AUDEMARS PIGUET

The roots of Audemars Piguet date back to 1874, when the 23-year-old Jules Louis Audemars met Edward Auguste Piguet, then only 21, at Vallée de Joux, they were both born in Le Brassus. When they graduated from school, they went to Vallée de Joux to start working together in watch manufacturing.

Thus Audemars started producing component parts for movements and Piguet got the job of a repasseur, maker the final regulation of the timepiece. In 1875, 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, therefore, 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.

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 a range of ultra-thin chronograph models, notably the Calibre 2003. The sales of Audemars Piguet started growing in the 1940s and 1950s. 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", which uses a custom Jaeger-leCoultre movement, 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, Vacheron Constantin & Jaeger-LeCoultre , is sometimes claimed to be one of the "big four" Swiss watchmakers. Every timepiece manufactured in-house is still made using the old-fashioned hand-made technique.

The Audemars Piguet watch group is composed of 1,100 employees, fourteen distribution subsidiaries and sixteen boutiques around the world. It comprises three production sites: Le Brassus (SA de la Manufacture d'Horlogerie Audemars Piguet & Cie), LeLocle (Audemars Piguet: Renaud et Papi SA), and Meyrin (Centror SA).

The manufacture Audemars Piguet produces 26,000 timepieces per year.

Since 1999, Audemars Piguet has been the sponsor of the Queen Elizabeth II Cup, a 2000 metres Group One Thoroughbred horse raceat Sha Tin Racecourse in Hong Kong around the end of April each year.

In 2007, Audemars Piguet offered its support to the Clinton Foundation. The Foundation works around the world on global issues, including education, health, poverty issues, and fight against HIV/AIDS. The company created the Jules Audemars Clinton Foundation Equation of Time watch in a limited edition of 126 pieces. The watch incorporated complex astronomical features. It shows sunrise and sunset times, perpetual calendar, and astronomical moon.

Audemars Piguet was a sponsor of Team Alinghi, winners of the America's Cup in 2003, making a series of Alinghi limited edition watches.

Like many other brands of luxury watches, Audemars Piguet has a number of ambassadors, including: Novak Djokovic, Sachin Tendulkar, Michael Schumacher, Lionel Messi, Sebastien Buemi, LeBron James, Michelle Yeoh, Diamant Lulaj, among many other personalities and athletes.

TAG HEUER

TAG Heuer S.A., a combination of Techniques d'Avant Garde and the surname Heuer, designs, manufactures and markets luxury TAG Heuer-branded watches, chronographs and fashion accessories and markets Swissluxury TAG Heuer-branded eyewear and mobile phones manufactured under license by other companies. TAG Heuer traces its roots to the 1860 foundation of Uhrenmanufaktur Heuer AG by Edouard Heuer in St-Imier, Switzerland. The company was purchased by TAG Group (Holdings) S.A. in 1985 and the Heuer brand became TAG Heuer. In 1999, TAG Group sold TAG Heuer to French luxury goods conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy • Louis Vuitton.

Notable wearers and brand endorsers of TAG watches include Barack Obama, Lewis Hamilton, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tiger Woods, Brad Pitt, Shah Rukh Khan, Ben Blowers, Chris King and Tristan Revell.

TAG Heuer is based in Neuchâtel, Switzerland and is led by President and CEO John-Christophe Babin. Jack Heuer, the great grandson of the founder, is the Honorary Chairman. TAG Heuer maintains a watchmaking workshop in Cornol, Switzerland and a watchmaking factory in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. The TAG Heuer slogan is "Swiss Avant-Garde Since 1860".

TAG Heuer traces its roots to 1860 when Edouard Heuer founded Uhrenmanufaktur Heuer AG (English: Heuer Watchmaking Inc.) in St-Imier, Switzerland.

Edouard Heuer patented his first chronograph in 1882 and in 1887 patented an 'oscillating pinion' still used by major watchmakers of mechanical chronographs

In 1911, Heuer received a patent for the "Time of Trip", the first dashboard chronograph. Designed for use in automobiles and aircraft, two large hands mounted from the center pinion indicate the time of day, as on a traditional clock. A small pair of hands, mounted at the top of the dial (12 o'clock position) indicates the duration of the trip (up to 12 hours). A top-mounted crown allows the user to set the time; a button mounted in that crown operates the start / stop / reset functions of the "duration of trip" counter.

