Audemars Piguet is a manufacture of expensive Swiss watches that compete with Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin.
The roots of Audemars Piguet date back to 1875, when the 23-year-old Jules-Louis Audemars met Edward-Auguste Piguet, then only 21, at Vallee de Joux, which is considered to be the cradle of prestige watch-making. Their hometown was Le Brassus. When they graduated school they went to Vallee de Joux to start working in their favorite field of watch manufacturing.
Thus Audemars started producing component parts for movements and Piguet got the job of a repasseur, whose job it was to make the final regulation of the timepiece. They founded a firm later known as Audemars, Piguet et Cie.
Since 1882, members of the Audemars and Piguet families have always been on the board of directors and have thus directly or indirectly run the company.
The business started with Audemars managing the production and technical part and Piguet focusing on sales, and success was not immediate. The Audemars Piguet trademark was registered in 1882, however it would be seven years later that the company was officially founded. At this point Audemars Piguet et Cie became one of the largest employers for watch-making in the whole of Vaud, southwestern Switzerland.
The company opened its first branch in Geneva in 1889, and began creating its own components and assembling within its factory with direct supervision and strict quality control .
Between 1894 and 1899 the company produced about 1,200 timepieces, including some very complex watches. When Audemars and Piguet died, in 1918 and 1919 respectively, the company steadily grew and became more famous. As the success of the company's business was rising its customers became Tiffany & Co, Cartier and Bulgari, who rebranded and sold Audemars Piguet watches under their own house names. Today these watches are only identifiable as Audemars Piguet products by their serial numbers.
Later Audemars Piguet launched several watches like the smallest minute repeater in the world and a jumping second hand (i.e. the second hand jumps from second to second in quanta rather than progressively) pocket watch. In 1925 Audemars Piguet introduced the world's thinnest pocket watch, at 1.32 millimeters. Only three years later the company created the first skeleton watch.
At the end of 1920s and the beginning of 1930s the success of Audemars Piguet started dimming. The crash of the stock market as well as the Depression slowed the development of many Swiss companies.
During World War II the manufacturer was able to come back on the market by producing one of its well-known models-an ultra-thin chronograph, the heart of which was Calibre 2003. The sales of Audemars Piguet started growing in the forties and fifties. Together with Jaeger-LeCoultre it designed the thinnest automatic movement. The latter included a 21 carat gold rotor placed in the center. Their "Royal Oak", was produced in 1972 and is considered to have created the market for the stainless steel luxury watch. It was designed by Gerald Genta.
Today the company, along with Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin, is sometimes claimed to be one of the top three Swiss watchmakers. It owns about 40 per cent of Jaeger-LeCoultre and every timepiece manufactured in-house is still made using the old-fashioned hand-made technique.
Since 2000, the company claimed that it makes no more than 16,000 Audemars Piguet watches each year and will not do so in the future. This production is less than that of other famous Swiss watch manufacturers, such as Rolex which produces 2,000 watches per day.
