LeCoultre – Cartier, another part of the Jaeger-LeCoultre history

Another lesser known part of the Jaeger-LeCoultre history is the connection with Cartier. Today Cartier creates their own watches with in-house movements…

But this was not always the case…

Back in the end of the 1940’s and beginning of the 1950’s Jaeger-LeCoultre and Cartier had some kind of arrangement so that Cartier sold Jaeger-LeCoultre watches labelled Cartier.

Jaeger-LeCoultre Triple Date reference 2904

In documents, so far I have only found U.S. advertisements confirming this partnership, so maybe it was a LeCoultre partnership?

Here is an ad from 1947 which feature the Atmos clock. It is not possible to see any brand labelling on the Atmos – so this could just be an ad showing that Cartier store also sold Atmos…

Dual signed watches is nothing odd, there are many examples of retailers or stores which had their name printed on the dials. One of the most famous being Tiffany &Co.

In this next ad from 1951, the Cartier on the dial is clearly shown! It’s hard to see, but the Futurmatic is dual signed, both LeCoultre and Cartier.

Cartier ad 1951 – Futurematic dual signed

But then we come to the more uncommon variation, single signed Cartier dial. This ad is also from 1951.

How do I know this is a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch featured in the Cartier ad? Well, I could be wrong, but I am quite sure the watch in the Cartier ad and this Jaeger-LeCoultre reference 2208 from an early 1950’s Jaeger-LeCoultre catalogue are the same watch.

Not convinced? Number T.W.O from the left, E 365 Powermatic, number three is the 2208 Round manual, number five is the smaller version 2723 Triple Date. If I looked a bit more into my library I bet I would find the Jaeger-LeCoultre reference also for the other two watches…

What is interesting to see is that all the cases are identically to the Jaeger-LeCoultre version. During this period in time, Jaeger-LeCoultre shipped assembled movements over to the U.S. from Switzerland, to be cased and adjusted in the U.S. due to tax regulations.

Because of the cases were made locally in the U.S. most of the LeCoultre watches have different cases compared to the European Jaeger-LeCoultre version of the watch.

Due to this, I suspect that the collaboration with single signed Cartier were made with Jaeger-LeCoultre here in Europe and not with the LeCoultre U.S. branch which were a part of Longines, Wittnauer & Vacheron Constantin at the time…