23 January 2012 - For quite some time, Geneva-based Frédérique Constant has been affiliated with vintage racing, first with Austin Healeys and most recently with La Carrera Panamericana, the legendary Mexican race that is eagerly watched by millions of classic car aficionados.
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16 January 2012 - The Franck Muller Group is defined by its namesake brand, the one that started it all with designs by the man, Franck Muller, that set watchmaking on its ear.
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19 December 2011 - Nestled in the hills surrounding Le Locle, in the very heart of the Swiss watchmaking country, Tissot, which has been in business since 1858, just inaugurated perhaps the most technologically-advanced storage and retrieval system in the entire watch industry
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19 December 2011 - The very imposing UR-1001 Zeit Device condenses the last fifteen years of experimentation conducted by Urwerk into a time-measuring object with more than generous dimensions and ample weight. It is neither a wristwatch nor is it a traditional pocket watch—unless you have a solidly re-inforced pocket. “It is,” as Felix Baumgartner says with a smile, “the Mother of all other watches, the Mother Ship of all the space shuttles that make up the Urwerk timekeeping fleet.”
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19 December 2011 - For the last ten years—since 2002 when the brand was founded—De Bethune has been managed by its two co-founders, David Zanetta, president, and Denis Flageollet, technical director.
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19 December 2011 - The boss of Hublot, Jean-Claude Biver, financed the “Antikythera” project, whose name is derived from the famous astronomical mechanism of ancient Greece.
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19 December 2011 - World famous Bondi Beach, Sydney Harbour Bridge, Ayers Rock, Sydney Opera House are all Australian iconic landmarks in the serious traveller’s diary. Recognising this potential, the new Australian watch brand Bausele, pays tribute to the Australian culture and its remarkable iconic landscape.
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18 December 2011 - In its fourth year, the Geneva Time Exhibition (GTE) will be presenting itself in a different light, with an emphasis on quality rather than quantity.
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18 December 2011 - The first major international event of the watch calendar year, the SIHH, is a must-see show, since it is here that the major lines are drawn for the year to come, whether in terms of ambitions or the upcoming trends.
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14 November 2011 - DeWitt’s intricate Golden Afternoon ladies’ model draws its inspiration from the Pre-Raphaelite movement in order to pay a fitting tribute to the women for whom it is destined.
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7 November 2011 - “Raymond Weil stands out because of its own efforts and not because we are attached to a large group,” insists Olivier Bernheim, who heads up the family brand with his two sons, and who wants things to be clearly stated and understood.
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31 October 2011 - After a long night flight from Geneva to Hong Kong, via London, I arrived in the HKG International Airport and familiar faces welcomed me – watches from Vacheron Constantin, Ulysse Nardin, TAG Heuer, A. Lange & Söhne and more.
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17 October 2011 - Guillaume Tetu, now the only captain aboard the Hautlence “ship” has always put his cards squarely on the table. After the rough seas of the economic crisis where the small independent brand was seriously tossed around and its business plan was left in disarray, everything had to be started again.
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17 October 2011 - Bédat & Co. cleverly bypass the need to name their collections by using numbers for them. This has the advantage of making them easily memorable in any language. But beware – the collections are not numbered in the order in which they are launched, so the brand’s first collection was – quite illogically – the No. 3.
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17 October 2011 - Freed from the constraints of the family firm, Alain Mouawad launches a new brand with a focus on the minutest attention to detail in a design that adds a new twist to the classic round watch case.
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17 October 2011 - Jean Depéry comes from a family which can trace its history in watchmaking back to the 1700s, yet he chose the name of one of his ancestors’ customers, Emile Chouriet, for the name of the watch brand he launched back in 1998.
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14 October 2011 - Vaucher Manufacture Fleurier—which belongs to the Sandoz Family Foundation and which has grown at the sides of Parmigiani for which it is the main manufacturing group of various companies—seriously suffered during the watch recession that followed the economic downturn of the years 2008-2009.
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30 September 2011 - Following the death of Rolf Schnyder, its president and CEO, the Ulysse Nardin manufacture is continuing along the path of independence and innovation. Planned for this year is an increase in the production of the new UN-118 calibre equipped with an escapement in DIAMonSIL.
