WT_2007_02: PROFILE: PERRELET

Perrelet’s Jumping Hour Big
Second Hand watch in rose gold

Left: This antique postcard shows
an engraving of Abraham-Louis
Perrelet by Charles-Samuel
Girardet. Below: An 18thcentury
pocket watch with
automatic movement attributed
to Abraham-Louis Perrelet
Reviving Perrelet
BY NORMA BUCHANAN
Once you acquire a grand old Swiss watch name, how do you
breathe life into it We asked Herbert Arni, the head of
Perrelet SA.
For today’s watch entrepreneurs, a good
man is hard to find. Especially a good
watchmaker, long dead (the longer the
better), who can serve as a creditable “founding
father” for a modern-day watch brand.
Watch companies scour horological archives
and prowl Swiss cemeteries, reading headstone
inscriptions, in search of such men.
So you can imagine how happy Miguel Rodriquez
was when he heard that Abraham-
Louis Perrelet’s name was on the market. Rodriguez,
owner of the mid-priced Festina
brand, is trying to gain a foothold in the luxury
segment of the Swiss-watch industry. So, in
2004, when Perrelet’s then-owner decided to
sell the brand, Rodriguez snapped it up.
Perrelet is one of the most famous watchmakers
who ever lived. As nearly every watch
aficionado knows, he invented the self-winding
watch. The rotor he developed, or a close
facsimile of it, spins tirelessly on the wrists of
millions of consumers (usually visible through a
glass caseback), powering the vast majority of
luxury mechanical watches made today.
Rodriguez bought the Perrelet brand from
Flavio Audemars, who in 1993 established the
Neuchâtel firm Perrelet SA to develop and market
Perrelet wristwatches. (Audemars has no
connection to the Audemars Piguet watch firm.)
Rodriguez added Perrelet, which was virtually
April 2007 WatchTime 123

PROFILE: PERRELET
Herbert Arni, CEO of Perrelet SA
dead — it had some distribution in Russia, but
almost none anywhere else — to a trio of
brands, L. Leroy, Joseph Chevalier and Berney-
Blondeau, that he had already assembled in a
holding company called the H5 Groupe.
“H5” is short for “Holding Hispano Helvétique
de Haute Horlogerie.” “Hispano” refers to
the fact that Rodriguez is Spanish; Festina is
headquartered in Barcelona. “Helvétique”
comes from “Helvetia,” the Latin name for
Switzerland.
Rodriguez chose watch-industry veteran
Herbert Arni, whose prior posts included jobs
with Heuer, Omega, Eterna, and Versace, to
head Perrelet SA and the holding company,
both based in Bienne. By spring of 2005, in
time for Baselworld, the new Perrelet line was
set to go.
Arni’s mission has been to capitalize on the
strength of the Perrelet name, which he describes
as “an unbelievable asset.” To do that,
he’s had to start from scratch, developing a
new product line and a new way of connecting
Perrelet the brand to Perrelet the man.
The Right Spin
It was the latter task that required the most ingenuity.
After all, winding rotors are standard
equipment for mechanical watches. Simply
making all Perrelet watches automatics would
do nothing to highlight the brand’s link to the
inventor of that now ubiquitous device. Arni
needed another way to make the Perrelet point.
The previous owner had his own solution:
a device consisting of two rotors, connected
to each other. One is in the traditional position,
under the movement; the other is on the
dial side of the movement, visible, and sitting
in a recessed circle. The bottom rotor winds
the mainspring. The dial-side rotor is purely
for show. Its spinning does nothing to wind
the mainspring; it’s there only as “an homage
to Mr. Perrelet,” Arni says.
To many people’s surprise, Arni ditched the
signature double-rotor (although not entirely:
it lives on in two models, one round, the other
a tonneau). For one thing, it was tricky to manufacture
and made the watches too expensive.
Arni wanted to keep Perrelet’s prices out of the
stratosphere (they start at $2,850 for a big-date
model with small seconds subdial). Under the
Audemars ownership, the brand had been
priced higher. Furthermore, Arni was leery of
taking what he calls a “mono-product” approach
to the brand by relying exclusively on
the appeal of the double rotor.
