Watches: Audemars, Last Of the Great Family-Held Manufactures

The brand’s masterful and trailblazing combination of technology, history and art has resulted in some truly influential pieces that feel entirely personal yet has centuries of storytelling embedded in every complication. It’s a culmination of all of those things that attracted Michael Friedman, historian for Audemars Piguet, to the role and he hasn’t looked back since. He sat down with us to discuss how horology is more than meets the eye, how the AP brand is far more personal than what we might think and just how monumental one model in particular was for the trajectory of the brand itself.

I’ve been in the business myself 23 years from all sides. Five years ago, I became full time with Audemars Piguet. It’s a company of which I’ve been a collector of myself for many, many years, and a company I’ve had some great collaborations with over the years as well. And it’s the last company in the hands on the founding families – purely independent.....

The sort of big discovery for me was when I was still in university and there was this emerging recognition that the entire history of science and technology has been anchored to time measurement. And not only that – objects of time measurement have always been platforms of the decorative arts, and decoration, artistry, and craftsmanship. So it’s a fascinating duality – an intersection if you may – between science, technology, art, design, sculpture, architecture, engineering, physics…pretty much every discipline you can image is contained within this field of time measurement....

When Jules Audemars and Edward Piguet came together in 1875 to create the business, one was a fourth generation watchmaker and the other was fifth. So watchmaking of Audemars Piguet heritage goes much, much further, even back in history. But when the company’s founded in 1875, on the one hand, the Industrial Revolution is underway. And on the other, you have the rise of impressionist paintings, of new art movements, the proliferation of photography, the proliferation of new forms of literature, writing, popularisation of operas. All types of different aspects of culture are really emerging....

But because it’s family run and because it’s independent, the strength and power of the AP brand still resides with the men and women who create the watches. A few years back, we introduced our Royal Oak Double Balance Wheel. That mechanism, that movement and that double balance wheel were conceived, invented, and introduced by a watchmaker at Audemars Piguet on his own time. Even something that’s become one of our big successes – “a hit” – was not conceived of in a boardroom. It wasn’t this strategic choice of ‘let’s find a watch to appeal to a certain demographic’. There were no focus groups and there was no study. It was just the raw creativity of one watchmaker who ended up inspiring an entire new calibre, which is now in some of our most successful watches.

-Man of Many