LeJour
LeJour
History
Translating from French to “The Day”, LeJour was best known as a retailer of watches manufactured by Heuer and as the brand for Yema watches in the United States. While odd today, the idea of a major company like Heuer making watches for a private label was very common in the watch world up until the quartz crisis. In fact LeJour was not the only brand to benefit from this relationship with Heuer and a whole subset of so-called ‘poor man Heuers’ exist today that were created under these pretenses. When the partnership between LeJour and Heuer formed in the late 1970’s Heuer was pushing automatic chronographs on the world. Some guess that this led them to sell their older manual wind chronograph movements and cases on the cheap to these private labels. This could explain the difference in style between these watches and the contemporary Heuer models which featured mostly cushion shaped cases. LeJour went the way of so many other brands in the late 70’s and early 80’s as a result of the quartz crisis. Following this initial shutdown, the brand name was bought and sold numerous times until 2017 when the brand was resurrected once again. The modern LeJour focuses on the heritage of the brand and uses past models as inspiration for their current lineup.
Notable Models
Links
Credits
Dial and Bezel