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16 September 2011 - When in 2003 at the head of a group of investors, Alain Spinedi (ex-Sector, ex-Swatch) took over the reins at the Louis Erard brand (founded in 1931), he opted for a rather unique strategy.
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16 September 2011 - In 2009, we described the ateliers of Voutilainen, in Môtiers in the Val de Travers, as a ‘one-man manufacture’. It was a way of saying how the Finnish watchmaker, who became independent in 2002, had achieved such a high degree of ‘verticalization’, if we might qualify such an artisanal structure in this manner.
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2 September 2011 - Until now, François-Paul Journe has never made a sports watch. “For the pure and simple reason that I don’t do sports,” he explains laughing.
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2 September 2011 - Any watchmaker worthy of the name must obviously master the ‘hidden springs’ of time, or in other words, the mechanical measurement of time. A question of technique, it is also a question of art and taste, things that can be learned and acquired.
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23 August 2011 - In the remote neighbourhood of Changping in Beijing, time stands still; strollers have not given way to taxi lanes and the shadow of Mao still looms heavy. Behind his statue, as if under its protection, lies the Beijing Watch Factory. It is here that some of the most beautiful watches in the country are created.
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2 August 2011 - The economic crisis has not killed the need for the ‘concept watch’, in fact, perhaps, just the contrary. Research is and remains more than ever the domain where new roads are solidly established—roads that will not all end at an oasis, as some will simply wander among the sand dunes.
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5 July 2011 - The Ceballos family has been in watches and jewellery for three generations. Located in Hermosillo, Mexico, which is south of Arizona, Daniel Ceballos Joyeros is now under the direction of Daniel Ceballos the third, carrying on the family tradition. One of Daniel’s main initiatives has been to increase the number of watch brands his store carries. Europa Star caught up with Daniel Ceballos in his store in Hermosillo.
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22 June 2011 - One of the biggest trends in the watch industry right now is towards more traditional, classical designs, inevitably simpler, slightly smaller and thinner.As a response, Mondaine is introducing a new collection called Simply Elegant.
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16 June 2011 - IceLink has two new launches named after great ski locations, one in Switzerland, Zermatt, and one in Italy, Cortina d’Ampezzo.
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9 June 2011 - Ultra thin, flat, fine, slim and slender are words that are dominating the watch press at the moment due to the return towards classical timepieces. There has been no return to thinness for Obaku Denmark, however, as this minimalist Danish brand has always produced slim, clean and pure timepieces.
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9 June 2011 - Maurice Lacroix made a lot of brands jealous last year by being the first to incorporate the invention of Michel Vermot, who, with the collaboration of the Haute Ecole ARC in Le Locle, had developed the first square gears. (Since then, Michel Vermot has been appointed as the head of the department for movement development at Maurice Lacroix.) This mechanical ‘curiosity’—for lack of a better word—is quite impressive when you see it turning in a square manner.
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6 June 2011 - We remember when the Armin Strom brand, a master watchmaker specializing in the art of skeletonizing, opened its new facility in Bienne in 2009. It was a veritable mini-manufacture that was very well integrated. This rise in strength was made possible by its association with the Michel family.
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2 June 2011 - It is difficult to be a pioneer. It is even more difficult perhaps to remain one. This is because, when you are ‘right’ before everyone else, or quite simply put, when you propose a new way of doing things, a different way of doing things, but no one really gets it, you need to move mountains to clear the field of view for what people have not been able to see.
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30 May 2011 - We have underscored it several times—the work of ‘re-conquering’ its own watchmaking legitimacy, started in 2009 by Jean-Frédéric Dufour, at the head of Zenith, deserves to be praised. ‘Just by chance’, or more realistically, carefully put into action after deep reflection on the state of watchmaking and the heritage of Zenith, this re-centring of the brand on purely watchmaking values is arriving at its maturity, at the right moment. And, in two ways—in terms of both design and price.
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26 May 2011 - The new Vintage Original Carbon Collection pays tribute to the aviators of the 1940s
with Bell & Ross’s distinctive DNA fitted into a classic round case.
