Spotlight: Schwarz Etienne

This article is the first Spotlight article written as a part of Watch Affinity partnering with UK-based independent watchmaking specialist retailer, The Limited Edition, looking to showcase different independent watchmakers and brands to highlight what they have to offer.

Be sure to read to the end to find out how you can get a little bonus with any order at The Limited Edition as well!

This area is rapidly becoming a hugely important sector in the watch industry, with Jean-Claude Biver describing the tendency towards independents to me as a “natural process that is now accelerating and becoming bigger and bigger, so the independents have a lot of happy days in the future”.

In this piece, I will shine the Watch Affinity spotlight on independent Swiss brand, Schwarz Etienne.

The History of Schwarz Etienne

Schwarz Etienne was founded in 1902 by Paul Schwarz and his wife Olga Etienne, based in La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland. Originally, Schwarz Etienne was a specialist manufacturer of mechanical watch movements which were incorporated and then sold by the manufacture under a series of different brands.

Several of these brands went on to have a lot of success – the Venus watch brand for instance took a first-place award at the 1950 Basel Fair and later adorned the wrist of Hollywood legend Jayne Mansfield! This success served to grow the reputation of Schwarz Etienne watch movements, and before long they were providing movements to leading brand names such as Dunhill and even Chanel.

In the decades leading up to the quartz crisis, the business was passed to Paul and Olga’s sons, who sought to expand more into Europe, but also farther afield towards the Middle East and Asia. When the quartz crisis struck in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they reacted by changing the business’ focus from operating multiple brand names to focusing once more on the creation of watch movements, and in turn created the Schwarz Etienne brand that we see today, too.

In House Movements

One of the most impressive things about Schwarz Etienne today is that each movement they manufacture is constructed entirely in-house. There is no liberal application of the term “in-house” here either – every single component down to even the hairspring is manufactured internally or through sister company E20 Innovations, who also provide components to other manufacturers, too.

There are 4 families of in-house calibre manufactured by Schwarz Etienne today:

The manual wind MSE (Manual Schwarz Etienne) calibres are double-barrelled movements, both comprising 230 components and 25 jewels. The double barrels combine to offer up to a hugely impressive 96 hours (or 4 days) of power reserve when fully wound.

More prevalent are the ASE (automatic Schwarz Etienne) calibres, which are wound by a micro-rotor. There are different numbers of components and jewels depending on the functions available, but regardless of this the single barrel in the calibre continues to offer an impressive 86 hours’ power reserve when fully wound.

There is also ISE (Irreversible Schwarz Etienne) and TSE (Tourbillon Schwarz Etienne) calibres, where the ISE is designed to showcase the workings of the movement on the dial side of the watch as opposed to through a sapphire caseback, and the TSE of course includes a tourbillon adorned with “SE” on the balance wheel.

Whilst these movements are of course used in their own brand pieces, as you might expect given their history as a movement supplier to the industry, Schwarz Etienne also provide movements for other brands today as well through there La Division du Temps products – supplying brands including Ming and Chopin.

Current Collections

The first time I encountered Schwarz Etienne was at The Watchmaker’s Club, an independent watchmaking event I attended in London in 2019. I was immediately taken by the designs of the watches and wanted to learn more.

One of the best things I find about independent watchmaking is how close to the brands you can get – a fact personified by the fact I was able to spend a good half an hour speaking with the brand’s CEO, Mauro Egermini, that very evening. Mauro kindly talked me through each of the collections, with pieces from each on hand for me to be able to try there and then. Here are some photos of watches I tried from that very evening:

Schwarz Etienne Roswell Collection

My personal favourite is very much the Roswell collection. This incorporates the ISE calibres which show the micro-rotor and balance wheel on the dial side and introducing some interesting casebacks, too, including a piece of rock from the Matterhorn mountain range hand-picked by Mauro and his team.

Pascal Huguenin was one of the team who joined this expedition, and he told me “We left one morning at the end of October with Mauro to go and look for Matterhorn stones. When we arrived at the top of the resort at an altitude of over 3000 metres, we were up to our knees in snow! We came back down with more than 50 kg of stones that we carried with difficulty. So, we have plenty of stock for the small laser cut stone of the Roswell Voyage capsule.”

