Louis Erard Excellence Petite Seconde 39mm Unisex Watch Purple

Louis Erard was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1893, into a town then producing a large share of the world's watches. He worked in its workshops, founded a watchmaking school in 1929, and set up a casing and assembly business with André Perret the same year. The first watches under his own name followed in 1931.

Assembly was the trade at the time: components came from independent artisans and the assembler built, adjusted and finished the watch. By 1937 Erard employed more than sixty people and was selling internationally.

The quartz crisis did its usual damage. The company was sold in 1991 and production moved to Le Noirmont in the Jura, then sold again in 2003 to a group led by Alain Spinedi, who refocused it on mechanical watches at prices that undercut everyone doing similar work.

The regulator became the signature — the dial layout that separates hours, minutes and seconds onto their own axes, borrowed from precision reference clocks, and rarely seen at this price.

What has made the brand's recent reputation is collaboration: limited editions with independent watchmakers whose own work is unobtainable, among them Vianney Halter, Konstantin Chaykin and Alain Silberstein, on Sellita and Valjoux movements.