Building a high-end watch business from scratch takes some doing, so it came as no surprise to see Chopard co-president Karl-Friedrich Scheufele struggling to hide his emotions while speaking at an intimate dinner held a decade ago to mark the 20th anniversary of the brand’s L.U.C Manufacture. 

Based in the Swiss mountain town of Fleurier, L.U.C (after Louis-Ulysse Chopard, founder of the firm in 1860) represents the realisation of Scheufele’s vision to create a sub-brand dedicated to the best of the best in watchmaking. 

It was established in 1996 with the aim of adding substance to Chopard’s horological offering, reviving its heritage and enhancing its appeal to serious collectors. Initially, L.U.C employed just three staff and made a handful of movements – but now the team is spread across two buildings: one entirely devoted to L.U.C and another (called Fleurier Ébauches) producing movements for Chopard’s other lines.

Along the way, L.U.C has developed more than a dozen base calibres that have given rise to many varieties of movement, including regulators, tourbillons and the brilliant four-barrel Quattro – all of which have helped it secure at least 25 patents and demonstrate a mastery of every category of complicated watchmaking, from chronometers to world timers and from chronographs to perpetual calendars. 

The list was notably added to for the 10th anniversary of the manufacture in 2006, when Scheufele introduced the first L.U.C chiming watch in the form of the Strike One – but that was relatively conventional compared with what was unveiled on the night of the aforementioned 20th anniversary dinner: the Full Strike, then the most technical watch L.U.C had ever created. 

Made in just 20 examples, the £163,000 mechanical marvel was conceived as a modern take on the minute repeater complication which gives an audible indication of the time on demand (and it proved good enough to win the prestigious Aiguille d’Or award at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève in 2017).

Invented long before the dawn of artificial light, when gloomy conditions made dials difficult to read, the minute repeater is now entirely obsolete as a practical necessity – but mastering its complexity is still regarded as a mark of extreme horological prowess. English priest and inventor Edward Barlow is credited with creating the first practical repeating mechanism for clocks in 1676, but compared with the constraints of developing a similar mechanism small enough to fit inside a pocket watch case, his achievement seems relatively straightforward. 

It was more than a decade later, in 1687, before fellow English horologist Daniel Quare patented just such a “portable” repeater, which relied on incorporating a tiny bell into the mechanism to create the chimes. And it wasn’t until 1800 that the some of Switzerland’s most accomplished watchmakers – notably Abraham-Louis Breguet – had gradually enhanced the system to improve its accuracy and sound clarity by substituting Quare’s bell with the tiny hammers and wire gongs that have since formed the basis of most repeating pocket and wrist watches.

Watchmaking is a profession for which the phrase “necessity is the mother of invention” could have been exclusively coined and, as previously mentioned, it was the necessity of being able to monitor the time in the low-light conditions of a candle-lit era that led to the repeater’s creation. But despite the invention of the “10 candlepower” oil lamp in 1780, gas lighting in the early 19th century and the wide-scale roll-out of domestic electricity more than 100 years after that, minute-repeating watches – with their ethereal sound, remarkable complexity and high price tags – have continued to be seen as the very apotheosis of the horologist’s art, and as rarities that only the fortunate few will ever possess. 

Yet while the basic principle of the repeater mechanism has remained the same for more than 200 years, Chopard’s original Full Strike and its variants (read on) tore up the rule book by reinterpreting the mechanism’s construction using cutting edge materials and technology. Most notably the tiny, ring-shaped gongs that create the sound are made from transparent sapphire crystal and are integral with the “glass” of the watch (referred to by Chopard as “watch glass Monobloc construction”). The patented arrangement eliminates the need for glue or screws and is said to create “a perfect loudspeaker”, with the resulting sound – tuned to the notes of C and F – being produced by a pair of minuscule steel gongs that were tested 1.5 million times on the prototype, to confirm reliability. 

Traditionally, minute repeaters are activated using an often clumsy-looking “slide” at the side of the case band – but all the functions of the Full Strike are controlled by the crown. A button at its centre invokes the chimes, while winding it in one direction charges the dedicated spring barrel that powers the minute repeater and winding it in the opposite direction re-winds a second spring that runs the timekeeping. The system enables the minute repeater to chime “12.59” – the longest possible sequence, comprising 12 strikes for the hours and 59 for the minutes – no fewer than a dozen times once fully wound. 

Comprising 533 components, the mechanism is fitted with seven “security devices” to reduce the risk of the wearer trying to adjust the time while the watch is striking, or making a second attempt at activating it while it is already striking – either of which could wreck the movement. 

Following the launch of the original Full Strike, Chopard marked the ‘silver jubilee’ of L.U.C five years later (in 2021) with three further chiming watches: an updated re-issue of the 2006 Strike One that used the sapphire chiming technology; a minute repeater with tourbillon; and the undoubted star of the trio, the (CHF 450,000) L.U.C Full Strike Sapphire.

