BA111OD Chapter 4 GMT Tourbillon

BA111OD Chapter 4 GMT Tourbillon Watch Review

The BA111OD Chapter 4 GMT Tourbillon is the latest release from the independent watch brand headquartered in the canton of Neuchâtel. A highly coveted complication, the tourbillon is usually beyond the financial grasp of most horophiles; however, Thomas Baillod has democratised the complication, working in close collaboration with Oliver Mory. The resultant watch also features an attractive and highly practical GMT and incorporates a plethora of refined details. Having chatted to Thomas Baillod, founder of the eponymous brand, Mark McArthur-Christie shares his thoughts on this limited edition timepiece.

The Veblen Paradox

I still miss my old Mercedes E500. It was a delight to drive; comfortable, more torque than a Type 83 destroyer and as anonymous as an airport taxi. It was rather less of a delight to run. My mechanic began to send me Christmas cards and the Cunard cruise brochures on his workbench were clues to the ruinous costs. I can still quote suspension and braking system error codes by heart.

Finally, it had to go, so into the classifieds it went, with a full and honest description of its faults and a price to reflect them. There were a couple of weeks of tumbleweed before I decided to try a contrarian approach. Rather than lowering the price, I raised it, considerably. The phone rang off the hook and the car now resides in St Albans with its happy new owner. Typically, it’s apparently incredibly reliable nowadays.

This is, at micro scale, the Veblen Paradox; the more you charge for something, the more people want it. I was reminded of this on catching up with Thomas Baillod at Geneva Watch Days again this summer.

Image – BA111OD Chapter 4.1 – The Veblen Dilemma Tourbillon

Thomas Baillod, founder of BA111OD

Thomas Baillod is someone you can happily listen to for hours. Not only does he tell a great story, he’s refreshingly direct about the watch industry, its practices and its prices. He should know a little about them. After all, the Baillod family has been involved in the industry since the late eighteenth century. One suspects La Chaux de Fonds runs through Baillod like the lettering in a stick of rock. Thomas is also a very practical student of Veblen.

Image – Thomas Baillod

You have to understand Veblen – and contrarianism – to understand the way BA111OD works. Rather than spraying cash at marketing budgets and advertising, Baillod started by asking the question, “What if your best ambassadors were your own customers?” This rather practical and direct way of making the Net Promoter Score a physical reality has paid off. Baillod’s ‘WeCommerce’ (see what he did there?) idea is ‘…about turning every BA111OD owner into an active participant – not just a passive consumer.’

Image – BA111OD Chapter 8 Sand

More fundamentally, Baillod changed the way watches were priced. He began by designing in Switzerland, manufacturing in Asia and selling models for CHF 400. By 2021, he had launched a 100% Swiss tourbillon watch selling (direct) for less than CHF 5,000, a move that generated as many column inches as watch sales.

BA111OD Chapter 4 GMT Tourbillon – do we need tourbillons?

Now, the firm has a GMT tourbillon to add to its product portfolio, the Chapter 4 Tourbillon GMT. It’s a 44 mm, Grade 5 titanium-cased, 100 hour power reserve (that’s one heck of a mainspring) watch, limited to only 30 pieces.

As I’ve mentioned before, there isn’t really much practical need for a tourbillon in a wristwatch. Designed to blow a raspberry at the effect of gravity by rotating the balance and escapement within a pocketwatch, while held in a vertical position, it makes less sense in a wristwatch. Indeed, a wristwatch is in constant motion, with the balance and escapement subject to a myriad of positions. But isn’t seeing watchmakers creating engineering beauty, manifest in the very smallest of details just for the sake of it, one of the joys of Haute Horlogerie? After all, you don’t need anglage or perlage either, but the world of watchmaking would be much poorer for their absence.

Image – BA111OD Chapter 4 Infinity Flying Tourbillon

In common with other BA1110D’s Chapter 4 watches, the GMT Tourbillon is powered by the calibre BA.01 movement, developed in cooperation with Olivier Mory, based in La Chaux de Fonds, a city synonymous with watchmaking. It’s a movement that’s also seen service in a few other models from the maker, including the Skeleton Tourbillon, the Skeleton Ice White and the 4.1 TVD Tourbillon, all having their origins in Mory’s original BCP Tourbillon movement. It’s a hand-wound movement, beating at 21,600 vph (3 Hz), features 19 jewels and is equipped with a variable inertia balance. You might be wondering why ‘TVD’? Simple and appropriate – The Veblen Dilemma.

