| Industry | Watch Making, Haute Horlogerie |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1791 |
| Headquarters | La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Key people | François-Henri Pinault, Stefano macaluso, Massimo Macaluso, Monica Mailander Macaluso |
| Products | Watches |
| Website | www.girard-perregaux.com |
Girard-Perregaux (French pronunciation: [ʒiʁaʁ pɛʁəgo]) is a high-end Swiss watch manufacture with its origins dating back to 1791. It is situated in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland and is a part of the Sowind group, a subsidiary of PPR.[1]
Contents |
In 1791, watchmaker and goldsmith Jean-François Bautte signed his first watches. He created a manufacturing company in Geneva grouping, for the first time ever, all the watch making facets of that time, which meant starting from the engineering of the watch all the way to the final hand assembly and hand polishing of each watch. In 1852, the watchmaker Constant Girard founded the Girard & Cie Firm in La Chaux-de-Fonds. He, then, married Marie Perregaux and the Girard-Perregaux Manufacture was born in 1856. In 1906, Constant Girard-Gallet, who took over control of the Manufacturer from his father, took over the Bautte House and merged it with Girard-Perregaux & Cie.[2] Since then, the brand has pursued its activities by reinforcing from the 1980s its position in the domain of prestigious mechanical watches, Haute Horlogerie, under the lead of the Macaluso family. In 2011, Sowind Group, the holding encorporating Girard-Perregaux, became a subsidiary of PPR.
The Manufacture has approximately 80 patents in the watch-making domain and is the originator of many innovative concepts.
Girard-Perregaux relies on being a manufacturer of movements and watches and a manufacturer of cases and bands. They bring together some tens of different components: watchmakers, engineers, movement decorators, polishers, etc. This global approach, founded on the traditional know-how of the watch-making craftsmanship, allows them to create and direct the high-quality watches and movements from the assembly stages all the way to the final encasement.[4]
The Girard-Perregaux Manufacture designs and develops its own movements:
It’s the emblematic model of Girard-Perregaux.[5] In 1884, Constant Girard submitted to the United States Patent Office a patent of the design of the movement “Tourbillon with three gold bridges.” The three bridges, now the mobiles of the movement, were redesigned in the form of arrows and placed parallel to each other. The movement was no longer just a functional and technical element, but it also became an element of design in every way. In 1889, the Tourbillon with three gold bridges was awarded a gold medal at the Universal Exposition of Paris. In 1980, Girard-Perregaux decided to make 20 pieces to conform to the original of 1889: 1500 hours of work were necessary to create the first one. Since then, the Tourbillon with three gold bridges is offered in different versions, and is sometimes associated with other watchmakers’ complications.
Out of the high-end watch collection, the most well known watches of Girard-Perregaux are: Vintage 1945 (with a rectangular case and a design inspired by an Art Deco style watch dating back to 1945), ww.tc (standing for worldwide time-control, this collection displays the 24 time zones on the dial), Girard-Perregaux 1966, Laureato Evo³, and the Cat’s Eye (from the feminine line).
Since 1999, the Villa Marguerite, a building in La Chaux-de-Fonds from the beginning of the 20th century, has housed the Girard-Perregaux Museum. A selection of old watches and documents illustrating the history of the brand is presented there.
François Chaille, Girard-Perregaux, Editions Flammarion, 2004, ISBN 2-0801-1069-1
ArmbandUhren, Special Girard-Perregaux, Peter Braun, 2007, ISBN 978-3-89880-808-8