How else could he create a Perrelet-related
identity for Perrelet The company’s designers
came up with an answer: a way of decorating
the movement that incorporates the winding
rotor. The movement’s bridges are engraved
with what the company calls
the “Perrelet tapestry,” an elaborate
pattern of interlocked
“P’s.” In order to make the
tapestry visible, the rotor is
fitted with transparent
glass. The center of the
rotor bears a large “P”
on a solid circle of metal
that hides what Arni
regards as the least attractive
part of the
movement. The rotor is
manufactured by DTH,
or Dubois Technique
Horlogère, a maker of
components and modules,
Five Minute
Repeater in
rose gold
owned by
Rodriguez and
located in the Vallée
de Joux. “The goal of
this exercise is that in one,
two or three years, the consumer
turns the watch over and
says ‘This must be a Perrelet, because
only they do this,’” Arni says.
The Perrelet tapestry-cum-transparent rotor
was one way to distinguish the brand, but Arni
wanted others. He knew that if the brand were
to claim to be the spiritual heir of Abraham-
Louis Perrelet, simply sticking a standard automatic
movement in a case would not suffice. “If
you are the inventor of the automatic, you cannot
just buy a [Valjoux] 2892, put it in a nice case
and say, ‘This is an automatic watch, and, by the
way, I am the inventor of this.’
“On the other hand, we did not have the
A current Perrelet movement with the
“Perrelet tapestry” visible through the
transparent winding rotor
124 WatchTime April 2007

PROFILE: PERRELET
NEXT UP: L. LEROY
Now that Perrelet is off the launching pad, its
owner, the H5 Groupe, is getting another
brand ready.
It’s called L. Leroy (pronounced “le WAH”).
Its origins stretch back to a French watchmaking
family that rose to prominence in the
18th century. (It is not to be confused with
the le Roy family whose most famous member,
Pierre, is credited with inventing the
detent escapement for use in marine
chronometers.) The L. Leroy of the brand’s
name is Louis Leroy, who joined the family
firm in 1879.
H5 bought the L. Leroy brand in 2004, just
before buying Perrelet. L. Leroy was still making
watches, but they were sold in a tiny
number of stores. Annual production was
only about 400 pieces per year. As it did with
Perrelet, H5 is revamping both the products
and the distribution, and plans to re-launch
the brand at the end of this year, says Herbert
Arni, the head of H5. L. Leroy will be expensive,
in the range of, say, Breguet, and very
narrowly distributed. The collection will be introduced
first in Italy, Switzerland, France and
Spain. Other markets will follow later.
Next year, L Leroy will get its own exclusive
movement, developed and manufactured by
H5’s sister company, DTH (Dubois Technique
Horlogère), which makes modules and movement
components, for H5 and other companies,
in the Vallée de Joux. “It isn’t possible to
put Leroy on the market without it having its
own movement,” Arni says
Both H5 and DTH are owned by Spanish
watch entrepreneur Miguel Rodriguez. His
Barcelona-based Festina Group has a stable of
mid-priced, mostly quartz brands: Festina, Lotus,
Calypso, Jaguar and Candino. Over the
past several years, Rodriguez has been on a
shopping spree, buying up well-known,
and not-so-well known, brand names, intent
on becoming a player in the world of
haute horlogerie. He now has four brands
under the H5 umbrella.
The two others are Berney-
Blondeau and Joseph Chevalier, the
former an old brand from the Vallée
de Joux, the latter named for a
19th-century Geneva watchmaker.
Both will spend a while “in
the fridge,” Arni says. Look for
them in a few years, maybe
around 2010.
money, the time or the capacity to make our own
movement,” Arni says. “This is an exercise of five
years with three to five million [Swiss francs] up
front. And then you don’t know if it works.”
Arni’s solution is to use ETA movements,
assembled not by ETA but by a third party,
combined with modules made exclusively for
Perrelet by companies including Dubois
Dépraz and DTH.
Simple Complications
His strategy in developing new products is to
incorporate just one or two complications in a
watch, making those complications as userfriendly
as possible. “We are not in the gadget
business, combining an alarm with a tripletime-zone
watch and adding a chronograph,
which nobody can read and no sales staff can
sell,” Arni says. The designers focused on readability,
so that nearly all the date displays are
so-called “big dates,” and the power-reserve
indicators are far larger than on most watches.
The line contains 14 distinct models (there
are some 300 distinct styles, if you include variations
in case materials, straps, etc.). Several of
the steel models are priced at under $5,000:
the steel chronograph with big date is $4,250;
the steel double rotor is $3,600. At the top of
the price range are such pieces as the limitededition
platinum automatic tourbillon, for
$90,000 (rose-gold and steel tourbillons are
$60,000 and $52,500, respectively).
