I recently bought my first Jaeger-LeCoultre. It’s a manually wound Club model from the ’60s or ’70s. When I started collecting watches as a high-school student three years ago or so, I never would have thought I’d wear a JLC before I graduated university and started working a well-paying job.
If there’s one thing 2025 taught me, it’s that everything I had previously thought about my life should be considered null and void. I always thought I’d end up at North West University in Potchefstroom. Thank heavens I didn’t. It’s not a bad institution per se, but I don’t fit in with Potch’s culture at all. I used to think I’d be an engineer, then I thought I’d try become an actuary. As of right now, I’m studying to become a geologist, which I refer to as “getting my rocks off.” To be honest, geology is the lavender marriage masking what I really want to do: watchmaking.
It’s funny, isn’t it? I always thought I’d work a white collar job using my knowledge of mathematics and the sciences to better the world or at least fatten the pockets of some shareholders. I always thought watchmaking would be the constant passion project; the thing I’d do on weekends and quiet evenings until I keeled over and died. Now it’s inescapable. I love it more than anything. I don’t think waking up every morning knowing I’m going to service watches would remove any glamour from it. What was once the intended escape from daily life has become something I aspire to do in lieu of daily life.
This makes everything jolly complicated. I was good at maths at some point, at least I thought so. The standard curriculum in this country woefully underprepares students for STEM careers. My entire family life was upheaved and still feels profoundly broken and empty. I had a brief, but passionate affair with alcohol and nicotine. It’s not hard for me to see why I didn’t exactly cut it in the already extremely competitive and demanding field of actuarial sciences. My circumstances are less an excuse and more so an explanation of why everything seemed to go belly-up.
I wonder about it sometimes, I really do. I wonder how everything would have looked if I had made the cut for actuarial sciences. Maybe there’s an alternate reality version of me, who, in twenty years or so, will be making enough money to live a comfortable life in some nice suburb, with a nice car to take him to work and a beautiful wife who loves him dearly. Maybe there’s a version of me who never found watchmaking. At the end of the day, I don’t care about “maybe” anymore. There are more “maybes” that put me in far worse places than I am now, places like AA meetings, jail cells, and graveyards.
All that said, I’m sure you’d believe me when I said I felt like a failure for months, working myself into a depression and slowly isolating myself from the outside world. After having lots of time to think and rethink my life, I have found contentedness. No one achieves all their goals. I’m not bothered that I don’t get everything I want all the time. That’s life.
So, what does all of this have to do with a JLC? A metaphor.
Jaeger-LeCoultre is known for producing luxury watches for the sort of people who appreciate a well-made product without it being too flashy. The JLC Club is very different. Unlike their other watches, the Club series didn’t use Jaeger-LeCoultre movements. They used AS movements. AS made good movements; they’re just about on par with ETA, which is hardly surprising as they both eventually melted into Ebauches SA. That said, I am not the biggest fan of AS movements overall. Movements with date complications are full of tiny, unsecured springs and early movements had unmarked reverse-thread screws where one would least expect them. Also, on many of the movements without a quickset, you’ll find the cannon pinion being worn loose. It happened to a Delfin I once owned. It happened to a Germinal Voltaire Greg sent me to fix. If two watches with roughly the same movement come to my workbench with the same issue, I start to call that poor design. I prefer ETA, thank you very much; just make sure that those reversing wheels are properly lubed.
My JLC doesn’t have a date, thankfully. It uses the AS 1700/01 movement, which is a 17-jewel three hander that beats at 21 600 A/h. It uses KIF Ultraflex shock protection, which is what JLC used in their homegrown movements. I don’t know if it is superior to Incabloc, if it is, it’s by a tiny margin. Nevertheless, I usually see this sort of shock protection on more expensive watches, which counts for something, even if only to me. Other than that, the movement has nothing else special about it. It’s not decorated. It’s not super high-tech. It’s a run-of-the-mill movement like many others. “Derivative” and “generic” are good words for it.
This is the biggest benefit of the Club, but also its Achilles’ heel. Because the movement isn’t in-house or special in any meaningful way, hardcore collectors avoid it. This makes them cheaper. The vast quantity of movements around and lack of information about this model means that it is the most faked JLC model out there. There are many Mumbai special Clubs, especially automatics. Mine isn’t, but it suffers from the same issues that plague the rest of the Clubs: it’s either an overpriced basic watch or a cheap JLC. The value proposition depends entirely on how much you value a brand name.
I like knowing I have a JLC on my wrist. It doesn’t bother me too much that it isn’t super fancy. After some time on the wrist, the novelty kind of dissipates. Granted, the novelty of anything eventually wears off, but with these, I expect that the less you know, the better. If you thought it had a Jaeger movement inside, you’d probably love it more. If they weren’t faked as much, they’d probably see more love in the market.
This is a Jaeger-LeCoultre that doesn’t tell me “You made it.” It tells me “You’re doing alright, I guess.” Sometimes, that’s okay. Sometimes, being basic and gold-plated is enough. Sometimes, it’s okay that it’s not a Reverso or Memovox; it doesn’t need to be. It can stand on its own merits; it may not be high horology, but who really gives a damn anymore?
The Escapement Room 