Review: De Bethune DB15
Born into a family of grape farmers, Ferruccio Lamborghini found his fortune in building tractors rather than riding them. When he offered his engineering expertise to the manufacturer of his shiny new sports car, a Ferrari, he was told that the advice of a tractor mechanic was not appreciated—and so, out of stubborn determination, a supercar legend, the Lamborghini Miura, was born. That’s cars, this is watches, and this is the De Bethune DB15—and it’s the supercar of watchmaking.
It was dogged determination that drove Ferruccio Lamborghini to build a motoring legend, and the same is true of De Bethune co-founders Denis Flageollet and David Zanetta. The Miura took two years to develop, an astonishing turnaround and a car that shook the industry, and the DB15 is no different. Released just two years after De Bethune was founded, it pioneered multiple innovations that made the watchmaker an overnight sensation.
It all started in 2002 with an approach to watchmaking that was decidedly different. Where Swiss tradition dictated conservative, reserved design, the creators at De Bethune sidestepped the mould and took a view that if it could be reinvented, it would be. But the thing is, it’s all very well and good saying that. Doing it is something else altogether.
Perhaps the largest hurdle blocking the way of this endeavour is production. A new watchmaker, ink barely dry on the registration documents, doesn’t have the experience, money, equipment—you name it—to build whatever it likes. It is burdened by suppliers, who dictate what can and can’t be done from the pages of their catalogues. A custom job comes with the custom price.
De Bethune, as was promised, took a different approach. If its watchmakers couldn’t get what they wanted from their suppliers, then they would simply have to make everything themselves. And I mean everything. By 2004, after just two years, De Bethune had the capability to manufacture every part of its movements, including—and if you know a decent amount about watches, you’ll know this is a big deal—its own hairsprings.
De Bethune was founded in 2002, La Chaux, Switzerland by David Zanetta and Denis Flageollet
To put that into perspective, the amount of companies in the world today that can make hairsprings numbers in the tens. Most watchmakers, even those who claim to make their own movements, often have their hairsprings made to order. Not De Bethune. Committing to this level of production after just two years is not just a risk—it’s downright insane.
But that’s not the half of it. As if it wasn’t enough to employ the capability to make its own hairsprings, the creative minds at De Bethune decided that the hairspring itself needed to be reinvented. With carefully placed folds in the terminal curve of the spring, and varying thicknesses throughout the spring itself, De Bethune successfully improved the concentricity, shock-absorbance, thickness, fitment and adjustability of an age-old design exclusively in-house. And that was just the beginning.
The way the watches looked was as much fair game for this widespread reinvention as the way they ticked. The brand has experimented with everything from the details, like the hands and the crown, to the very concept of the wristwatch altogether. Spring-loaded lugs that flex for comfort meet fluid, bionic shapes that are the very essence of a dream; it’s as much about the way a De Bethune is to look at, to hold, to feel, as it is the way it works.
And it was with the release of this DB15 in 2004 that the vision of De Bethune truly came together for the first time. Like the Miura, it took an industry comfortable in its ways and shook it up, changing the landscape forever. Let’s find out how.
De Bethune is made up of around 30 employees
By the standards of De Bethune’s most imaginative watches of today, the DB15 is a reserved, inoffensive piece, but in 2004, it was something of a revolution. The pointed lug tips were already familiar from previous De Bethune pieces, as was the intermittently serrated crown—but the impact nearly two decades ago was astonishing.
But like I said, this was a watch of firsts—a lot of firsts—even though some may not be quite so obvious as others. This was the first calibre for De Bethune to be entirely built in-house, and that gave the manufacturer flexibility to attempt some things that are still otherworldly today.
Some of the innovations are more of a practical nature. The DB15, despite its simplistic display, is a perpetual calendar, and that means it can keep the date accurate through shorter months and even leap years. Other perpetual calendar watches, when adjusted, will still allow non-existent days like the 30th of February to be selected—but not the DB15. Scrub through the month with the crown and, upon reaching the last official day of the month, it will skip forward right before your eyes.
It’s a treat usually reserved for those burning the midnight oil, one that’s taken place long before most owners will have begun to stir. But all that complexity and ingenuity is right there to be seen at the setting of the watch, as the calibre somehow knows to leapfrog the fictional dates.
De Bethune over the years have filled many patents to protect their technical innovations. These include their spherical moon-phase design and their signature balance-wheel and hairspring
But the splendour of the DB15’s date display doesn’t end there. Set against a background of oxidised titanium, whose blue is richer and more vibrant than that of steel—and another first for De Bethune—is a small, circular window. It looks like a moon phase, but it’s not. This curiosity actually serves as the leap year indicator, neatly aligning with the window to produce a fully golden display on the turn of the leap year. That’s much nicer than the typical arrow pointing at a number from one to four.
Now we come to the party piece of the front, and yet another industry innovation from De Bethune: the moon phase. Using of a sphere of blued steel and palladium, instead of representing the transition of the moon with a flat, two-dimensional display, De Bethune brings the complication to life in a way never seen in a wristwatch before. And by manufacturing this small moon from the two metals, the heat bluing affects just the steel, giving a perfect divide between the two hemispheres.
The true personality of De Bethune was yet to be seen from the outside of the DB15, but was very much present on the inside. The calibre DB2004 is unlike any movement from any other watchmaker, revealing a talent for thinking about watchmaking in a whole new way.
There’s the balance spring in there as mentioned before, but that’s far from the only innovation to be found in the escapement. The balance wheel itself, suspended from the enormous span of the balance bridge, is completely alien, a three-pronged star capped with platinum weights that thunders back and forth like a medieval weapon.
Even the arrangement of the bridges is completely unfamiliar, straddling the twin mainsprings in a form that most Trekkies will immediately recognise. It all starts to become clear, this avant-garde brand offering a nod to the future as painted by Gene Roddenberry, one that heavily inspired not just the way a De Bethune watch looks, but the spirit in which it was created, too. Given an opportunity to work with a completely blank canvas, the brush strokes De Bethune has applied here with the DB15—even almost two decades on—are still fresh and exciting. That a single watch can be so embalmed in innovation, style and originality is seldom seen, and the DB15 marks the moment when that happened for De Bethune, when it shifted from just a watchmaker to a watchmaking legend. Like the Miura, it was unexpected—and like the Miura, it’s a benchmark in history.
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