Measuring 42.5mm in diameter, its case, crown and dial were cut from solid blocks of lab-grown corundum crystal to give a 360-degree view of the highly decorated movement. The extensive use of crystal was also said to give the watch an unmatched clarity of sound which satisfies Scheufele’s aim of making a watch entirely in house that is as much musical instrument as timekeeper. 

“When I decided to establish L.U.C, I was looking at increasing Chopard’s credibility by putting some real substance behind the watches,” he told QP. “The last consideration was to ensure any sort of independence, but that did come when we founded Fleurier Ebauches [set up in 2008 to provide movement blanks to the Chopard group] and now, in fact, we are quite self-sufficient.” 

Since the launch of that original L.U.C Full Strike a decade ago, the model has been made available in numerous other case materials, including Chopard’s ethical rose, yellow and white gold, platinum, hardened steel and, in 2024, ceramicised titanium with a decidedly cool verdigris dial. Other developments of the Full Strike concept have included last year’s Revelation model (with a dial made from sapphire crystal to reveal the remarkable mechanical mastery expressed in the movement) and, the most “striking” of all, the Día de Los Muertos or ‘Day of the Dead’ models that were first seen in 2021. Each features a dial depicting a different interpretation of the “calavera” or skull symbol that has become synonymous with Día de Los Muertos. The image of La Calavera Catrina, a grinning female skeleton wearing haute couture, was originally published in 1913 by lithographer José Guadalupe Posada as a way of poking fun at Mexican elites who whitened their skin and dressed in European clothes. Today La Calavera Catrina has become all but the mascot of Día de Los Muertos, appearing on the Full Strike most memorably two years ago in the form of a one-off mosaic that is said to have taken 100 hours of painstaking work to create.

And now, in the 30th anniversary year of the L.U.C Manufacture, Chopard is officially launching an even more impressive chiming timepiece than the Full Strike at Watches and Wonders 2026: the truly remarkable L.U.C Grand Strike. Selectively previewed at last November’s Dubai Watch Week, the Grand Strike (which combines a grande sonnerie with a tourbillon regulator) takes over as the most technically complicated watch ever created by Chopard, bringing the maker into a hallowed circle of fewer than a dozen names – among them Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin and Audemars Piguet – that have succeeded in developing grande sonnerie movements. 

While a petite sonnerie complication allows a chiming watch to automatically strike the hours and quarter-hours, the grande sonnerie takes a technical leap further by repeating the relevant hour at every quarter. Comprising no fewer than 686 components, the Grand Strike’s movement can be seen in all its glory thanks to the use of a sapphire crystal dial similar to that of the Strike One Revelation – and it’s even more of a feast for the eyes.

Chronometer-certified and stamped with the Geneva Seal, the movement is both a fanfare to highly traditional watchmaking and a celebration of modern aesthetics thanks, in part, to the combination of classic anglage and Côtes de Genève engraving with contemporary black polishing, German silver (for the bridges and mainplate) and mirror-polished stainless steel (for the tourbillon bridge). 

As much as the Grand Strike is undeniably a shameless demonstration of horological pyrotechnics, the engineers who had to develop 10 patented features in order to create it didn’t lose sight of the fact that it needed to be a practical, wearable wristwatch. That meant seamlessly fitting those hundreds of parts into the 43mm-diameter space of the ethical white gold case, which measures a manageable 14mm thick. 

As with the Full Strike watches, operation of the striking mechanism has been kept simple and elegant, with a pusher integrated into the manual winding crown being used for “on demand” operation. A discreet slide beside the crown serves as a strike work selector, enabling the chimes to operate in petite or grande sonnerie modes – or to remain silent in situations where the watch is required to be seen but not heard. Individual spring barrels power the time and chiming mechanisms – both wound from the crown – with the state of the 70-hour power reserves being displayed on an indicator at the two o’clock position. At 12 o’clock, meanwhile, you’ll find another indicator to show which mode the strike work is set to: ‘G’ for grande sonnerie; ‘P’ for petite; and ‘S’ for silent. And with so much going on among those 686 components, reducing the likelihood of operator damage to the mechanism has been as carefully addressed as it was for the Full Strike. To that end, similar safety mechanisms ensure chimes can’t be activated when the crown is pulled out and that modes can be toggled between without risk. 

What is most remarkable about the Grand Strike, however, is the clarity and volume of its sound, which, of course, is all down to the watch glass Monobloc construction whereby the sapphire gongs are part of the crystal – meaning the sound escapes instantly before it can be soaked up by the movement or the case. Due to its complexity, Chopard expects to make no more than two Grand Strikes per year – at a starting price of CHF 780,000 (around £750,000). So don’t expect to see one in the wild any time soon. And if you do, there’s a chance you will have heard it first…