Last year, the company introduced a fiveminute
repeater ($29,900 in rose gold) and a
jumping hour ($5,575 in steel,
$15,675 in palladium and $17,000 in
gold). The company also added a
large-moonphase watch to its
women’s collection. As you might
guess, the women’s Perrelet
models are all automatics.
They’re priced from about
$5,000 to $10,000.
The five-minute repeater
was something of a
pet project for Arni, who
The Double Rotor features a
second rotor on the dial,
strictly for show.
COSC-certified automatic flying tourbillon in
stainless steel
believes repeaters are the next wave in complications.
Perrelet came late to the tourbillon party
with its COSC-certified automatic chronometer
tourbillon, but intends to get in on the
ground floor with five-minute repeaters, which
offer a more affordable alternative to minute repeaters.
Perrelet’s version, like the new jumping
hour, incorporates a Dubois Dépraz module.
Perrelet watches are styled in what Arni calls
a “classic-contemporary” mode. The sides of
the case bear a modern-looking pattern of vertical
striations, and most of the dials are decorated
with a striped pattern emanating from
the center of the dial.
The Toast of Le Locle
In developing the new products, Perrelet SA
got little help either from extant watches made
by Perrelet himself or from historical documents.
Other brands bearing the names of famous
watchmakers, brands like Patek Philippe,
Vacheron Constantin, Breguet and Audemars
Piguet, have a wealth of antique and vintage
watches, as well as archival material, to draw
on. Perrelet has next to nothing.
One reason is that, following the custom of
Abraham-Louis Perrelet’s time (he lived from
1729 to 1826) and his location (canton
Neuchâtel), he did not sign his watches. The
126 WatchTime April 2007

PROFILE: PERRELET
SELF-WINDING THROUGH
THE CENTURIES
An automatic movement from an 18thcentury
watch attributed to Abraham-
Louis Perrelet
A view of the movement inside a Harwood
watch from the 1920s
A view of the rotor in a Rolex Oyster from
the 1930s
Abraham-Louis Perrelet would be surprised, and no
doubt delighted, if he walked into a watch store
today. There, in showcase after showcase, he’d see
watches fitted with the automatic winding system
— many of them showing off their elaborately decorated
rotors through transparent casebacks —
that he invented some 237 years ago. Perrelet,
described by one author as a “retiring inventor of
genius,” was a modest homebody who spent his
entire life in the watchmaking town of Le Locle. It’s
safe to say he had no inkling of what would
become of his winding rotor.
In fact, Perrelet didn’t invent the concept of
winding with an oscillating weight. It probably
dates back to the 17th century. But early experiments
in self-winding never amounted to much. A
19th-century book, Histoire de l’horlogerie, by
Pierre Dubois, describes them as follows: “…The
mechanism of these timepieces was so defective
and worked so badly, that these early perpetual
watches soon came to be considered mere
baubles, mere fashionable novelties.”
Perrelet is universally credited with being the first
to make an automatic-winding system that actually
worked. Two of the foremost authorities on the
subject, Alfred Chapuis and Eugène Jaquet, authors
of The History of the Self-Winding Watch, write,
“…the manufacture of the first really complete and
technically sound self-winder can be attributed to
Abraham-Louis Perrelet.”
He used two types of winding weights in his automatic
watches, the authors write. One was oval or
round, and swung back and forth on a pivot in the
manner of a pendulum (except that its swings were
halted in either direction by banking pins). The
other, familiar to watch owners today, used a
semicircular, fan-shaped rotor that spun around
pieces attributed to him have been identified
through detective work. Furthermore, Abraham-Louis
Perrelet did not found a company,
so there was none to keep his name in the
public eye through successive generations.
His grandson, Louis-Frédéric Perrelet,
achieved some celebrity as the official watchmaker
to the French kings Louis XVIII, Charles
X and Louis-Philippe, and one emperor,
Napoleon III. He is also known for having
patented a split-seconds chronograph in
1827. But after he died, in 1854, the Perrelet
name entered watchmaking oblivion.
In Abraham-Louis’s day, though, it echoed
through the Jura Mountains. He was born in
Le Locle on June 9, 1729, the son of a wellknown
maker of watchmaking tools. (His first
name was actually spelled “Abram-Louis” in
the Neuchâtel manner, as was, originally, the
first name of Abraham-Louis Breguet, and it is
this spelling that is most often seen in old horological
history books. The names of both
watchmakers later morphed into the more
common “Abraham.”)
