Audemars Piguet

Audemars Piguet traces its beginnings to 1875 in Le Brassus, a village in Switzerland's Vallée de Joux. Jules Louis Audemars and Edward Auguste Piguet worked within a network of small specialist workshops. Making a complete watch meant coordinating their work, then adjusting, finishing and assembling what came back. The founders did not begin with every operation under one roof.

The surviving production records show what occupied them. The first register, opened in 1882, lists thirteen watches on its opening page; nine could chime the time. Such a mechanism, called a repeater, sounds the hours and smaller intervals when activated. Other entries include stopwatches and calendars. These were complicated watches made in small numbers, often sold through another company whose name could appear on the dial.

That background makes the Royal Oak's arrival in 1972 more interesting than a change of case shape. Audemars Piguet was proposing a steel sports watch as an expensive, carefully finished product in its own right. Gérald Genta supplied the design, but turning it into a watch required further work on the case, bracelet and production methods. Flat surfaces, narrow polished edges and exposed fastenings left plenty of manufacturing work visible.

Nor did the company's design history end with Genta. Jacqueline Dimier became head of product design in 1975. Her smaller Royal Oak for women required more than shrinking a drawing: the proportions had to accommodate a different movement and bracelet. She remained in that role until 1999, working across the company's collections.