Handmade: 21st Century style

We visit the Omega manufacture in Villeret and get a crash course in contemporary watchmaking

 

- Ashok Soman

Not all watch manufactures are created equal but they are mostly shrouded in mystery. Visits are allowed, sometimes, but always supervised and photography is often completely prohibited. There are good reasons for this but the watch brands themselves typically don’t offer much in the way of explanation. After our visit to omega’s Villeret facility, we thought we would attempt a bit of a breakdown to see if we could make sense of it ourselves (full disclosure: we have visited before and published that story, which focused on the Omega museum in Bienne, last year in issue 36).

As always though, we have to go back in time to go forward, so we begin with a short jaunt back to 1848, a year of revolutions in Europe. Even as revolutionary fervour spread from France to the rest of the continent, Louis Brandt was writing the first chapters of the omega story with the opening of his watchmaking workshop in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. The name omega traces back to 1894 in Bienne, where the Brandt family firm was based; the Omega Watch Co. was founded in 1903 but the first wristwatches to bear the omega symbol date back to 1899.

Manufacturing-wise, Omega was a huge player in the years before the quartz crisis, as part of the ssIH Group (essentially a merger between omega and Tissot). The group even acquired movement maker Lemania in the 1950s, thus bringing the chronograph expertise that was omega’s stock-in-trade in-house. The 1970s changed matters, with all production being streamlined into another arm of what would become the Swatch Group. Today, the term “in-house” at the swatch Group usually means that brands can take advantage of the full might of the conglomerate. some brands, such as omega, get the exclusive attention of ETA for the development and production of its calibres. The facility we visited is one such site.

AUTOMATION FOR THE PEOPLE