The Coating Comes Off
BA111OD strips the PVD from its Chapter 7 Skeleton and narrates the subtraction as summer. What survives the strip is smaller — and real.
In May, the Chapter 7 Skeleton arrived in anthracite PVD, a coating engineered to swallow light. This month it arrives with the coating gone. The steel beneath is what you now see. Everything else holds — the 40mm case, the Soprod P024, the thirty-eight hours, the faceted bezel, the crown pushed to four o’clock. A single process has been subtracted, and a cost subtracted with it. BA111OD calls this being revealed by light.
It is worth pausing on the verb. Nothing was revealed. A decision was taken — to stop laying down a dark PVD layer — and then narrated as though the steel had been waiting all along for summer to find it. This is not deception. The specification sheet is candid: it names the Soprod caliber without flinching, states the reserve honestly, makes no certification claim it cannot keep. The mythology works one storey above the facts, in the register where a colourway becomes a season and a finishing choice becomes a property of the light over Lake Neuchâtel.
Barthes1 catalogued this exact operation. Take something contingent — a decision, a cost, a market calculation — and let it harden into essence, into something that simply is, timeless and unchosen. The release is a small museum of the technique. The watch is not cheaper to produce; it is brighter, distinctly summery, a fresh expression. It did not lose a coating; it evolved. The light of Neuchâtel did not brief an agency; it shaped the brand’s vision. Agentless, essential, continuous. Somewhere a person removed a step from a production run, and the sentence reporting it has no subject at all.
The campaign supplies a human face for the essence. Loïc Huguenin, the Neuchâtel wingfoiler, works his home lake daily with the wind and the light — an approach the release assures us echoes the precision, balance and control of watchmaking. It is a graceful association and a wholly constructed one. A man rides a foil in the same canton where the watches are assembled, and from that adjacency the copy manufactures a shared soul. Precision. Balance. Control. The words describe the athlete, the object, and the brand at once, which is exactly their assignment: to make a marketing choice feel like a property of the place.
None of which makes the object dishonest. That is the part worth holding onto.
Because beneath the weather system, BA111OD is one of the more genuinely disruptive propositions in accessible Swiss watchmaking, and the disruption is real precisely where the poetry is decorative. Founded in 2019 — from a garage, launched over LinkedIn, financed by pre-orders rather than banks — the brand sells directly, prices transparently, and has spent five years demonstrating that a Swiss mechanical watch need not carry the industry’s customary markup to reach a wrist. That is the substance. Everything layered on top is the tax — in money and in myth — the substance apparently still has to pay.
Consider the heritage. The release invokes two hundred and fifty years of Baillod watchmaking, a line running to 1775. True enough, on the record. But by the brand’s own telling, Thomas Baillod founded the company first and discovered the bloodline afterward, uncovering the ancestor once the enterprise already existed. Which inverts the story on offer. A start-up did not descend from 1775; a start-up went looking and found a 1775 to descend from. The lineage is real. Its function here is mythological — a garage experiment handed a coat of arms.
The same halo hangs over the movement. Flying tourbillons. Observatory-certified chronometers. Métiers d’art dials painted one at a time. The About section runs the entire vocabulary of high watchmaking, and this watch speaks none of it. It runs a Soprod P024: a sound automatic built on the ubiquitous ETA 2824-2, made by a division of the Festina Group, shared without embarrassment across half the accessible-Swiss field, from Nivada Grenchen to Jacques Bianchi. There is nothing wrong with a good outsourced base. Most of the industry runs on them. But the brief invites you to feel the tourbillon workshop’s gravity through a caliber that has never been near it.
Pick the watch up, though, and the argument tilts back toward the object.
In natural steel the openworking reads differently than it did in anthracite. The dark coating flattered by concealing; bright steel has nowhere to hide and survives the exposure anyway. The bridges are genuinely layered, not a handful of decorative holes over a solid plate. Vertical brushing runs the flanks of the case; the bevels take a polish that throws a hard line of light as the wrist turns; between the indexes, sandblasting keeps the glare down to a matte hush. The ruby bearings sit exposed, small red punctuation in the mechanism. Against the very lake-light it means to evoke, the steel does what the PVD could not: it answers back, scattering rather than swallowing. For a watch under a thousand francs, the finishing is not pretending. It is doing the work.
Which is where the collector actually lives — not in the heritage paragraph but on the wrist, inside a very particular appetite. The Chapter 7 speaks the integrated-bracelet dialect fluently: the faceted bezel, the unbroken case-to-bracelet line, the whole Genta-descended grammar of the luxury sports watch. That grammar usually costs five figures. Here it costs four, and the low ones. The desire it serves is not for rarity. It is for access — for the look and the real finishing of an idiom whose entry fee has, until lately, been the entire point.
So run the subtraction. Strip the Neuchâtel light and the frost-blue reflections. Strip the wingfoiler on his home lake. Strip the 1775 that was found rather than inherited. Strip the tourbillon halo, the Soprod base it shares with the field, the colourway that is the only thing this release actually changed. Then ask what remains singular to this watch. The honest answer is nothing. No technology no one else has. No mechanism, no provenance that this piece alone can claim. On the axis of singularity the subtraction leaves the wrist bare, and pretending otherwise would be one more myth.
But singularity was never the thing being sold, and the wanting does not vanish with the myth. What survives the strip is quieter and entirely real: finishing that holds up in unforgiving light, at a price the direct-to-consumer model genuinely makes possible. A provenance that checks out — not a bloodline, a business model.
The forbidden thing, then, was never the watch. It is the appetite the watch flatters: the wish to wear the sports-luxe idiom without paying the idiom’s toll, to have the line and the light and the layered bridges for the price of a sensible three-hander, and to feel — quietly, on the wrist, where no one audits your reasoning — that you have got away with something. The trade spent decades teaching collectors that Swiss mechanical seriousness must cost dearly. This one hands you the look of it for under a grand and leaves you to decide whether that is a bargain or a small heresy. The steel tempts you toward no flaw. It tempts you toward the suspicion that the tax was never the watchmaking.
Roland Barthes (1915–1980): French critic and semiologist whose Mythologies (1957) showed how culture turns contingent, made things — a choice, a product, a slogan — into what feels natural and inevitable, quietly draining the history out of them.
About the Author
Sergio Galanti is a Swiss-based independent writer specialising in the luxury watch industry, and an advisor to private collectors and investors. He is the editor of WatchDossier (watchdossier.ch), a publication exploring the cultural and philosophical undercurrents of contemporary horology, and the author of Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Swiss Independent Watchmaking.
No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.
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