Jaeger-LeCoultre partners with Filipino webcomic artist to tell Reverso story

Swiss luxury watchmaker Jaeger-LeCoultre’s latest Made of Makers collaboration foregrounds a Filipino creator: Cebu-based webcomic artist Olivecoat (Lily Mae Young-Catan) was commissioned to reimagine the Reverso’s origin as a vertical-scroll, archive-inspired webcomic. The project reframes the Reverso not as an objet d’art but as lived history, delivered in a format native to younger, mobile-first audiences.

The collaboration is deliberately cross-disciplinary. For a maison whose Made of Makers program has previously worked with chefs, perfumes, and designers, a webcomic represents a strategic if unexpected outreach: marrying Le Sentier workshop lore and 1931 polo-field legend with the soft, human-first storytelling that defines Olivecoat’s online work.

Jaeger-LeCoultre’s own presentation of the project stresses the move from archival prose and product imagery into “visually immersive designs” optimized for serial mobile reading—an explicit attempt to make heritage legible to a new generation.

“Before becoming ‘a classic’ something has to break boundaries,” Jaeger-LeCoultre marketing chief Matthieu Le Voyer told WatchPro, explaining why the Maison invited a comics artist into a rarified horological conversation. “What we wanted to do here is explore the fine arts to propose a vision of what could be the new disruptive classic.”

Olivecoat’s contribution reads like an exercise in cultural translation rather than simple illustration: the Reverso’s mechanics and origin myths are rendered as human encounters, small gestures, and visual atmosphere. As she told T Australia, the aim was to capture a sensibility more than a catalogue of facts: “Reverso is all about capturing a feeling—with a lighter tone—the timelessness, creativity, and human touch that define Jaeger-LeCoultre.”

Her reaction to the invitation was candid and revealing of the creative leap involved. Olivecoat described the experience as overwhelming and exhilarating. That sense of being thrust from a familiar creative world into the vaulted workshops of Swiss haute-horlogerie frames the comic’s sympathetic perspective: the watchmaker’s history is revealed not by technical diagram but by the people inside it.

The webcomic appears in five serialized chapters online, with a limited printed edition for collectors—an intentional bridge between swipe culture and the tactile pleasures of bookmaking. Jaeger-LeCoultre frames that duality as part of the project’s logic: the digital form reaches new readers, while the paper edition honors the Reverso’s collector status and the Maison’s archival impulse.

Why this matters beyond clever marketing: the piece signals a broader shift in how luxury brands curate relevance. Rather than importing youth via influencer playbooks or token collaborations, this commission elevates a creator whose primary audience lives on Webtoon and Instagram—audiences that do not encounter watchmaking through boutiques but through storytelling. The result is a subtle repositioning of heritage: not as frozen object-cult, but as a narrative one can inhabit, scroll through, and emotionally map.

For Olivecoat, the project extends an existing practice—character-driven, pastel-toned, quietly emotive comics that grew from juvenile sketchbooks to internationally read serials—into new terrain. For Jaeger-LeCoultre, the collaboration becomes an exercise in cultural dialogue—inviting a Filipino perspective to cast new light on a storied Swiss icon, and in the process, subtly widening the circle of those who see themselves in the Reverso.