Hublot

Carlo Crocco, from the family behind Italy's Binda Group, moved to Switzerland, formed MDM Genève and designed a watch he named Hublot, French for "porthole". Shown at the 1980 Basel fair, it combined a precious-metal case with a natural rubber strap, a design English Wikipedia calls groundbreaking, and sold more than US$2 million in its first year.

By the early 2000s Crocco, absorbed by his design work and by the Hand-in-Hand Foundation, a children's charity, was looking for someone to run the company. In late 2003 he met Jean-Claude Biver, who had revived Blancpain and then Omega.

Biver became chief executive, board member and minority shareholder in May 2004. At Basel in April 2005 he launched the Big Bang chronograph, built on "the fusion of tradition and future", which won the design prize at the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève that year and tripled orders within a year. Sales rose from 24 million Swiss francs in 2004 to nearly 100 million by the end of 2006. The first mono-brand boutique opened on rue Saint-Honoré in Paris in February 2007, followed by Saint-Tropez.

LVMH bought Hublot from Crocco in April 2008. The company opened its first manufacture in Nyon, near Geneva, in 2009, the year it introduced WISeKey, a smart-card system for authenticating watches against counterfeits. Biver went on to lead LVMH's watch division from 2014 to 2018.

Partnerships with football, including the 2008 European Championship and the 2010 and 2014 World Cups, with Formula 1 from 2010, with Ferrari from 2012 and with the 2019 Cricket World Cup have kept the brand in view. Collections include the Big Bang, in materials such as ceramic, sapphire and Magic Gold, and the Classic Fusion.

Hublot has worked with the designer Samuel Ross and the artists Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons, with whom it unveiled the Classic Fusion Balloon Dog and the MP-14 Origin in 2026. In 2019 it had 169 boutiques.