Chopard L.U.C: Buy, Sell & Value Guide | Ultimate Watch NYC

The Chopard L.U.C is the collection that took Chopard from a jewelry house that also sold watches into a real Manufacture that makes its own movements from raw brass to finished bridge. The initials stand for Louis-Ulysse Chopard, the founder who opened the workshop in 1860. Karl-Friedrich Scheufele, co-president of the family that has owned Chopard since 1963, spent the early 1990s building a movement workshop in Fleurier in the Val-de-Travers, and in 1996 that shop delivered the L.U.C Calibre 96.01-L, an ultra-thin automatic with a 22-carat gold micro-rotor. In 1997 it went into the first L.U.C watch, the 1860, which promptly won Watch of the Year from the Swiss magazine Montres Passion. That is the whole point of the line: this is the serious watchmaking side of a house most people know for happy diamonds and red-carpet jewelry. On 47th Street we see far more Chopard jewelry across the counter than L.U.C watches, which is exactly why a good L.U.C is worth talking about. It is one of the best-kept values in haute horlogerie, a genuinely in-house, often Geneva Seal or COSC-certified movement in a market that keeps confusing brand heat with watchmaking. If you own one and want a number, or you want to buy one right, we buy and sell these every week and can tell you what the movement inside actually is.