Here’s Why Audemars Piguet Is Refining Complications and Its Approach to Women
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The history of Audemars Piguet officially begins in 1875, when Jules Louis Audemars and Edward August Piguet joined forces to found a watchmaking atelier in Le Brassus, Switzerland, a remote village in the Vallée de Joux, the area in the Jura Mountains known as the cradle of Swiss watchmaking. Unofficially, however, the story begins nearly a century earlier, with a woman named Susanne Audemars, a widowed mother of three who served as the brand’s unlikely wellspring.
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“We call it ‘the AP tale,’” Ilaria Resta, AP’s chief executive, said last week in her opening remarks to an elaborate historical presentation that unfolded at the brand’s new Arc manufacture building in Le Brassus, where I joined some 50 watch editors from around the world to honor the brand’s 150th anniversary.
“Imagine we are in 1792,” Sébastian Vivas, AP’s heritage and museum director, said as he bounded on stage to share Susanne’s story. “It’s the middle of the winter, in the last farm of the Vallée de Joux. After that is deep forest, it’s cold everywhere. Susanne is with her three kids, from ages 5 to 12 years old. But she’s sad because she has lost, during the two previous months, three other kids and her husband. She’s resilient, she’s brave, she’s brilliant. She finds a way to teach her three kids watchmaking, to make them the first Audemars watchmakers of the Vallée de Joux.
“One of the three, Louis Benjamin Audemars, who was 9 when he lost his father, founded a company, a little workshop in 1811, that became one of the most important workshops of the Vallée de Joux in the 19th century. Everybody has worked with Louis Audemars’ workshop, including our two cofounders before the foundation of AP. Their fathers did, their uncles, their cousins, their friends, their neighbors, everybody. It was, and is still, a question of family, but also a question of families. We wanted to take a moment to pay tribute to Susanne Audemars, because, honestly, without her, we probably would not be here today.”
The story, which preceded a theatrical reenactment of the brand’s history to the present day, marked the first time AP had spoken about Susanne Audemars, Vivas said. The emphasis on the brand’s feminine heritage was likely no accident.
Women represent one of the brand’s two big “vectors” for growth in the coming years, Resta told Robb Report the day after the 150th gala celebration. Incidentally, the event took place in a temporary structure in the middle of the forest near Le Brassus, close to where Susanne Audemars once lived. (On her wrist, Resta wore the new 38 mm 18-karat sand gold Code 11.59 featuring a flying tourbillon and diamonds along its case and lugs.)
The other big growth opportunity, Resta said, was complications. That part was made clear during the product presentations, when AP revealed the hero of its 150th anniversary collection, a new selfwinding perpetual calendar movement, Calibre 7138, that unites all the functions of the QP in a single “all-in-one” crown, reflecting a new focus on ergonomics.
During her closing remarks at the morning presentation, Resta highlighted the new caliber “that allows you to set all the features of the QP in a very simple way, just with a touch of the crown. No more setting tools, no more brain gymnastics, everybody can set it and everybody can wear and enjoy it.”
Presented in three executions—a 41 mm Code 11.59 in 18-karat white gold (109,300 Swiss francs, about $121,720), and on two 41 mm Royal Oak models in either stainless steel (109,300 Swiss francs) or 18-karat sand gold (130,000 Swiss francs), as well as on three corresponding “anniversary” limited editions of 150 pieces, each featuring aesthetic details that pay homage to the manufacture’s 150th anniversary—the new movement was five years in the making.
“This complication, which is astronomically connected, reminds us every day that time and nature, the past and the present are interconnected,” Resta said.
It’s also a reminder that AP—which in 2024 had an estimated turnover of 2.38 billion Swiss francs, about $2.76 billion, according to the latest report from Morgan Stanley and LuxeConsult—remains a sales leader in the Swiss watch industry in part because its timepieces are pricey and getting pricier. The report, which ranked AP fourth on the list of brands in terms of sales, went on to say that AP and its privately-owned cohorts in the “Big Four”—Rolex, Patek Philippe, and Richard Mille—last year captured an impressive 47 percent market share. Compare that with the quartet’s pre-Covid 2019 market share of 36.8 percent and it’s clear where the market is headed: up, up, and away.
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