Perrelet made his first automatic watch
sometime around 1770. The renowned horological
historians Alfred Chapuis and Eugène
Jaquet write in their book, The History of the
Self-Winding Watch, that Perrelet used two
different types of oscillating weights in his au-
128 WatchTime April 2007

360 degrees on a center pivot, winding the watch
regardless of which way it was turning.
During Perrelet’s lifetime and some decades
thereafter, it was the former system that prevailed.
Breguet refined the back-and-forth mechanism and
fit it into his famous perpetuelle watches, and other
watchmakers, including Louis Recordon and the
Jaquet-Droz firm, also adopted it. Historians think
the reason the spinning rotor was abandoned was
that it did not generate enough power. In those
days, all watches were, of course, pocket or pendant
watches, and were not subjected to as much
motion as wristwatches are.
In their first decades, automatic watches made
quite a splash and were produced in large numbers.
But even the back-and-forth type of self-winders
presented problems. If not expertly manufactured,
they didn’t work. They were very expensive to
produce, and few people knew how to repair them.
And they were big: the winding weight added appreciable
thickness in an era when thin watches
were definitely in.
Around 1840, the self-winding mechanism
received a near-fatal blow: the introduction of keyless
winding, which eliminated automatic winding’s
biggest reason for being. Self-winding had been
invented chiefly because key winding was such a
nuisance. Not only did the watch owner need to
keep his winding key with him, he risked chipping
or scratching his watch’s dial whenever he inserted
the key into the key aperture. Furthermore, this
hole provided an entry point for dirt and dust. So
when key winding disappeared, so too, for all
practical purposes, did automatic winding.
Until the wristwatch came along. When, during
World War I, soldiers began wearing wristwatches
in large numbers, automatic winding once again
tomatic watches. One was a banked weight,
later adopted by Breguet, whom he knew and
to whom he sold some watches; the other was
a spinning rotor like that used today. Perrelet’s
watches were extremely popular during his
lifetime, and helped make him something of a
horological celebrity.
So did his other accomplishments. Chapuis
and Jaquet describe him as a craftsman
par excellence, celebrated throughout canton
Neuchâtel. He was the first Le Locle watchmaker
to work on cylinder escapements and
on such complications as calendars and equation
of time devices, they write. They quote a
book entitled Biographie Neuchâteloise dehad
a raison d’etre. Wristwatches were exposed
to much more dirt and dust than pocket
watches because they were unsheltered from
the elements. This dirt entered the watch
through the winding-stem hole.
The problem was especially acute in trench
warfare. In the 1920s, John Harwood, a British
watchmaker who had fought in the war,
resurrected Perrelet’s old concept of a centrally
pivoted winding weight and applied it to a
wristwatch. Because wristwatches are subjected
to more motion than pocket watches, the rotor
concept would work in them, he realized.
Harwood’s watch had no crown; the owner set
the time by turning the bezel. There was
therefore no way for dirt to get into the case.
Harwood’s watches may have been dirt-free,
but several technical flaws nonetheless doomed
them. The biggest was the shocks that shook
the movement every time the rotor hit one of
the banking springs. The Harwood watch was
abandoned in just a few years.
In 1931, Rolex succeeded where Harwood
had failed. It adapted Perrelet’s centrally pivoted
rotor in a different way than Harwood had:
instead of the rotor moving through an arc, and
being stopped on either side by banking
springs, the rotor swung around freely in either
direction, just like Perrelet’s rotor had done. This
eliminated the shocks that had plagued
Harwood’s watches. (Rolex had solved the dirt
problem five years earlier by introducing the first
truly impermeable watch case, which it incorporated
in its Oyster models.)
Today’s automatic watches use essentially the
same system. Perrelet, modest though he was,
would surely be proud.
scribing him as “the master of all watchmakers
of Le Locle.” Whenever other Le Locle
watchmakers had a problem they couldn’t
solve, they would say to each other, “Let’s go
to old Perrelet,” according to the Biographie.
And old he became, making entire watches
from scratch well into his 90s. He completed a
lever-escapement watch at age 95. Earlier in
his career, the town of Neuchâtel had tried to
lure him away from Le Locle, but to no avail.
He died there at 97.
Although he left few watches to remember
him by, we have plenty of evidence of his
ingenuity. You need look no further than
your wrist.
■
April 2007 WatchTime 129