Competing against industry giants, newcomer Genus won the Mechanical Exception Watch Prize at the GPHG 2019.
Co-founders Sebastien Billieres and Catherine Henry introduced a novel way to tell time on the award-winning GNS1.2 powered by Calibre 160W-1.2.
At the traditional 9 o'clock position, a fixed arrow points to the current hour on a rotating peripheral ring with twelve satellites, numbered one to 12. They remain aligned in the reading direction, rotating 90 degrees every three hours, or four times during their 12-hour journey.
Billieres unconventionally breaks down the minutes to tens and single digits for his choreography of time.
The central tens-of-minutes display involves two large counter-rotating wheels with the numbers 10, 50 and 60 on the top ring and 20, 30 and 40 on the bottom one.
Together, they vertically form the infinity symbol, which marks the origin of his time display concept.
The two wheels drive a procession of elements called genera along the figure-8 path with the first genus indicating the tens-of-minutes.
The precise minute is shown by a stationary arrow on the right, near the crown, which aligns with a number, from zero to nine, on a skeletonised rotary dial.
Accordingly, one reads the time from left to right while being entertained by the captivating animation, which is even more magical in the dark -- thanks to the Super-Luminova on the numerals and indicators.
A decade of research and three years of development resulted in the ingenious mechanism with two patents for the peripheral display of the hour satellites and the free-moving genera circulating, as if on rails, between the two counter-rotating foci.
The launch of his independent brand and the inaugural GNS1.2 in 2019 marked 20 years of Billieres in the watch industry. His career started at the Roger Dubuis workshop, which had approximately ten employees back in 1999.
Today, the master watchmaker combines his inventiveness with the highest standards of Swiss haute horlogerie to create exceptional timepieces at the Genus workshop in Geneva.