It was in La Côte-aux-Fées, a little village tucked into the Jura mountains of Switzerland, that in 1874 Georges Edouard Piaget laid the foundations of what would become, a few decades later, an inimitable hallmark in the world of luxury and precision.
He set up his first workshop on his family’s farm and devoted himself to crafting highly precise mechanical clock movements for prestigious watchmaking companies.
As he received more orders, this small-scale production developed into a family business.
The name of Piaget began to echo well beyond the peaks and valleys of the Swiss Jura.
As orders poured in from discerning clients who had learned to recognize in Piaget’s clock movements a rarely equaled mastery of the craft, the workshop took on new dimensions.
Timothée Piaget, Georges Edouard’s son, took over the family business in 1911 with the same passion and pursuit of absolute quality as his father and with equal success.
The spirit of entrepreneurship, a taste for risk, and the determination never to rest on one’s laurels seem to be firmly rooted in Piaget’s DNA.
In 1943, the manufacturers of Piaget’s mechanical movements made a decision that would prove crucial for their company’s future.
The Piaget brand name was officially registered, and the workshop at La Côte-aux-Fées began producing watches, which it designed and sold under its own name.
It was a renaissance for Piaget due principally to Gérald and Valentin Piaget, the founder’s grandsons, who worked to expand the brand geographically and make it more widely known.
Orders poured in: clients were impatient to wear “their” Piaget, and Piaget’s production units constantly worked at maximum capacity.
The old workshops had been modernized, but they could no longer suffice.
In 1945, a new facility was built at La Côte-aux-Fées. It would become the locus of completely new developments in the field of ultra-thin mechanical movements.
2004 brought an anniversary that the founder, Georges Edouard Piaget, probably never imagined.
He would no doubt have been proud to observe that, after 130 years of creativity in watchmaking and jewelry, Piaget’s hallmarks – audacity and a passion for innovation – remain as strong as ever.
It took only a few of those years for the Possession collection to become a jewelry classic.
And it took only one more element to perfect that enchanting universe. Launched in 2005, the Possession watch set the tone for Piaget’s ongoing success.
