.C microrotor. Stephanie informed us that this was a new in-house chronograph movement, and we would shortly see and hear a lot more about it!

Second Floor

The last stop on our tour was the second floor, where R&D, prototyping, and the watchmaking laboratory are located. Chopard again has completely embraced modern techniques in their movement development process. All designs are done using AutoCAD software - not only are designs faster to develop than traditional paper drawings, but the CAD instructions can go directly to the prototyping department for test manufacturing, the laboratory for design refinement, and eventually to production (milling and EDM) without need to re-encode the instructions. In addition to designing and manufacturing movements, this department also is in charge of making tooling and dies to be used in production both here and in Geneva. Tolerances of manufacture are specified to be in the neighborhood of 1/1000 mm.

The R&D, prototyping, and laboratory departments of the Fleurier Manufacture will be shortly be moved to a renovated building down the road in Fleurier at 1 Rue du Temple, across from the Hotel de Ville. To be organized under a separate subsidiary of Chopard known as "Chopard Technologies", this space will give the personnel, "the freedom to think," according to Karl-Friedrich Scheufele.

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