In 1791, watchmaker and goldsmith Jean-François Bautte signed his first watches. He created a manufacturing company in Geneva grouping, for the first time ever, all the watch making facets of that time, which meant starting from the engineering of the watch all the way to the final hand assembly and hand polishing of each watch. In 1852, the watchmaker Constant Girard founded the Girard & Cie Firm in La Chaux-de-Fonds. He, then, married Marie Perregaux and the Girard-Perregaux Manufacture was born in 1856. In 1906, Constant Girard-Gallet, who took over control of the Manufacture from his father, took over the Bautte House and merged it with Girard-Perregaux & Cie. Since then, the brand has pursued its activities by reinforcing from the 1980s its position in the domain of prestigious mechanical watches, Haute Horlogerie, under the lead of Luigi Macaluso. In 2011, Sowind Group, the holding incorporating Girard-Perregaux, became a subsidiary of Kering.

Constant Girard produced the first ever major commercial production of a wristwatch, made for German naval officers and ordered by German Kaiser Wilhelm I. The Manufacture has approximately 80 patents in the watch-making domain and is the originator of many innovative concepts.