Brand Focus: Vacheron Constantin
In July 1955, at the height of the Cold War, a meeting was held to discuss peace. The Geneva Summit, as it became known, was led by the ‘Big Four’—USA’s President Dwight Eisenhower, Britain’s Prime Minister Anthony Eden, France’s Prime Minister Edgar Faure and the Premier of the Soviet Union, Nikolai Bulganin.
In honour of this meeting to encourage global diplomacy, citizens of Geneva offered the four heads of state timepieces inscribed with the world leaders’ names. The watch brand chosen for this great honour? Vacheron Constantin. It was a company that had come to symbolise superior quality, style—and enduring perseverance.
The Vacheron Constantin story starts in a similar way to many long-standing luxury watch companies; with one man and a dream. In September 1755, master watchmaker Jean-Marc Vacheron, then only 24 himself, took on his first apprentice at his workshop in Geneva, determined to pass on his knowledge and skill; and so the company was born.
Jean-Marc’s son, Abraham, took over the business in 1785, and the workshop began expanding its skills. It was during this time that the watchmaker began making complicated movements, as well as designing its first engine-turned dials. But though things were seemingly going well for the company, the world around the workshop wasn’t so rosy.
Tensions in France, brought about by financial crisis, hunger, and the disparity between the rich and poor of the country, were reaching boiling point, and in 1789, the country erupted into violent revolution. Geneva itself was annexed in 1798 under the French Directory, until it was admitted to the Swiss Confederation after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. It definitely wasn’t the easiest climate within which to produce high end timepieces, but Abraham Vacheron somehow kept the company afloat—even training his own son, Jacques-Barthélemy, in the skills he had learned from his own father.
When Jean-Marc Vacheron died in 1805, he could be content in the knowledge that his company, still in the hands of his son and soon to be in the hands of his grandson, had not only survived the revolution, but was going from strength to strength. The workshop began producing more complicated timepieces, and was commissioned to make pieces for such lofty clients as Prince Charles-Albert of Carignano, who would go on to become the king of Sardinia.
In 1819, Jacques-Barthélemy Vacheron befriended a fellow Genevan by the name of François Constantin. This was a meeting of minds that would give the workshop a new name: Vacheron et Constantin. François set off to market the brand’s timepieces across the world, propelling the brand onto the global stage; by the 1930s, the company had sales representatives as far as America, Brazil and Cuba. It was also during this period, in 1880, that the familiar Maltese cross symbol was registered in the Swiss federal trademarks office, symbolising the company’s quest for ultimate precision.
To cope with the company’s rapid expansion, a new boutique on the Quai de l'Ile in Geneva was opened in 1906; this location is still open today. The brand started the century as they meant to go on—an exceptionally accurate Royal Chronometer was produced in 1907, followed by the creation of the tonneau case and a cushion-shaped watch launched for the American market, to embrace the excitement of the roaring twenties.
But the twentieth century would bring its own tribulations for the company to endure. As it had already proven during the French Revolution, Vacheron Constantin, like the creations of its workshop, was built to last. As the Great Depression hit in 1929, the brand found itself once again facing turbulent times. Charles Constantin, the first member of his family to be president of the company since the 1850s, steered the manufacture through the 1930s with decisive skill, and it emerged as a pinnacle of fine Swiss watchmaking. His successor, Georges Ketterer, would similarly ensure that Vacheron Constantin would survive through the austerity of WW2.
The next bump in the road would come, as it would for the mechanical watch industry as a whole, in the form of the quartz crisis during the 1970s. By this time, the company had dropped the ‘et’ in its name—becoming Vacheron Constantin—and was under the control of Georges Ketterer’s son, Jacques. As if in defiance of the decline of demand for mechanical watches because of the cheaper quartz movements available, the brand released the Kallista—a watch carved out of a one-kilo gold ingot, set with 118 diamonds, and taking 6,000 hours of work to create. It was valued at nearly £4m at the time.
Despite the embattled history of Vacheron Constantin, the brand has endured to become today regarded as one of the ‘top three’ in high-end Swiss watchmaking, alongside Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet. It seems likely that the denizens of Geneva chose their gifts for the ‘Big Four’ with this history in mind—what better way to hope for peace than with a brand that had survived so much turmoil?
