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Audemars Piguet and the Curse of the Limited Edition

written by A.Morgan - 30th Jan 2012

There was once a great inventor, who, having served the King faithfully, was offered any reward he wished from the grateful monarch. Being a clever man he said;

”Place before you a chess board, and lay a single grain of rice on the first square. On the second square lay double, and on the third, double again. Continue this until all the squares are full.”

The King, thinking the offer was a simple and cheap one, immediately accepted, but after he had ordered his staff to arrange the inventor’s prize, it quickly became apparent that there wasn’t enough rice in the entire land to fulfil the man’s wishes. Enraged at being outsmarted, the King promptly had the man’s head cut off, all the hard-work and servitude that had earned his prize in the first place forgotten.

There is a moral in there somewhere, and I’ll get to that in a minute, but first, let’s talk about Audemars Piguet. To Audemars Piguet, the Limited Edition is about as sacrosanct as a sale on a Sunday, and probably about as prolific too. Although not the worst culprit for the oh-it’s-my-nan’s-cat’s-birthday-let’s-make-a-limited-edition brigade, they certainly don’t shy away from making the occasional low-volume piece, so sometimes it can become a bit tiresome separating the wheat from the chaff.

Like our quick-witted inventor, Audemars Piguet have fallen into something of a trap by asking too much of a loyal fanbase, and it’s a bit of a double-edged sword – on one hand, you have a buying public who could well get turned off by the next sporting personality emblazoned on the back of a Royal Oak Offshore case, and on the other hand, you have an ever growing list of ‘special’ colour combination ideas that just might start to run dry. In any case, even if our protagonist did get all that rice, surely he’s just going to get sick of it before the week is out?

Propping up the cornerstone of what is, despite its flaws, a superb manufacture, the Le Brassus brand still do make some Limited Editions that really are worthy of our attention. Following a brief relationship with the America’s Cup-winning yachting team known as Alinghi, came a round of watches that launched the use of forged carbon fibre both for the first time within the brand and also for the first time within the watchmaking world. As this rose gold Alinghi chronograph ably demonstrates with its forged carbon fibre bezel, the material is both an impressive feat of technology, as well as a beautiful and intriguing thing to look at.

Of course the usual refinements are there, as you would expect for a watch whose price would give a Ford hatchback an inferiority complex, and the styling has had a little more thought and care than most other special editions too, having had some tweaks beyond the traditional colour changes. But there’s more to it than that. Somehow, it just feels special, truly special, and that counts for a lot more than just having a limited number inscribed on the back.

Audemars Piguet make some of the best and most interesting watches in the world, so let’s hope they enter 2012 without trying to hoover up the entire market and expecting too much from the people they serve in the process. We wouldn’t want them losing their heads over it.