Another caseback is a “Matrix” styled background, where depending on the angle you’re looking at the caseback from, you will either see or not see the Schwarz Etienne logo.

The name of the collection comes from the famous town in New Mexico, the site of an alleged UFO crash in 1947. This is embodied within the collection in two ways – firstly, the case of each piece within the Roswell collection is designed such that it gives connotations of the flying saucer shape when you look at it from the side profile, but it also comes in one of the coolest presentation boxes I’ve ever seen – a flying saucer!

Each Roswell piece is presented in a 45mm stainless steel case which sounds large, however I found these extremely wearable on my 17cm (or 6.5 inch) wrist, and whilst there was certainly a strong wrist presence, they certainly didn’t feel oversized to me.

Schwarz Etienne Fiji Collection

The Fiji collection is Schwarz Etienne’s collection designed for women watch collectors; as with all Schwarz Etienne collections, it is named after a city or a place. The Fiji collection is named such to give connotations of a faraway place to evoke dreams of paradise.

Whilst the collection is intended for women collectors, personally I don’t think the design is overly effeminate such that it wouldn’t or couldn’t look equally at home on a man’s wrist either, perhaps helped by the 38mm case size for each piece in the collection.

Each piece features hours, minutes, and a separate small seconds display – albeit the small seconds is slightly different in that it is more an indicator of the watch running; decorative aperture patterns are cut into the main dial, through which a different colour sub-dial disc can be seen rotating, which I think is quite an interesting, if not precise, way to present the small seconds complication.

With the exception of the jewellery piece reference, Schwarz Etienne have also resisted the temptation to adorn the watch with diamonds, instead offering a restrained single diamond fitted to the crown.

Each piece is presented with two strap options which are easily interchangeable owing to the quick-change system, and in lieu of a presentation box a far more useful leather bag, where the watch is presented inside in a matching leather pouch.

Schwarz Etienne La Chaux-de-Fonds Tourbillon

Of course, the collection with the tourbillon offerings is a testament to the savoir-faire of Schwarz Etienne as a brand, with the collection named after the town in which it was founded in 1902.

The flying tourbillon model family features hours, minutes and tourbillon functions based on the TSE calibres mentioned earlier, which are accompanied by a second family incorporating a small second retrograde (‘PSR’, or Petite Seconde Rétrograde) function and an asymmetric dial where the hours and minutes indications are displayed on a smaller sub-dial in the bottom right of the dial.

These are slightly larger, each with a 44mm case constructed from options of not only stainless steel, but also in white and rose gold for those looking to add an additional dimension through precious metals.

Schwarz Etienne Roma Collection and Roma Synergy by Kari Voutilainen

An elegant collection, the Roma is one which comprises the greatest range of pieces available, with complications including a small-seconds display (with a hand this time as opposed to the rotating disc underneath seen in the Fiji collection), power reserve indication and GMT. Each case is sized at 42mm and across the collection they are available in stainless steel or rose gold.

One of the standout features of the Roma collection however is the use of ‘sunburst’ style of guilloché decoration used on the dial. In fact, this is what lends the collection as the perfect canvas for a collaboration with the master of guilloché, Kari Voutilainen with the Roma Synergy limited edition, where not only the Roma dial but also the ASE micro-rotor movement have been finished by hand by the artisans of Les Ateliers Kari Voutilainen.

On the dial, different guilloché motifs are showcased with an extraordinary attention to detail. The designs are more intricate and compact towards the centre of the dial before expanding towards a more expansive wave motif around the edges. The movement, too, is finished using a plethora of techniques including snailing, perlage, polishing, and again a variety of guilloché motifs.

Whilst the Roma references are readily available, the Roma Synergy editions are limited to just 50 pieces per reference, making for something rather special indeed.

