Stories

Born in Neuchâtel in 2004 and named with an anagram of the town, Hautlence makes watches that often swap ordinary hands for chains, spheres and jumping numerals.

URWERK began at a student party in December 1995, where the watchmaker Felix Baumgartner, his brother Thomas and the designer Martin Frei talked about how best to express time.

Bart and Tim, the brothers behind Grönefeld, make complicated watches next to the Saint Plechelmus Basilica in Oldenzaal, where their grandfather opened his workshop in 1912.

From the Jura village of Le Noirmont, Louis Erard, independent since 1929, has turned one complication, the regulator, into a canvas for guest designers and watchmakers.

Founded in 1839, L’Epée 1839 is a clock manufacture in Delémont, in the Swiss Jura, and since 2014 it has engineered and built a series of clocks conceived by MB&F.

In 2005 Maximilian Büsser resigned from Harry Winston to found MB&F, a company that treats a watch as a machine and makes each one with friends.

Two childhood friends, a watch enthusiast and a master watchmaker, opened a manufacture in Biel/Bienne in 2009 to make movements that show how they work.

Heinrich Moser founded H. Moser & Cie. in 1828; since its revival in 2005, the house has hidden complex watchmaking behind deliberately plain dials.

Two friends and industrial designers, Giovanni Moro and Simone Nunziato, started UNIMATIC in 2015 to make watches in which every design decision serves a function.

Laurent Ferrier, a third-generation Geneva watchmaker, and François Servanin, his teammate at Le Mans, waited 30 years to make their own watch, then won a GPHG prize with it.

In a studio in Schwäbisch Gmünd, the artists Marco Biegert and Andreas Funk spent years on one idea: a display that shows the time as it is spoken.

Dan Niederer’s Zurich brand turns cogwheels, copper pipes and bank vaults into square watches whose dials are built up in layers.