In 1874 Georges Edouard Piaget sets up his first workshop on his family's farm and devotes himself to creating precise mechanical clock movements for prestigious watch companies. The small shop quickly gained business and soon the family business switched from farming to watch-making. Edouard's son, Timothee Piaget, took over the family business in 1911 and continued the same pursuit of quality as his father before him.
In 1943 the Piaget brand name becomes officially registered and they began producing watches under their own name. In 1945 they opened a new facility at La Cote-aux-Fees where the brand would become the creator of completely new developments in mechanical movements.
In 1957 a new movement, Calibre 9P, was developed at the new facility. This movement was an impressively thin manual wound movement. Just a few short years later in 1960 Piaget developed the slimmest self-winding movement in the world, the Calibre 12P, which was just 2.3 millimeters thick.