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23 May 2011 - The French brand Pequignet is now realizing its goal of creating a revolutionary calibre that combines reliability, torque, precision, symmetry, space, elegance and the integration of complications directly into the original main plate—the Calibre Royal.
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19 May 2011 - The AirBoss line is one of the most successful for Victorinox Swiss Army.
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16 May 2011 - The chronograph has its special place in Louis Vuitton’s time collections as it ties in perfectly to the brand’s spirit of travel. The new Voyagez Tambour Automatic Chronograph ‘Tachometer” is a true instrument for travel with its chronograph and tachymeter function that allows its owner to calculate his land speed.
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12 May 2011 - Armand Nicolet has weathered the financial storm and is well positioned for the future, thanks to its success with its vintage movement powered limited editions.
“We are continuing and consolidating our image and position as a small yet sophisticated factory,” says Rolando Braga, President, Armand Nicolet.
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9 May 2011 - César Jean-Mairet, founder of Jean-Mairet & Gillman, didn’t grow up in the watch industry, though his family has a long heritage in watchmaking. As a result, Jean-Mairet has always been aware of watches and was determined to design watches one day. Sidetracked from his true passion, he studied engineering and after obtaining his degree, went to Togo and Saudi Arabia to build electrical power plants
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5 May 2011 - It has been a great year for Philip Stein – fantastic new sleep studies, celebrity
endorsements and brand new products to help everyone feel better.
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2 May 2011 - Already in 1916, Heuer introduced its Mikrograph, the first sports stopwatch, accurate to 1/50th of a second and 1/100th of a second. This represented a major advance in this domain since most stopwatches of the day were precise to only 1/5th of a second.
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27 April 2011 - A young Italian watch company, Haurex brings the best of Italian design to the watch industry with a brand new collection entitled Ink.
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21 April 2011 - Since he has taken the reins of Corum, Antonio Calce has been working twice as hard. His obsession: push as far as possible the coherence of his brand’s offer by re-centring the pieces around a few strong, identifiable, and immediately recognizable collections.
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18 April 2011 - Bedat & Co affirms itself in the women’s watch segment with new products and an intense global expansion strategy. On the distribution side, 2010 has been a dynamic year with the revitalisation of the American market that now boasts 70 points of sale.
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14 April 2011 - As early as the 1940s, Ernest Borel received the ‘Bulletin de marche’ certificate for many of its watches and soon became the second largest manufacturer of chronometers. A testament to this continuity, Ernest Borel was one of the top brands to receive COSC certification in 2009.
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7 April 2011 - Carl F. Bucherer is presenting an additional model in the successful Patravi EvoTec range, using the in-house CFB A1000 Manufacture calibre with peripheral rotor. The new Patravi EvoTec Calendar is the next evolution of the EvoTec, which started with the base movement’s introduction in 2009, followed by the EvoTec PowerReserve and EvoTec BigDate in 2010.
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4 April 2011 - Passing into ‘second gear’, the young brand Hautlence (created in 2004) launches its HL2.0 collection, which spectacularly revives the art of reading time. And, at the same time, it has also invented a rival to the tourbillon. Other than the ‘pioneer’ Urwerk (created in 1995), very few watch brands concentrate essentially on the creative possibilities offered by the display. But, right from the beginning, Hautlence clearly expressed its desire to specifically target this area.
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4 April 2011 - Raymond Weil is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year. Thirty-five years, and three successive generations are still at the helm. The honorary president is Raymond Weil himself who had the incredibly daring idea of creating his own brand in 1976, right during the middle of all the turmoil in the watch industry.
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31 March 2011 - Unquestionably, Urwerk is a case apart in the landscape of advanced creative watchmaking. No other brand has systematically carried out research that centres, not so much on the complications themselves, but rather on the display, something that is contrary to most other research endeavours. A priori, from a strictly orthodox timekeeping point of view, this quest seems less ‘noble’ than the others…
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28 March 2011 - Since the arrival of Frédéric de Narp as the company’s CEO in January 2010, Harry Winston seems to have doubled its efforts in the watch division.
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23 March 2011 - “The big brands are going to crush us. We are all going to die,” declares Antoine Preziuso, during a meeting with Europa Star in his atelier near Geneva, on the eve of BaselWorld.
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