Chabi Nouri has been at the helm of the Swiss watchmaker/jeweler Piaget for two years. In this exclusive interview with WatchTime Senior Editor Mark Bernardo, she discusses the long road to producing and commercializing the current World’s Thinnest Mechanical Watch, standing out in the crowded men’s luxury sports-watch field, and the intersection between watch and jewelry design.

Chabi Nouri joined Piaget as CEO in 2018.

MB:  Piaget’s biggest news in watchmaking this year is that the Altiplano Ultra Thin Concept Watch, introduced at SIHH 2018, has finally been commercialized. What were the major hurdles your technical team had to go through to perfect this watch for the market"

CN:  We?re very excited about making this happen, because it has been a dream for the last six years. As you know, we wanted to celebrate the 60th anniversary of our ultra-thin Caliber 9P movement from 1960 in a very significant way. So we had this crazy idea of making a full watch that would be 2 mm thick [the same thickness as Caliber 9P]. We worked really hard on it, developing five new patents along the way, and the prototype we unveiled two years ago was already a functioning model. But we wanted to further perfect it to make a daily-wear watch. This is what we’ve been focused on for the last two years. We needed to make it economical but also to ensure that it would always be unique and very rare, so we added our “Infinitely Personal” conc...