Lebois & Co Avantgarde watches

The Lebois & Co Avantgarde Date is the watch that brought the Lebois & Co name back. Raymond Dodane, of the Dodane watchmaking family, founded the brand in Besançon in 1934; in 1947 it passed to Italian importers, who had the watches made by Dodane and Swiss suppliers, and production stopped in 1972 as the quartz crisis began. Dutch entrepreneur Tom van Wijlick and his wife Eveline re-registered the name after coming across a photo of a vintage Lebois & Co chronograph, and the first new watches arrived in 2015, funded on Kickstarter.

The Avantgarde Date is a 40 mm steel automatic, 10.5 mm thick. The case and bezel are mostly polished, with satin finishing on and between the lugs, which curve slightly downward; slim guards flank the crown. The dial is layered, with faceted applied markers, separate hour and minute tracks, a red 60 and a red seconds hand with a lollipop counterweight, polished sword hands with a slim line of lume, a date at 3 o'clock and "Lebois & Co, 1934" printed on the inner circle. It has a sapphire crystal and is water resistant to 100 m.

The Re-launch Edition came in three Kickstarter runs of 100, told apart by dial colour. The first, 112.412, and the blue-dial second, 112.422, run on the automatic ETA 2824-2, a 28,800 vph movement with a 38-hour power reserve, behind a closed case back, and both came on alligator leather; the blue one added a NATO strap. The third, the black-dial 112.433, changed the movement to a decorated Sellita SW200-1 with Geneva stripes, perlage and blued screws, adjusted in five positions and shown through a display back, and it came on buffalo leather straps in black and cognac.