Menlo Park, CA (November 18, 2022) – Silicon Valley’s most innovative timepiece salon has further cemented its partnership with one of the Swiss watch industry’s most in-demand brands. Stephen Silver Fine Jewelry is proud to reveal the company’s premier watch design collaboration with Louis Erard, and the first ever ‘triple signed’ limited series of Louis Erard x Alain Silberstein for Stephen Silver watches and diptych watch sets.
The collaboration includes 72 Louis Erard x Alain Silberstein for Stephen Silver La Semaine watches – known among watch collector circles as the “Smiley” – offered for $4,590 USD each. The partnership also encompasses 28 diptych box sets containing both Louis Erard x Alain Silberstein for Stephen Silver Le Régulateur and La Semaine watches. Each box set will retail for $8,888 USD. Altogether, the collaboration offers 128 exclusive models.
Since the Silvers opened their timepiece salon in 2014, the Menlo Park-based company has established an impressive record of discovering up-and-coming independent watch brands like Louis Erard. Stephen Silver Fine Jewelry was the first North American retailer to carry the award-winning brand.
“Our Silicon Valley clientele have a natural affinity for unorthodox watches and the grit and bootstrap mentality of indie brands like Louis Erard,” says Jared Silver, president of Stephen Silver Fine Jewelry, “We are proud to partner with Louis Erard on our first ever Stephen Silver watch.”
Manuel Emch, Delegate Board Member of Louis Erard: “The US is our most representative market where we have built, in a short period of time, a great presence both off and online with the best in class. Stephen Silver Fine Jewelry was our first customer in the USA and, out of respect for their commitment, we offered them this advance launch.”
Unique artistic vision and watchmaking mastery combine in these Louis Erard x Alain Silberstein for Stephen Silver watches. Both ‘Le Régulateur’ and ‘La Semaine’ share the same 40mm titanium watch cases. The case architecture consists of a frame with vertical sidebars known as “brancards,” flanked by a conical crown. Visual balance and intrigue are achieved through contrasting shapes, materials, and finishes, starting with micro-blasted and polished grade 2 and grade 5 titanium.
Each model is water-resistant to 100 meters, and each comes equipped with an easy-wearing, quick-fit double-layer nylon strap. All watches also feature a Stephen Silver logo engraved on the sapphire crystal case backs, which reveal a glimpse of the watches’ automatic movements. The Louis Erard x Alain Silberstein for Stephen Silver watches also offer 38 hours of power reserve.
These limited-edition watches offer the quintessential Alain Silberstein design elements, with his signature use of elementary forms and primary colors. Silberstein also mines a wealth of references, ranging from Bauhaus to the rich history of watchmaking, and his own iconic geometric visual language. Jared Silver also worked with Louis Erard to develop an iridescent blue sapphire-inspired minute track exclusively for this limited edition, inspired by the many exceptional sapphire gemstones in the Stephen Silver Fine Jewelry collection.
Le Régulateur presents a large white arrow hand for the minutes, a red triangle for the hours, and a small yellow serpentine hand for the seconds, and La Semaine, with its three hands, date, and day displays, offers Silberstein’s special take on the weekly planner. Rather than traditional dates, the window presents playful smileys – small, stylized faces symbolizing different moods – from grey Monday to radiant Sunday. The smiley mood on display can be tailored to the wearer’s schedule.
The Louis Erard x Alain Silberstein for Stephen Silver wait list is now open at shsilver.com/pages/louis-erard-collection
About Stephen Silver Fine Jewelry
Stephen Silver is a Silicon-Valley based gemologist, geologist, diamonteer, and philanthropist. Over the course of the last 45+ years, Silver has established a reputation amongst his global network of jewelry industry contacts and elite gemstone collectors for his expertise in diamond and color gemstone cutting and jewelry design. Following his geology studies at San Diego State University and earning a Graduate Gemologist degree from GIA, Silver later returned to the San Francisco Bay Area to found an estate jewelry firm specializing in antiques and precious stones. There, he gained access to a number of history’s most important colored gems, including the famous Cullinan Blue Diamond necklace, a historic piece he went on to purchase and donate to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and later, the Pink Promise Diamond, which he recut and improved, resulting in a record price per carat at auction in 2017.
Joined in recent years by son and Stephen Silver Fine Jewelry President Jared Silver, Stephen Silver expanded his business into a vertically integrated wholesale manufacture and retail operation of international reach with an office and retail boutique based in and around Menlo Park, California. For more information, visit shsilver.com
About Louis Erard
Based in the Jura mountains, the birthplace of watchmaking, Louis Erard embodies the values of Swiss mechanics, the tradition that keeps its promises. Combining luxury, timelessness, and elegance, this independent brand is renowned for its mechanical watches and, in particular, its iconic regulators. A collection on which the brand, founded by Mr. Louis Erard in 1929, built its reputation.
Today, continuing the work of its founder and honoring the watchmaking tradition, the Maison is reinterpreting the codes in a contemporary language, revisiting its artistic crafts and opening up its field of expression through collaborations and exchanges of know-how. Louis Erard continues to set itself apart from mass-market brands. Inspired by high-end watchmaking, the brand draws on its values to enhance its mechanical timepieces. louiserard.com
About Alain Silberstein
“Real happiness is being passionate about one’s work.” Alain Silberstein was born in 1950. He has had a rather unusual career, beginning as an interior architect and designer in Paris before becoming a watchmaker in Besançon, France, at the end of the 1980s, when he set up his own company. At a time when the disappearance of mechanical watchmaking seemed almost inevitable, he joined the narrow circle of Swiss watchmakers behind a renaissance in mechanical watches with innovative features. His work pays tribute to the Bauhaus art movement, which traces its roots to Germany in 1919, and to major artists such as Gropius, Itten, Moholy-Nagy, Kandinsky, Klee, Albers, Bayer and Mies van der Rohe, all of whose works continue to influence graphic design, architecture and design in general.
Alain Silberstein has developed a unique style where the geometrical rigour of shapes and mechanical movements play mischievously with a rainbow of evocative colours and innovative materials. It is an artistic and playful approach to high-end watchmaking which sometimes surprises and often beguiles. It is the original approach of a watchmaker and artist who creates singular watches, taking on the challenge of offering a poetic approach to the passing of time and the emotions found in personal and shared times. Every year for twenty-five years, Alain Silberstein designed and created around a thousand exceptional watches, all made in limited series and numbered, in his workshop at the heart of French-Swiss watchmaking country. Since the closure of his company in 2012, he has turned his talent to working with other watchmaking brands such as MB&F, Romain Jerome and now Louis Erard. Alain Silberstein continues to explore a watchmaking universe which is somewhere between art and craft, where strict shapes, innovative materials and evocative colours harmoniously come together.
