Jules-Louis Audemars

Jules-Louis Audemars trained in the Vallée de Joux tradition of complicated-movement construction and, in 1875, co-founded Audemars, Piguet & Cie with his boyhood friend Edward-Auguste Piguet in Le Brassus, dividing responsibilities so that Audemars focused primarily on movement construction and Piguet on regulation, adjustment and commercial affairs, a common division of labour in the Vallée de Joux établissage tradition.

The firm specialised from its founding in complicated watches — minute repeaters, perpetual calendars, chronographs and combinations of these complications — supplying both retail clients and other prestigious Geneva and Vallée de Joux houses, and building a reputation for technical ambition that has continued under the Audemars Piguet name into the present as one of the most prominent Swiss haute horlogerie manufactures.

As with other founder-name Swiss maisons, this encyclopedia treats Jules-Louis Audemars the individual craftsman as distinct from the modern global luxury brand that continues to use his and Piguet's names; detailed attribution of any specific surviving movement to Audemars personally, as opposed to the firm's collective workshop production, generally requires archival research by the manufacture itself.