An Albanian Brand Goes Into High-End Watchmaking
He’s Spent the Past 4 Years Developing a New Watch Brand
September 11, 2024India Has Become the Watch Industry’s Next Big Prize
September 11, 2024This post was originally published on this site
Working with the Swiss movement specialist Agenhor, Pirro created a timepiece that has tiny dancers and musicians on its mosaic dial.
The dial of Primordial Passion, a one-of-a-kind watch by the Pirro brand in Albania, is dominated by 12 tiny gold folk dancers, each a third of an inch tall. They stand atop a red and black surface of 1,500 Murano glass mosaic pieces that were positioned, one by one, by the brand’s founder, Pirro Ruco, using a new technique he called “Pirro texture golden borders.”
The 46.5-millimeter watch, priced at 1.2 million Swiss francs ($1.4 million), is powered by a movement from the Geneva specialist Agenhor, which supplies the likes of Van Cleef & Arpels and Hermès.
Introduced in June, Primordial Passion was the brand’s first watch. “We are the only watch brand producing 100 percent in Albania, apart from the Swiss movement,” Mr. Ruco, a mechanical engineer, jeweler and self-taught watchmaker, said through an interpreter during a recent interview.
His road to this point has been anything but a straight path.
“A Low-Tech Environment”
Mr. Ruco, 64, grew up in the Albanian town of Kucove, which at the time was called Stalin City. Today, Albanians know it as the site of a new NATO air base, which opened in March.
Inspired by his father, who collected and repaired everything from cameras to sunglasses, Mr. Ruco also made sunglasses — which were scarce in the communist state — using one of his father’s machines. “But they were 80 percent made by hand,” he said. “Albania was really a low-tech environment, special machines didn’t exist.”
