The Nadir of Jaeger-LeCoultre and the Reverso
Although today’s Jaeger-LeCoultre marketing would have you believe that the Reverso model has been the signature of the brand for nearly 90 years, nothing could be further from the truth. Sure, the Reverso was quite popular in the 1930s, but it quickly fell out of favor and was forgotten. The model was completely absent from the company’s catalogs for decades.
In 1972, as the story goes, the Italian distributor for the struggling brand uncovered a cache of unused Reverso cases and asked Jaeger-LeCoultre to complete them. The design would have seemed antiquated by that time, with avant-garde digital and quartz watches in vogue, but this effort must have been successful because Jaeger-LeCoultre decided to revive the model officially at the end of the decade... More here.
A superb article.