Girard-Perregaux

Girard-Perregaux dates its origins to 1791, when Jean-François Bautte signed his first watches in Geneva; the name comes from Constant Girard and Marie Perregaux, who married in 1854 and established Girard-Perregaux in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1856. The family firm absorbed the Bautte house in 1906. Its emblem is the Tourbillon with Three Gold Bridges, a pocket-watch architecture patented in 1884 in which three parallel arrow-shaped bridges carry the barrel, gear train and tourbillon; it received a gold medal at the 1889 Paris Exposition and has been produced in wristwatch form since 1991.

The Laureato, an integrated-bracelet sports watch with an octagonal bezel, was introduced in 1975 as a quartz model and became a mechanical collection in 2017. In 2013 the company released the Constant Escapement L.M., a wristwatch with a constant-force escapement built around a silicon blade. Owned by Kering from 2011, Girard-Perregaux and its sister brand Ulysse Nardin returned to private ownership through a management buyout in 2022.