BA111OD Chapter 4 GMT Tourbillon – modularity

One of its features, as Mory explains, is its modularity. “The dimensions of our movements are interchangeable, complications are integrated, you no longer need new cases to offer new products.” This integration enables Mory to use the platform to produce everything from a moonphase complication (see the Infinity Flying Tourbillon) to this new GMT, all on the same platform. It’s all part of Baillod’s thinking – using mass manufacture techniques at low volumes to produce high-end pieces.

BA111OD Chapter 4 GMT Tourbillon – finishing

Finishing here may not be by hand, but there’s still brushing, mirror polishing, radial polishing on gears and anglage on bridges and tourbillon components. This isn’t a movement you’d worry about taking home to meet your parents.

BA111OD Chapter 4 GMT Tourbillon – suitable for daily wear

There’s another benefit to BA111OD’s more rational approach to manufacturing – robustness.  It’s no G-Shock, but the new GMT Tourbillon is far from fragile. It will shrug off the effects of a 2,000 Gauss magnetic field thanks to some smart choices of materials for the escapement. Unless you’re habitually hanging around MRI scanners, that should be more than adequate.  Want to swim with your tourbillon? That’s fine – this one is rated to 50 m, so unless you’re a semi-pro diver, you should be fine. And there’s 5,000 G of shock resistance, so it’s a ‘wear every day’ watch you don’t need to baby.

Image – BA111OD Team

BA111OD Chapter 4 GMT Tourbillon – dial

GMTs have a habit of being either fussy or utilitarian. The BA111OD is neither. In fact, you’d have a job to spot it was a GMT at all, with the complication almost blending into the main dial, positioned adjacent to 2 o’clock. The home time is shown on a completely separate display, even indicating half hour increments – handy for New Delhi, parts of Canada and Iran where the ‘offset’ is 30 minutes.

To be fair, anything approaching a conventional dial is unusual for BA111OD’s Chapter 4 watches. Most are skeleton dials, giving the movements a chance to shine. That’s not to say the dial here is a poorer option. Simple and classical as it looks, there’s been plenty of design thinking behind its layout and textures.

The dial base is a brushed sunray with applied hour baton markers, but the GMT sundial and the tourbillon window both use different treatments to separate them visually. The tourbillon aperture is plain finished with printed 5-second markers, so the complication gets all the attention. Helping it stand out are two screwed-in supporting arms that overlap the aperture and carry the small seconds hand. Moving outwards, there’s a further texture contrast with the printed minute track and the circular, ridged outer track. This latter is mirrored by the GMT subdial’s hour track. Classical Dauphine-style hours and minutes impart meaning, while the running seconds and GMT are shown using plain stick hands. Usefully, the hour and minute hands are lumed.

BA111OD Chapter 4 GMT Tourbillon – case

You’d be hard pushed to know the unfussy 44 mm case and crown were Grade 5 titanium without picking the watch up – it’s been PVD coated in a golden hue. The strap is a soft, grey nubuck which, if it isn’t your thing, you can change with a fingernail, thanks to its quick-release system.

Closing remarks

This BA111OD GMT Tourbillon is one of those timepieces that makes you look at the watch industry with a slightly raised eyebrow. A titanium-cased, 100% Swiss-made tourbillon with a true GMT for a gnat’s whisker under £8,000? There isn’t so much a price gap between this and other Swiss tourbillons as an Alpine chasm. Some of that can be accounted for by hand-finishing and different components, but it would be grossly unfair to this model’s quality and design and call it a ‘value proposition’. BA111OD is a maker in its own right, producing watches imbued with many qualities that transcend keen pricing alone.

There’s a rather lovely touch on the main bridge that tells you a lot about the watch and its maker. Those two, interlocking chevrons? They’re not just a bit of design fussiness, they’re from the Baillod crest circa 1341. This is a maker who is not only proud of what he produces, but the Chaux de Fonds heritage he draws from to do it.

Image – Villa Castellane, home of BA111OD