Grande Seconde

Presented in 2002, just two years after the Swatch Group's acquisition of the brand, the Grande Seconde is born as the symbol collection of the La Chaux-de-Fonds manufacture's revival. Its distinctive trait is the dial: an eccentric architecture in which the hour-and-minute counter, shifted upward, visually intersects with a large seconds counter at the bottom. The design draws on an eighteenth-century pocket watch preserved in the brand's historical archives, in which the indication of a large seconds counter was considered a mark of mechanical precision.

Over the 2000s and 2010s the two-circle architecture has been applied to a growing number of complications, without ever altering its recognizable graphic layout: from simple time display, to the date (Quantième), to the line's first monopusher chronograph, presented in 2019, and to skeletonized versions that reveal the entire mechanism. The cases are offered in two main diameters, 39 and 43 mm, in steel, 18-carat red gold and, in limited editions, in ceramic.

Thanks to this aesthetic consistency maintained for over twenty years, the Grande Seconde is today the brand's most produced and recognized collection, often paired with Grand Feu enamel dials in ivory or black tones: the meeting point between Pierre Jaquet-Droz's precision-watchmaking heritage and the manufacture's contemporary identity.