Hublot is a Swiss enterprise creating luxury watches and founded in 1980 by Carlo Crocco. The company currently operates as a wholly-owned subsidiary of France's LVMH.
A scion of the Italian Binda Group dynasty, best known for making Breil watches, Carlo Crocco left the company in 1976 to strike out on his own and create a new watch company. Moving to Switzerland he formed MDM Geneve and set about designing a watch that he named the Hublot after the French word for "porthole". The watch that he created featured the first natural rubber strap in the history of watchmaking. It took 3 years of research to create the strap. Despite failing to attract a single potential customer on the first day of its debut at the 1980 Basel Watch Fair, the watch quickly proved to be a commercial success with sales in excess of $2m in its first year.
In February 2007, Hublot opened its first mono-brand store in Paris, in the Rue Saint-Honore. The second was opened in the summer of that year, in the Hotel Byblos, Saint-Tropez.In April 2008 it was announced that luxury goods group LVMH had acquired Hublot from founder Carlo Crocco for an undisclosed fee, adding to it's existing portfolio of watch brands including TAG Heuer.
At BaselWorld 2009, Hublot unveiled a new method of detecting counterfeit watches. Using a WiseKey smart card, the system authenticates watches on Hublot's servers. The system went live in August of 2009.