Got this LeCoultre recently for a reasonable price at a local store, no box and papers. I bought it because it looks classic, wanted to know if it’s authentic or if there’s a similar piece out there.
No watch brand is called lecoultre and if this is supposed to be a JLC then yeah it’s a cheap fake. How much did you pay?
That’s a vintage JLC, likely 1960s model. They were made in many case and dial styles.
The company now known as Jaeger-LeCoultre emerged in the 1930s as the merger between French Jaeger, a supplier of watch components to Cartier, the French navy, and others, and the already century old Swiss company LeCoultre & Cie, already at that time one of the most respected producers of complicated movements. For trademark and distribution reasons, North American market watches continued to be branded “LeCoultre” until the 1970s. Additionally, while the movements were made by Jaeger-LeCoultre in Switzerland, they were cased in the US, using cases made by US suppliers, so the models are often a little different looking than their European market counterparts, beyond just the difference in the logo on the dial.
If you remove the back, you should be able to find something like “Cased and Timed in the US by LeCoultre”, as well as possibly markings as to the movement supplier.
Due to use of US based suppliers for cases, many LeCoultre branded JLCs are cased in gold filled cased, with 14k gold also being fairly common. Steel cased LeCoultres are less common, and are a good thing to find as the cases are often in better shape than the more common gold filled cases which can often have severe wear.
Looks like a good little vintage JLC, assuming it’s not a frankenwatch created by putting a LeCoultre movement and dial into a third party steel case. You do sometimes see this, as, like I said, the gold filled cases they originally were often sold in do wear out due to the nature of the material.