Feature: 6 Things You’ve Got To Know About Audemars Piguet

So of course you’ll have guessed by now that the fourth most popular brand and the subject of this week’s In Focus series is luxury giant Audemars Piguet. For better or worse, Audemars Piguet is predominantly responsible for the luxury watch landscape as it stands today, the paradigm-shifting 1972 AP Royal Oak starting a chain reaction that recovered the entire industry from obsolescence. You probably know a lot about this prestigious watchmaker already, but here’s some stuff you didn’t know.

The Royal Oak Was Originally Made In White Gold

I don’t think you’ll be surprised that the first fact we’re delving into here has something to do with Audemars Piguet’s flagship, the Royal Oak. Talking about Audemars Piguet without mentioning the Royal Oak would be like Simon without Garfunkel or Bert without Ernie. Like it or not, the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak is an exceptional piece of watchmaking history without which we’d all be wearing Apple watches instead.

What cemented its status into legend was its combination of looks, price and material. First off, it looked nothing else that had ever gone before. If Audemars Piguet—and indeed much of the watchmaking scene—were well-established with the mantra of form follows function, the Royal Oak did exactly the opposite. It looked like it did because, well, why not?

And the price, ouch. At a whopping ten times the cost of a Rolex Submariner, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was at least going to be in gold to make up some of that cost. Nope—it was made of plain old steel. And this wasn’t some cost-cutting measure; it was a conscious decision. Steel was in and gold, Audemars Piguet’s preferred material, was out.

But despite that, the first Royal Oaks weren’t actually made in steel at all—they were fashioned from white gold instead. The hugely complicated case and bracelet components just weren’t something Audemars Piguet was equipped to make at such short notice, and so the prototypes were manufactured in gold instead, being softer and easier to machine. In fact, the added setup costs to equip the brand to machine the steel version actually caused it to have a higher production expense than gold for Audemars Piguet, materials included—an expense that, as we well know, was easily recouped.

Audemars Piguet Makes Incredible Watches … For Other Watchmakers

The Royal Oak may be the most famous watch that Audemars Piguet makes—but that’s only when you consider the luxury watches you know about. There are a whole hoard of pieces Audemars Piguet is responsible for that you’d otherwise have no idea about. Enter Audemars Piguet employees Dominique Renaud and Giulio Papi, two watchmakers with a dream of building grand complications. To put you in the mindset of what these two did next, have you ever commented on someone’s performance, only to be faced by the retort, “Well, if you think you can do better, why don’t you do it yourself?”

Well, in 1986, that’s exactly what Dominique and Giulio did, circumventing the traditional career path to master watchmaker by establishing a master watchmaking firm of their very own, Renaud et Papi. Now, let me set the scene here, because these two did this at the point the Swiss watchmaking industry was on its knees. It’s like investing in radio on the day MTV was launched.

Or at least it would have been, had a certain watchmaker called IWC not been trying to spark something of a rebirth. The man in charge, Günter Blümlein, the legend who revived not only IWC, but Jaeger-LeCoultre and A. Lange & Söhne too, set Dominique and Giulio a challenge: build a minute repeater to fit Kurt Klaus’ legendary perpetual calendar and a Valjoux 7750 chronograph. Challenge not only accepted, but knocked out the park.

Unfortunately, critical acclaim wasn’t paying the bills, and so it was back to Audemars Piguet for Dominique and Giulio—not for employment, but with a business proposition. They agreed to sell a majority share to Audemars Piguet on the condition the pair could continue making watches for third parties—and so it was agreed.

Since then, under the watchful eye of Audemars Piguet, the dynamic duo has not only launched brands like Richard Mille and assisted even the mighty A. Lange & Söhne, but also fostered the careers of greats like the Grönefeld brothers and Stephen Forsey. All those watches that could have worn an Audemars Piguet badge instead …

Audemars Piguet Really Did Bet Everything On The Royal Oak (And It Wasn’t Called The Royal Oak)

It’s often told that Audemars Piguet relied on the Royal Oak to survive the industrial downturn, but I don’t think it’s ever fully been established just how much of a pickle the watchmaker was in and how much it bet on the Royal Oak’s success. Then Managing Director for Audemars Piguet, Georges Golay, found himself the day before the 1971 Basel Fair in a bit of a bind. The company was failing, and he needed an answer. A 4pm phone call to designer Gérald Genta would turn out not only to be the best thing he ever did, but a corporate gamble to rival the likes of New Coke.

To set the scene a little better, Audemars Piguet, in 1971, manufactured 5,000 watches total. Not per model—the whole lot. By comparison, the brand today makes some ten times that. Such small numbers were why the business was failing, and the business was failing because no one was buying the watches they did make. That 4pm phone call was beyond desperate. Georges Golay needed a ground-breaking watch that would sell at an incredible price—and he needed it first thing the next morning. He needed the Royal Oak.

If this Royal Oak—or rather, Safari, as it was originally titled—were to save the company, it would have to do so in a big way. The risk couldn’t be taken in a mitigated fashion, perhaps trialling a small batch and then scaling up—it was time to go big or go home. The investment in machinery needed to make the complex steel case and bracelet alone meant the numbers only worked if total production went up by a whopping 50%—just in Royal Oaks. Georges Golay bet the business on red.

By 1975, three years after the launch of the Royal Oak, things were looking shaky. The first batch of 2,000 had only just been sold. The business was still very much on a knife edge—and so, ignoring every principle of the gambler’s fallacy, the choice was made to double down and make another 2,500. This, finally, is when the popularity of the watch started to emerge, and by the mid-eighties, production had risen to well over 10,000 pieces a year. Now, I don’t know if Georges Golay was a gambling man, but on the eve of the 1971 Basel Fair, he made the biggest gamble of his life, and somehow, it paid off—all thanks to the midnight scribblings of one man: Gérald Genta.

