In 1833, Antoine LeCoultre founded a watch workshop in the Vallée de Joux, Switzerland; and three short decades later, he established the region’s firstmanufacturethat housed all the labor necessary to create watches under one roof. It was a revolutionary idea during an era when watchmaking skills were traditionally spread across small workshops. The company became Jaeger-LeCoultre in 1937 when the founder’s grandson, Jacques-David LeCoultre, joined forces with renowned French watchmaker Edmond Jaeger.
Today, Jaeger-LeCoultre maintains that same spirit of complete production and remains one of the only Swiss watchmanufactures that creates, develops, decorates, and produces all its timepieces in-house. The company has developed thousands of movements, including the world’s smallest (Caliber 101) and some of the most complicated. Jaeger-LeCoultre is known as “the watchmaker’s watchmaker” since it has a history of supplying watch movements to other high-end brands.
One of Jaeger-LeCoultre’s most famous models is the rectangular Reverso, which features a clever mechanism that allows the wearer to swivel the case so that the robust caseback is facing outwards while the fragile dial-side remains safely hidden away. Although the Reverso was developed in the 1930s for polo players to keep their watches intact during dangerous matches, it is now beloved as a classic Art Deco-style dress watch.
Jaeger-LeCoultre’s impressive range of ultra-flat dress watches and superb complications can be found within the Master, Master Control, Master Grande Tradition, Rendez-Vous, and Duomètre collections, while the Hybris Mechanica line is home to groundbreaking grand complication timepieces. However, the brand is also behind some fantastic luxury sports and tool watches such as the AMVOX, Memovox, and Polaris.