Building on the success of its debut, a quartz chronograph was next introduced followed by the first Aikon with an automatic movement in 2018. It really isn’t surprising why the Aikon has gained remarkable traction. Although targeted at the mid-range market, it looks like a high-end timepiece with a handsome design to boot.

This year, the Aikon collection is enhanced with the Venturer, a sports casual model, and the Mercury, its first complicated incarnation.

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“People still remember the Calypso, which had the claws on the bezel,” recalls Stephane Waser, managing director of Maurice Lacroix. “It was launched in 1990 and became very popular. Along the way, the Calypso underwent a few redesigns until it ceased production in 2003 but we felt that the original design was still the best.”

Waser makes no bones about the fact that the Aikon was birthed to recapture the mid-range market. The brand built its business in this particular segment before it shifted focus to the high-end segment with the Masterpiece collection of manufacture-produced complicated watches such as the Masterpiece Gravity and the Masterpiece Mysterious Seconds.

While the watches were stellar and burnished the Swiss brand’s standing in horology, the timing unfortunately coincided with the 2007/08 financial crisis. “It didn't take off the way we hoped it would. In the end, we needed a core product that could be the ‘face’ of the brand,” Waser elaborates.

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The case is 43mm steel with a unidirectional ceramic bezel with the claws replaced with minute numerals for the countdown function. It is water-resistant up to 300m. Even though it has the classic features of a diver, Waser and his team stop short of categorising it as a dive watch.

“It’s more than a watch that you can go diving or take a shower with,” Waser says. “It’s reductive to call it a dive watch. We call it a watch you can ‘dive’ in the urban jungle; it’s a beautiful lifestyle product.”

Indeed, as an urban ‘diver’, it presents a striking face. The dial is sun-brushed in either blue or black, and it is matched with bold baton hands. Alternating round and rectangular hour markers are coated with SuperLuminova.

The strap is rubber with a central strip of squares that recall the Aikon’s angular design. Fitted with an EasyChange system, the rubber strap can be changed out for a steel bracelet effortlessly. “The design is clean, simple and pure. We wanted something classic that will still look good 10 years from now,” notes Waser.

The sleek outer proportions of the Aikon may have found its perfect match internally. The Mercury is endowed with the in-house Calibre ML225 fitted with a patented time memory module on a self-winding base.

This patented mechanism comprises a double snail cam mechanism. One snail cam is responsible for the hours, making one complete rotation every 12 hours, while the other is responsible for the minutes, making one rotation in 60 minutes. The watch doesn’t tell active time – instead, it harnesses the power of gravity to pull two weighted levers into contact with the continuously rotating snail cams, which will “guide” the levers to drive the hour and minute hands to indicate the correct time.

Simply put, the watch shows the correct time only when you move your wrist to look at the watch. Otherwise, the hour and minute hands remain idle.

It took three years for Maurice Lacroix to perfect this complication. “We didn’t want to do traditional complications like the tourbillon or the minute repeater,” says Waser. “These days we don’t need a watch to tell time. As such the Mercury is the perfect instrument for today. It’s a watch that disconnects when you don’t need it and it reconnects when you do. It definitely has a playful element, a way of saying that watchmaking doesn't have to be so serious.”

Aesthetically, the open dial reveals the skeletonised module of the movement that features a combination of circular brushing and hollowed sandblasted bridges. The Mercury, which was unveiled during Geneva Days in January, pairs its 44mm stainless steel case with a steel bracelet or a rubber strap.

In hindsight, Maurice Lacroix’s venture into high watchmaking turns out to be an advantage in the development of the Aikon. “The team that works on the Masterpiece is the same team that works on the Aikon. If we haven’t acquired this competence in-house, we wouldn't be able to do watches like the Aikon quartz with the same quality as a high-end watch.”

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