Audemars Piguet Didn’t Make Watches

Picture this: rural Switzerland, 1875 and two young men who’d been friends all their lives decided to go into business together. One, 24-year-old Jules-Louis Audemars, had just finished watchmaking school, having graduated by making a particularly impressive pocket watch. It had no less than three major complications: a perpetual calendar, dead beat seconds and a quarter-repeater. By comparison, I graduated with a thin plastic-bound essay on soil compaction that was heavily borrowed from the internet.

It was clear that Jules-Louis had something special going on, and his friend, 22-year-old Edward-Auguste Piguet, thought they could make some money out of it. Also a watchmaker, Edward-Auguste found his calling not just in the regulation of Jules-Louis’s movements, which he did very well, but in the flogging of them, too. Turns out the Le Brassus country boy couldn’t just sell milk to a cow, he could sell it a leather jacket and shoes to match, too.

With Edward the brains and Jules the watchmaking brawn, together they were Audemars Piguet. Jules made high complication movements whilst Eddie sold them around the world, opening up offices in Geneva, London, Berlin, Paris and New York in just a few short decades. But here’s what Audemars Piguet didn’t do: make watches.

What you’ve got to remember here is that back then, the name Audemars Piguet meant nothing. It didn’t mean quality, it didn’t mean costly, and it certainly didn’t mean that eight-sided watch of which we won’t mention. Like so many other watchmakers of the period, Audemars Piguet operated as a B2B supplier, business to business, an OEM manufacturer to other watchmakers. They were still basically kids, making some of the most complicated—and therefore riskiest to purchase—movements in the world.

Audemars Piguet made movements for the biggest and best brands in existence. Bulgari, Cartier, Tiffany—they all saw the mastery of this up-and-coming watchmaker and wanted it for themselves. It wasn’t until the turn of the century that the business could get by selling directly to the public, buying in cases and dials and assembling their own watches right there in their Le Brassus workshop.

Audemars Piguet Shouldn’t Be Around Today

Things are a little different these days—but perhaps not as different as you might think. Today, the Audemars Piguet facility is a technical tour-de-force employing both cutting edge and traditional architecture as a representation of what it takes to bring the best of everything into one exquisite watch. There are some 2,000 people on the payroll, a true giant of industry and one that many smaller brands seek to emulate.

Contrast that to the building Edward and Jules started out in and it is night and day. I say building, but that’s misleading because it’s probably causing you to think of a small industrial unit or serviced office space, when in reality it was just a house. This was a farming village, not a thriving industrial town, and so they had to make do.

The timing of this business venture was, to be quite honest, not great. Swiss watchmaking was evolving from a cottage industry that gave desperate farmers extra income during the winter season into an industry a nation could build a reputation on. With Jaeger-LeCoultre bringing the different stages of watchmaking under one roof and IWC establishing repeatable, industrial processes for mass production, the prospects for a pair of young watchmakers from the country looking to make it as independents were getting slimmer by the day.

But they had an ace up their sleeve: the incredible watchmaking of Jules-Louis Audemars. Had he been an average or even a great watchmaker, the business would have fallen on its backside. But Jules could do what no machine or factory could do, making incredible, high-complication watches to a level of quality that still baffles today.

And as the years and decades wore on, there in the little farming village of Le Brassus he stayed. Even when the pair passed away within a year of each other, the business remained in Le Brassus. Handed down to sons Paul-Louis Audemars and Paul-Edward Piguet—just think about those naming choices for a second—it remained right where it was, employing less than thirty people all the way until 1950. Even through the quartz crises, the brand continued to stick to its roots as a traditional, family-run watchmaker, and by all accounts it shouldn’t be here today. Yet, not only does the shiny new facility today continue to be located in Le Brassus—the Chair of the Board is one Jasmine Audemars, granddaughter of Jules.

Audemars Piguet Built A World-First For Omega

So it was mentioned before that Audemars Piguet tried to take the brand to the next level by making watches for itself and not for others, and that it did by refreshing Jules’ graduation project in 1882. It was a good start, improved upon in 1899 with a new, even more complicated watch showcased at the Paris World Fair. This watch had a grande and petite sonnerie plus minute repeater over three gongs, an alarm, a perpetual calendar and a split-second chronograph with all the second hands dead beat—and it was promptly purchased by Universal Geneve and re-cased as its own watch.

But somewhere in between those two watches, in 1889, another less grand but probably more important watch was made. It wasn’t a pocket watch like the other two, but a wristwatch, the first ever with a minute repeater. That is impressive enough in itself, a world-first for Audemars Piguet and a place in history—but this watch didn’t wear the Audemars Piguet name on its dial. It didn’t wear any name on its dial.

Like all good small businesses, Audemars Piguet started building up its brand by producing one-off commissions. Unlikely to be filling jeweller’s windows with its watches any time soon, producing unique pieces for certain discerning customers was a sensible approach to becoming the complete watchmaker Jules and Edward dreamt it would be.

This particular customer, however, who had ordered the minute repeater wristwatch, was rather special. He himself was in the watchmaking game, owning a firm that not only made watches, but at 100,000 units per year, was the largest manufacturer in all of Switzerland. That customer was Louis Brandt, and the watchmaker he owned was none other than Omega. If you don’t believe me, you can still see that watch in the Omega museum today.

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