Audemars Piguet & Cie

Jules Louis Audemars and Edward Auguste Piguet founded their watchmaking firm in Le Brassus in the Vallée de Joux in 1875 — a remote Alpine valley that has been the centre of Swiss haute horlogerie for centuries. The two families have maintained ownership of the company to the present day, making Audemars Piguet one of the oldest continuously family-owned watchmakers in the world. Le Brassus has a permanent population of approximately 1,000 people; Audemars Piguet is its primary employer and the reason most visitors come.

Audemars Piguet produced the first minute repeater wristwatch in 1892 — a watch that chimes the time on demand, striking the hours, quarter hours, and minutes on tiny gongs. The mechanism requires extraordinary precision: the striking train must be perfectly regulated so that the chimes sound at precisely the right intervals. A minute repeater pocket watch had existed for decades, but miniaturising the mechanism for a wristwatch was considered nearly impossible. Audemars Piguet did it four years before the official invention of the wristwatch.

In 1971, Audemars Piguet was in financial difficulty. CEO Georges Golay asked designer Gérald Genta to design a watch overnight for the Basel watch fair. Genta, inspired by diving helmets and porthole designs, produced the Royal Oak — a stainless steel sports watch with an integrated bracelet and exposed octagonal bezel screws. When it launched in 1972 at 3,300 Swiss francs — five times the price of a gold Rolex — the reaction was largely hostile. Industry insiders called it ugly. Retailers refused to stock it. Audemars Piguet persisted. The Royal Oak became the most copied watch design in history and the foundation of the entire luxury sports watch category.

Gérald Genta, who had also designed the Patek Philippe Nautilus and IWC Ingenieur, spent years frustrated by his failure to receive royalties or consistent credit for the Royal Oak. The watch he had designed in a single night had become one of the most valuable watch designs in history. Genta later said: "I gave them the Royal Oak and they gave me nothing." Audemars Piguet maintained that the design was work-for-hire. Genta founded his own watch brand. The Royal Oak continued to define the company that had paid him a single fee for it.

By 2022, the waiting list for a standard Royal Oak in stainless steel — a watch that retails for approximately $25,000-$35,000 — stretched to five or more years at authorised dealers. Grey market prices for the same watch exceeded $150,000. Audemars Piguet produces approximately 50,000 watches per year, deliberately far below the demand it could satisfy. The watch that was called ugly at its 1972 launch had become the most desirable sports watch in the world — and one of the most significant design objects of the twentieth century.