Omega Watches Back to For Sale Index
Founded at La
Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland in 1848 by 23-year-old Louis Brandt who
assembled key-wound precision pocket watches from parts supplied by local
craftsmen. He travelled throughout Europe selling his watches from Italy to
Scandinavia by way of England, his chief market. After Louis Brandt's death in
1879, his two sons Louis-Paul and Cesar, troubled by irregular deliveries of
questionable quality, abandoned the unsatisfactory assembly workshop system in
favour of in-house manufacturing and total production control. Due to the
greater supply of manpower, communications and energy in Bienne, the enterprise
moved into a small factory in January 1880, then bought the entire building in
December. Two years later the company moved into a converted spinning-factory in
the Gurzelen district of Bienne, where headquarters are still situated today.
Their first series-produced calibres, Labrador and Gurzelen, as well as, the
famous Omega calibre of 1894, would ensure the brand's marketing success.
Louis-Paul and Cesar
Brandt both died in 1903, leaving one of Switzerland's largest watch companies -
with 240,000 watches produced annually and employing 800 people - in the hands
of four young people, the oldest of whom, Paul-Emile Brandt, was not yet 24.
Considered to be the great architect and builder of OMEGA, Paul-Emile's
influence would be felt over the next half-century. The economic difficulties
brought on by the First World War would lead him to work actively
from 1925 toward the union of OMEGA and Tissot, then to their
merger in 1930 within the group SSIH,
Geneva. Under his leadership, then that of Joseph Reiser beginning in 1955, the
SSIH Group continued to grow and multiply, absorbing or creating some fifty
companies. By the seventies, SSIH had become Switzerland's number one producer
of finished watches and number three in the world.