Maurice Lacroix is a Swiss watch manufacturer founded in 1975 in Saignelégier, in the Jura mountains. It was not founded by a watchmaker. It was founded by a silk trading house from Zurich, and the man whose name is on the dial was that company’s Director for Silks in Lyon. Knowing that explains most of what happened next: the climb from assembling other brands’ watches, the 2000s detour into five-figure haute horlogerie pricing that nearly sank the company, and the current act, where Maurice Lacroix sells a very handsome integrated-bracelet sports watch for a few thousand francs.
A brand dreamed up by silk merchants
Desco von Schulthess was founded in Zurich in 1889, trading silk and other goods from Asia. After the Second World War it became the Far East agent for Audemars Piguet, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Heuer, Eterna and Certina, which is how a silk company learned the watch business from the distribution end. In 1961 Desco bought the Tiara assembly workshop in Saignelégier and spent the next fourteen years building watches under other people’s brand names. Then, in 1975, it decided to launch its own brand. Under Swiss rules a company had to be named after an employee, so Desco picked Monsieur Maurice Lacroix, the Director for Silks in Lyon, France. The first Maurice Lacroix watches went on sale in Austria in 1975, reached Spain in 1976, and took another two decades to reach America, in 1995. By 1980 the brand was successful enough that the Saignelégier plant stopped assembling watches for third parties altogether.
So the founding legend is exactly what it sounds like: the man on the dial sold silk. This is the opposite of a centuries-old heritage story, and it is worth saying out loud, because the brand’s later attempts to dress itself in haute horlogerie prestige make more sense once you know where it actually started.
The Maurice Lacroix factory in Saignelégier, in the Jura. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Building a real watchmaker
In 1989 Maurice Lacroix bought the case maker Queloz, right there in Saignelégier, and started manufacturing its own cases. The first real commercial breakthrough came in 1990 with the Calypso, a sporty watch whose bezel looked like it was held to the case by six little claws, and it sold well enough to put the brand on the map. Around the same time the company started a dressy, complicated line called Les Mécaniques, later renamed Masterpiece, full of retrograde displays, regulators and jump hours, much of it built on heavily reworked bought-in movements. Maurice Lacroix became its own legal entity in October 2001, separate from Desco von Schulthess. The marketing department got creative along the way: Roger Federer signed a three-year partnership in 2004, and in 2010 the brand ran an ambassador campaign that put Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s face on a banner hanging off the Saignelégier factory. You have to admire the nerve.
The upmarket detour
Then the brand got ambitious, the way brands do when the money is good. In 2006 Maurice Lacroix unveiled its first in-house movement, the ML106, a hand-wound column-wheel chronograph with a swan-neck fine adjustment, developed with the independent watchmaker Andreas Strehler. It went into the Masterpiece Le Chronographe, and the company followed it with an automatic manufacture movement in 2011 and the Mémoire 1, a watch of 604 moving parts that could switch between time and chronograph functions without losing track of either. This was serious watchmaking. The problem was the price tag. The average Maurice Lacroix price climbed from around CHF 2,000 to CHF 5,000 or 6,000, and Masterpiece models were suddenly asking CHF 10,000 and up. As managing director Stéphane Waser later admitted, at that price people bought a very nice Rolex or an IWC instead, and unless you were a serious collector you were not spending that kind of money with Maurice Lacroix. Sales slid from 2009 to 2014, and a company that had started out assembling other people’s watches nearly went bankrupt trying to be a haute manufacture.
Credit where due: the ML106 was a genuinely impressive piece of engineering, and the Masterpiece line showed the factory in Saignelégier could finish a movement properly. The market just said no to the pricing, and it was right to.
The Aikon and the permanent “for sale” sign
The ownership story runs alongside all of this. DKSH, the Swiss market-expansion conglomerate with deep roots in Asia, took a majority stake in Maurice Lacroix in July 2011. By 2014 the brand was struggling again, and DKSH put it up for sale, a state of affairs that lasted the rest of the decade and then some. Bloomberg reported in April 2022 that the company was profitable and still for sale, which tells you plenty about how a corporate parent thinks about a watch brand.
Meanwhile Stéphane Waser, who had joined the company in 2008 and become managing director in 2014, was rebuilding the catalog from the ground up. The answer was the Aikon, launched in 2016: a direct descendant of the 1990s Calypso, with those six bezel claws reworked into bezel riders and the whole thing riding on an integrated bracelet, aimed squarely at the integrated sports watch crowd. Here is the honest part: you cannot look at an Aikon and not see Gerald Genta’s shadow. Royal Oak, Nautilus, take your pick. Maurice Lacroix was not first to this idea, and the launch lineup was quartz-only, which annoyed the enthusiasts. But the brand listened, added automatics in 2018, and kept the price where it belongs, mostly between CHF 1,000 and 3,000. By 2019 the Aikon had made the company profitable again. The line kept growing: a bronze Aikon in 2017, the Venturer diver, chronographs, new colors every year. The sponsorships kept coming too, including a partnership with FC Barcelona. Waser stepped away in July 2026 after eighteen years with the brand, and Joel Chabanne took over as managing director.
A Maurice Lacroix wristwatch. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CeCILL license.
Why it matters
Maurice Lacroix matters because it is one of the clearest cases in the Swiss industry of a brand that survived by admitting what it actually is. It is a former assembler with a made-up name, a genuinely capable factory in the Jura, and one very good hit in the Aikon, not a manufacture with centuries of history. The in-house movement years produced real watchmaking that Masterpiece collectors still respect, and the upmarket years taught the brand the lesson every value brand eventually learns: you cannot charge five figures on a Maurice Lacroix nameplate. What you can do is build a well-finished, Swiss-made sports watch for two or three thousand francs, and that is exactly what the Aikon is. For a brand named after a silk salesman from Lyon, that is a good outcome.
Official site: mauricelacroix.com
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