In the early 1950s, Heuer produced watches for the American retailer Abercrombie & Fitch. The "Seafarer" and "Auto-Graph" were unique chronographs produced by Heuer to be sold by Abercrombie & Fitch. The "Seafarers" had special dials—with blue, green and yellow patterns—that showed the high and low tides.

Commencing in the mid-1960s, Heuer was part of a partnership (with Breitling and Hamilton) that sought to introduce the world's first automatic chronograph. Seiko (a Japanese watch manufacturer) and Zenith (a Swiss watch manufacturer) were also seeking to be the first to offer these chronographs. These projects were conducted in secret, as none of the competitors wanted the other companies to be aware of their efforts. Most agree that the Heuer-Breitling venture was first to introduce their new line of automatic chronographs to the world wide market, with Heuer-Breitling-Hamilton holding lavish press conferences in Geneva and New York, on 3 March 1969, to show their new lines of chronographs.

In 1975, Heuer introduced the Chronosplit, a digital chronograph with dual LED and LCD displays. Later versions featured two LCD displays.

TAG Heuer's current lines include Formula One, Aquaracer, Link, Carrera, Monaco and Grand Carrera.

TAG Heuer, in keeping with its image as a luxury brand with an innovative spirit, has long standing links with the world of sport and Hollywood. TAG Heuer has been the official timekeeper of the three Summer Olympic Games of the 1920s, the Skiing World Championships, the Formula One World Championships and has developed a watch for the McLaren F1 team. The brand has also had a long list of sports and Hollywood ambassadors.

Some of the more recently announced models include the Monaco V4 (the movement of which is driven by belts rather than gears); the Carrera Calibre 360 (the first mechanical wrist chronograph to measure and display time to 1/100 of a second) and the Monaco 69 (with both a digital chronograph accurate to a millisecond and a traditional mechanical movement, with a hinged mechanism allowing wearers to flip the watch between its two separate dials).

London-based Christoph Behling has been the lead designer for TAG Heuer since 2004. The collaboration has resulted in some of the brand's most celebrated pieces including the world's fastest chronograph, the Mikrogirder 1/2000th, launched in 2012.

CORUM

Corum is a Swiss watchmaker based in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Canton of Neuchâtel. Founded in 1955, it makes high-quality and high-price watches, many of which are limited editions. The benchmark watch series for Corum is its "Admiral's Cup" series.

Corum has also been the maker of the World Series of Poker watches that accompanied World Series of Poker bracelet in 2007, and became the maker of the bracelets themselves in 2007.

Corum was founded in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland by Gaston Ries and his nephew, Renee Bannwart in 1955, one year later the first Corum watches were being produced.

Corum's claim to fame came early on when the company introduced a watch made out of a $20 dollar gold piece which was an instant best-seller. Corum is also known for its "World Premiers". Each year, it's produced a limited number of limited edition pieces.

In January 2000, Corum was purchased by its current owner, Severin Wunderman, and was soon under the guidance of his son Michael, Corum was sold to China Haidian Group (basel 2013) who also the owner of eterna.

The team was completed in 2007 with the arrival of a man with a rich professional background, Antoine Calce, to the CEO position, who oversees overall operations.

The Admiral's Cup race was first held in 1957 and the Corum Admiral's Cup watch was introduced just 3 years later in 1960. This first watch was square, water resistant and had a sailboat engraved in the back. It had little resemblance to the current Corum Admiral's Cup watches with their twelve-sided case design and brightly colored nautical penants decorating the bezels. The Corum Admiral's Cup is available in 40mm, 41mm, 44mm, and 48mm as well as in versions with a chronograph complication or just time and date. Several materials are available as well: rose gold, yellow gold, two tone, stainless steel and even a titanium and rubber fusion on the Admiral's Cup Challenge Regatta 2007.

The Corum Tourbillon and Classical collection, as the name suggests, is devoted to the most elegant and complicated watches. The current collection comprises the Corum Classical Billionaire Tourbillon, a diamond and sapphire covered masterpiece of watchmaking, the Corum Golden Tourbillon Panoramique with its tourbillon movement floating between sapphire bridges, and the skeleton dialed Corum Classical Skylight Skeleton..

The Corum Artisan watch line is defined by beautiful dials depicting wild animals, exotic locales, or even historic scenes, all of them limited edition masterpieces of some of the very few craftsmen left who are familiar with the immensely time consuming techniques used in these watches.