250 Years of Breguet: What the Brand’s Final Anniversary Watch Tells Us About How to Build a Legacy

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Breguet has had a pretty astounding 250^th anniversary year. It started on October 1^st, 2024, when the Maison brought on Gregory Kissling as CEO. In the 14 months that followed, the brand introduced 12 new models, including the Expérimentale 1, released earlier this month, which features a breakthrough technological advancement.

Moreover, Breguet was acknowledged with the highest honor in the industry at the 2025 GPHG awards, taking home the Aiguille d’Or for its Classique Souscription.

By all measures, it appears Breguet is once again on the upswing with its current catalog. However, the brand has set a wildly ambitious pace for itself in this anniversary year, which begs the question: What’s next?

How does the brand plan to continue to create a legacy that will be celebrated another 250 years from now? Well, we spoke to a couple of collectors and compiled our own insights as we reflect on this exceptional year and gaze into the beyond.

It’s impossible to be a watch enthusiast without a reverence and connection to history. Watchmaking is a centuries-old artform. For me personally, it’s challenging – near impossible – to place myself in the year 1775 because I feel so disconnected from what life was really like during this period. However, if I focus on Breguet, 1775 becomes easier to grasp because, back then, Breguet was not a brand but a man.
 

“I’m a big lover of independents,” admits Daniel Herz, a young millennial collector based in Los Angeles, California. “And that’s part of what drew me to Breguet – he started out as an independent. Today, we think of [Abraham-Louis Breguet] as being synonymous with this big brand, but in his time, he was viewed just like I view Max Büsser or Martin Frei today.”

In addition to remembering that Breguet was merely an independent watchmaker when he created the tourbillon in 1795, we also have to remember that a watch’s purpose was so wildly different from what it is today: timepieces were tools. In the era of Abraham-Louis Breguet, new inventions were not just for showmanship; they were for utility.
 

Take the tourbillon, for instance. Today, this complication is merely a mark of high horology and artistic expression. Although it improves accuracy by counteracting gravity’s effects on a vertically positioned watch, the tourbillon’s functionality doesn’t benefit wristwatches in the same way it revolutionized pocket watches when it was created.

“The invention of the tourbillon alone is certainly grounds to make you one of the most important watchmakers in history,” shares Philip Khoury, a seasoned New York City-based collector. “Even though the complication doesn’t carry the same purpose today, for me, it’s more about how one invention creates a domino effect and influences every watchmaker and invention to follow.”

Over the past two centuries, the Breguet brand has continued to build on its founder’s inventions. In the modern era, we look to 2010, which brought the introduction of the magnetic pivot and, a year later, the magnetic strike governor.

By harnessing magnetism – a natural enemy of mechanical watches – Breguet was onto something. This led the brand to the breakthrough of the Expérimentale 1, a magnetic escapement that delivers a constant force to the balance and eliminates the more complex system of the traditional lever escapement.
 

This, in turn, allowed Breguet to include a high-frequency 10Hz tourbillon, making the Expérimentale 1 the world’s first timepiece to combine a constant-force magnetic escapement and a tourbillon in a single movement. Sounds groundbreaking, right? Let’s unpack some pros and cons.

The magnetic escapement offers both simplicity and complexity. Once built, the mechanism ultimately simplifies the whole system, which has important long-term benefits. “I have the original 10Hz watch from 2014, the 7727,” shares Herz. “I don’t think people really understand the impact of this technology or how Breguet has updated it in the Expérimentale 1. Essentially, you no longer need lubrication, and this really opens the door for a new wave of engineering.”
 

This brings us back to the core of watchmaking and a major objective of these objects: longevity.

Ensuring components are appropriately lubricated is one of the most crucial parts of servicing and keeping a watch ticking for decades or even centuries. This small but significant benefit of the new magnetic escapement, increasing the lifespan of a watch, is not to be overlooked.
 

That said, the individual components that make up the magnetic escapement are highly intricate, requiring extreme precision in both machining and assembly. This is the biggest limitation of the invention; scalability would be labor-intensive, costly, and ineffective in its current form.

This brings us to the commercial viability of innovations and models like the Expérimentale 1. Here is where Breguet has perhaps positioned itself as a double threat: continuing to foster an environment for technically minded talent who can perpetuate the brand’s inventive roots and bringing in leadership who can leverage this work into products collectors can actually enjoy.

Gregory Kissling comes from a successful career at another Maison under the Swatch umbrella: Omega. Kissling had an impressive 20-year tenure at the brand, joining in 2004 just five years after Omega developed the co-axial escapement. This mechanism initially faced many of the same challenges we see in Breguet’s magnetic escapement, as it featured a complex construction that made large-scale production difficult.
 

However, under Gregory Kissling’s leadership as a Senior Product Manager, we saw a major leap from Omega in 2007 with an in-house movement that optimized the co-axial escapement for mass production. Through the remainder of Kissling’s tenure at Omega, eventually ascending to the VP of Product, we watched the co-axial escapement go from a niche invention to a mainstay of the Maison’s catalog. Perhaps Kissling is poised to bring this same sensibility to Breguet.
 

“I think we can expect Breguet to continue to evolve the magnetic escapement, and over time it will become more accessible across other pieces,” predicts Khoury. “But I also think the introduction of the magnetic escapement is about more than the invention itself; it’s what the act of invention stands for. This is a brand with 250 years of heritage, but it’s not just resting on the successes of its past; it’s continuing to push watchmaking forward.”

There are only a small handful of watchmakers in production today whose roots trace back to the 1700s. In over two centuries, it’s simply inevitable that there will be peaks and troughs. This type of trajectory is about endurance and forward motion through the ups and downs, along with momentum and knowing how to fuel that momentum when it comes.

It appears Breguet’s 250^th anniversary has served as that spark, bringing a renewed energy to the brand that it can continue to harness into the new year.
 

For more information about the brand or the new Expérimentale 1, check out the Breguet website.