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| Jaquet Droz Watches |
After the long-slumbering traditional Swiss brand Jaquet Droz celebrated its happy awakening with the introduction of extremely complicated, mechanically driven androids, it became clearer than the previous year at the large booth housing the Swatch Group brands at the Basel Fair 2003 which direction this company will be taking in the future. Of course, an economically interested company won't continue to produce technical works of art such as the android draftsman who really writes by himself and under whose clothing innumerable wheels, levers, and rack pinions make the doll move.
The Neuchatel precision engineer, watchmaker, and philosopher Pierre Jaquet Droz was already fascinating people at Europe's royal courts 230 years ago, and often found it necessary to open and take apart his "mechanical men" in order to assure onlookers that this was truly not witchcraft.
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A small workshop in La Chaux-de-Fonds still produces such artfully mec~anical treasures today - proving that the still-popular name of
Jaquet Droz did not become completely forgotten in Switzerland's Jura. And in the meantime, a second, hardly older tradition of this house has been recollected: watchmaking. Under the roof of the Swatch Group, Jaquet
Droz is to be a brand oriented toward the traditional values of watchmaking, more
classical in style, and more elegant than sporty. The new company's model palette is understandably not yet very comprehensive. It does, however, foreshadow the future of the brand, which is to close the gap between the middle level and top brands according to
the wishes of the Swatch Group directors. A characteristic trait of this "new, old" brand
could well become the overly dimensioned subsidiary seconds display that dominates the dial on the Grande Seconde model. Two individual large-scale rings, either printed
directly on to the dial or elevated from the flat background of the dial three-dimensionally by means of a thin metal border, stand in the spotlight of the typical Jaquet Droz "face." The fact that these two circles form a stylized "8," the Far Eastern symbol for happiness, is certainly no accident as the brand enjoyed a long and successful history on the Chinese market.
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Montres Jaquet Droz SA
Rue de Boujean 9
Case Postale
2501 Biel, Switzerland
Tel.: 011-41-32-343 45 55
Fax: 011-41-32-343 45 60
www.jaquet-droz.com
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