Chronoswiss

The watchmaker Gerd-Rüdiger Lang founded Chronoswiss near Munich in 1983, at a time when mechanical watches were out of fashion, and built the brand on traditional mechanical features: fluted 'coin-edge' bezels, onion crowns, guilloché dials and open case backs. Its Régulateur of the late 1980s adopted the dial layout of precision regulator clocks, with separate dials for hours, minutes and seconds, and made it popular in wristwatches.

After a change of ownership the company moved to Lucerne in 2012.

Lang trained as a watchmaker and specialised in chronographs, which he had serviced for years before founding his own company. Chronoswiss was started in 1983, in the years when quartz watches had pushed most mechanical watchmaking aside, on the bet that buyers would pay for visibly traditional mechanical watches; although the company was based in Germany, its watches used Swiss-made movements.

The Régulateur took the dial of a precision regulator clock — a large central minute hand, with the hours on a small dial at twelve and the seconds at six — and put it on a wristwatch, a layout that until then had been seen mainly on workshop and observatory clocks. Other Chronoswiss lines include chronographs, the skeletonised Opus, and watches with jump hours and moon phases, almost all with exhibition case backs so the movement can be seen.

Chronoswiss watches are easy to recognise by their fluted 'coin-edge' bezels, large onion-shaped crowns, screwed lugs and guilloché dials. In 2012 the company was bought by the Ebstein family and moved from Germany to Lucerne, and it has continued the regulator dials alongside newer designs.