Interview: Davide Cerrato, Creative Director And Head Of Watchmaking At Montblanc

By Benjamin Clymer

I have known Davide Cerrato for a long time. The better part of my career, really. The first time I met him, or at least my first real concrete memory of him, was in Italy in 2011. I was still in graduate school, HODINKEE as a company consisted of, well, me, who would bug my friends to contribute now and then. He was then the newly appointed creative director of a brand that did not even exist in the United States – a brand called Tudor. HODINKEE caught his attention, or he caught ours, because of our shared loved of mid-century, form-follows-function products – the type of things that people used not because they were cool, or expensive, but because of how they worked.

Over the years, we’ve become friendly for our love of vintage cars – he drives a Morgan, often with elbow-length driving gloves and a leather helmet (and yes, he would often drive that to the Rolex HQ parking lot) – and vintage watches. I had the pleasure of introducing Davide to one John Goldberger early on in our relationship, and we can see so much attention to detail paid to many of Davide’s products, at Tudor and Montblanc. Davide is also often seen sitting in the first row at the Geneva auctions not because his job mandates it, but because he wants to. And that’s just it – there are so many suits in this business, Davide is a breath of fresh air: light-hearted, playful – sometimes even goofy – but always keen to listen and learn. These are traits not often found in watch executives.

In 2015, Davide took the helm of the newly created Montblanc Watch Division and has been hard at work creating products that he feels best convey what Montblanc means as a global luxury brand today and what Minerva, a brand now fully under the Montblanc umbrella, means to collectors and enthusiasts alike. The job at Montblanc is very different than that of his role at Tudor, where the formula was simple and pure, with the largest luxury watch company in the world as his backstop. A short while ago, I had the chance to interview Davide about the stresses and successes of starting over, building products that are widely appreciated but not always purchased, and building …read more