Snakes, octagons and Italian flair: Fabrizio Buonamassa, Executive Director of Product Design at Bulgari, talks to FACES about what makes Bulgari watches so unique. The Italian also reveals what he appreciates and misses about his home country, why he actually started his career as a four-year-old and what time means to him.
FACES: You earn your money with things that revolve around time. How does this change your perception, definition and value of time?
Fabrizio Buonamassa: Difficult question. Time is the most valuable thing we have because we can’t buy it. We have to find a way to use time as intelligently as possible. When it comes to watches, we naturally need time to produce them. You don’t really need a watch anymore. Rather, it is a choice to wear a watch: because you love this type of object and want to show your taste and appreciation for beautiful, handmade things. Otherwise you have a lot of watches around you: on your cell phone and laptop. Time also plays an important role in the creative process. Sometimes you have ideas that come too early or too late. We are constantly trying to manage time, but that is not possible. Today we have different tools to measure time, but still the same goal of using it as well as possible. We use the mechanical to talk about something that in the end you can neither touch nor see.
FACES: So time is the new luxury.
Fabrizio Buonamassa: Now perhaps more than ever, because we have more and more staff and more things to manage. And although we have a lot of electronic and digital tools these days, at the end of the day it’s the things you can’t buy, such as air or time, that really are a luxury.
The best of both worlds
FACES: As an Italian who was born in Naples, grew up in Rome and now lives in Neuchâtel in Switzerland, do you have the feeling of having two cultures within you? How does this affect your daily life?
Fabrizio Buonamassa: It is difficult to manage two countries and two different cultures. We also have many cultures in Italy. I grew up in Rome, but I spent part of my life in Turin and Milan. Then I was back in Rome, and now I’ve been living in Switzerland for more than ten years. I think that Bulgari is also a unique brand in this respect. If we make the Serpenti watch, for example, it is the perfect blend of the two souls, the two different working methods of Switzerland and Italy. The body and head of the snake come from Italy and the movement from Switzerland. The aesthetics of the Octo Finissimo and the way the watch is worn symbolize Italian culture, with the movement also coming from Switzerland. So we like to say that Bulgari is able to fuse the know-how of Swiss watchmaking with Italian style, Italian design and Italian taste. So in the end, I am still Italian today, even though I live in Switzerland with my children. Italian will remain forever, it is part of our DNA.
FACES: Italian culture is relaxed and charming, and Italians enjoy their time to the full. As a Swiss person, you always have to be punctual and very focused on your work. Are you caught between these opposites?
Fabrizio Buonamassa: No, not necessarily. My only complaint is that the summer vacation ends in mid-August. Maybe it’s also because I have children and you spend so much time with them. It’s things like school vacations that make me realize that I’m no longer in Italy, although there are also many positive aspects to life in Switzerland. Everything is safe here, and life is very easy in Switzerland.
FACES: The watches are manufactured in several Bulgari factories in Switzerland. The movement comes from Les Sentiers, the dials from La Chaux-de-Fonds. The components are then assembled in Neuchâtel, where you are based. How do you manage to divide your time between work, family and leisure?
Fabrizio Buonamassa: In my free time, I like to ride my motorcycles through the Swiss Alps. It’s the best way for me to relax, as I’m usually constantly thinking about products, objects, jewelry, watches and sunglasses. You never know when an idea will pop up. I actually started my career when I was four years old, because that’s when I started making sketches. I’ve been working for more than forty years now – it’s my life. We are always trying to manage time by building mechanical devices that tell the time. But we are not in a position to compress or extend them. That is the point.
From the sketch to the clock
FACES: Can you describe your work process? Do you always start with a specific vision or do you take a much more structured approach and draw up a concept first?
Fabrizio Buonamassa: Both. Sometimes we have requests and then we try to follow the briefing. For example, if we need to change a dial. However, high-quality pieces of jewelry such as the Serpenti Tubogas or the Octo Finissimo are created from an idea and a simple sketch. Most of my everyday life consists of making sketches. This is also about time: in around ninety percent of cases, an intuition and an idea became a product in the next few years. So now we already have some drafts for the years 2025 to 2027. However, such a development can sometimes take up to five years.
For the Octo Finissimo and the Serpenti Tubogas, we didn’t follow any trends and didn’t stick to any briefing – we just had an idea. The most interesting things often come about in this way. When you have to follow a brief, the creative process is different because you start to build the product in your head like a puzzle. I prefer the first approach, because the idea is the most emotional and exciting thing you can imagine in a creative process, and immediately after that I start making sketches. When you have to build a collection, it’s less exciting because you have a lot of elements to consider. You have to be able to turn these restrictions into opportunities. I prefer it when the idea comes naturally, but we have to be able to do both.
FACES: What role do your emotions play in the creation of new watches?
Fabrizio Buonamassa: I’m working on a crazy idea at the moment and we’ll see what comes out of it. It is a project for the end of 2025 or 2026. Watches are like chairs: The market is full of chairs. We don’t actually need any more new chairs, but designers are still creating new ones. There are new technologies, production processes and materials. So they try to tell the customer something different every time. It’s the same with us. We make watches because we love to play with mechanical components and we love the way we can reinvent the brand every time through different products.After twenty years in the company, I realized that we use new watches just as an excuse for me to make more sketches. (laughs)
Looking back on 20 years of creativity
FACES: 20 years of Bulgari! And soon you will be celebrating your silver jubilee. How does that make you feel? And looking back, which milestones were your absolute highlights?
Fabrizio Buonamassa: I feel old, quite honestly. Because when I look around me now, I don’t know many people at all. Even in the business unit, I’m the oldest as far as I know. And that’s a good thing. I’m getting old, and that’s it. I am also more of a mentor these days and am often asked to tell the story of the brand or the story behind a project when people from the company need to discover new or old products. This is a very interesting part of my work.
I still remember the first dial, an orange spherical dial that I designed more than twenty years ago. And I even remember the first watch I designed on my own. I’m very lucky because I’ve made a lot of mistakes. And mistakes always lead to interesting things.
Serpenti Tubogas is certainly a milestone, as it has completely changed the perception of Serpenti within the company. Before the Tubogas, Serpenti was just one of the three references, three SKU, watches with high jewelry value. It was a very small niche. And after the Serpenti Tubogas, the brand discovered the amazing power of the Serpenti aesthetic, which is now the company’s biggest franchise. And the second is certainly the Octo Finissimo, because it was able to change the perception of the brand among customers.
FACES: Your press team has described the new collection as an icon of icons – can such a superlative be topped? To what extent was it possible to reinterpret the collection while remaining true to the Bulgari tradition?
Fabrizio Buonamassa: That is the most difficult thing about this company and my job, because we are full of different sciences. Over the decades, thanks to the amazing creativity of Gianni Bulgari, we have made a lot of different things. When you realize that our archive is so full of different products, it’s not so easy for me to manage this amazing heritage. But for me, the archive is simply an opportunity to discover the brand from a different perspective. So I don’t like to proceed according to the copy-paste principle. I prefer to get a comprehensive overview of the brand’s DNA and reinterpret some of the characters in a contemporary way. Serpenti celebrated its 75th anniversary last year. We still find a new way to wear a Serpenti watch every time. And that’s the interesting part. Bulgari is an amazing brand – very rich in science, very rich in DNA. For me, it’s important to find a different angle every time, because we love to tell a new story every time.
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