I actually picked this watch as one of my favourite pieces in 2020 in an article looking at collaboration pieces, and during my research for that article I was able to ask Schwarz Etienne CEO Mauro Egermini and ask how this collaboration came about:

“I met Kari 3 or 4 years ago for the first time during a watches exhibition somewhere in Europe. Immediately we felt very comfortable with each other. This was the birth of a new friendship. One year later, we were again exhibiting in the same salon, but this time in London and I invited Kari for a multi-brand dinner between friends. We were at the same table sharing food and wine and having very nice discussions. Towards the end of the evening, I came to the idea of asking Kari: ‘I would love to have your expertise on our watches, and will you be open to a collaboration together?’ I can assure you that there was no premeditation. A few seconds afterwards, just the time to empty our glasses of wine, the answer was ‘yes, with a great pleasure and I look forward to leaving this experience with you’.

“Sometimes things are very simple when two people are on the same wavelength and especially without a business ulterior motive.”

Client Customisation

One of the undoubted benefits of collecting watches rom independent watchmakers and brands is the ability to customise your watch – something you very rarely, if at all, get the opportunity to do with a larger or more corporate brand.

Having spoken with Schwarz Etienne I can confirm that they are often asked by clients whether it is possible to customise pieces, and their answer is that everything can be changed. They often receive requests for unique pieces, too, to which Schwarz Etienne are equally amenable. Indeed, some collectors have even spoken about further customising the limited-edition Roma Synergy collaboration watch with Kari Voutilainen, to include different colours of dial. The brand said that time will tell if there will be a follow-up…

In Summary

Whilst Schwarz Etienne might not necessarily be a brand you have heard of previously, it is a brand which absolutely deserves to be on your radar, nonetheless. With a history reaching back to the very beginning of the Twentieth Century and a rich tradition of watchmaking and high-quality movements, today they are one of very few manufacturers that truly manufacture everything in house, right down to even the most complicated components.

I hope that from having read this, you will take away an interest in Schwarz Etienne and would be interested to learn more about the brand – be sure to visit the Schwarz Etienne website, and for those of you in the UK you can look to purchase Schwarz Etienne through our partners at The Limited Edition.

Be sure to mention “Watch Affinity” when speaking with the team at The Limited Edition to receive a small gift with any order!

If you have any questions, please get in touch via our Contact page, or via our Instagram.

You might also be interested in:

• The Watchmakers Club 2019
• Collaboration Watches
• Independent Watchmaking – An Ode to the Indies

More about Watch Affinity’s Partnership with The Limited Edition

As smaller entities, independent watchmakers and brands are far more susceptible than those with corporate backing to the economic effects that will inevitably be felt following the Covid-19 pandemic, and so I felt it was important for me to try and do something to help.

The result of this was Watch Affinity’s partnership with The Limited Edition, a UK-based retailer specialising in independent watchmaking, and even working directly with indie brands, watchmakers, and collectors to collaborate on unique pieces, too. I will publish regular articles such as this one, shining the Watch Affinity Spotlight on an independent watchmaker or brand, in an effort to showcase both the brand and their timepieces and spread the word. Pandemic-pending, perhaps even coverage of some exciting events, too!

Co-Founder of The Limited Edition, and GPHG Academy member Pietro Tomajer says of Schwarz Etienne:

“Schwarz Etienne is a power house in the eco-system of independent watchmaking. Besides powering some very talented niche watch brands, Schwarz Etienne has built a name for itself with a uncompromising dedication to all aspects of the watchmaking, clear aesthetics and mechanical engineering solutions that create a very strong identity as a contemporary watchmaker. 

“Operating mainly under the radar, the recent collaboration with watchmaking legend Kari Voutilainen (the Roma Synergy) has brought the brand to the attention of collectors worldwide, and given back some of the horological credit accumulated in years of underground commitment to uncompromising quality, both for itself and the numerous brands that can count on Schwarz Etienne for their movements supplies… one name for all, Ming watches. 

“It is a pleasure to take you to a journey with our partner Watch Affinity and refer you to our recent interview with Mauro Egermini, the driving force behind the La Chaux-de-Fonds based watch manufacturer. The Limited Edition and Watch Affinity are available for any further insights or information you would like to receive.” 

Remember to mention “Watch Affinity” when speaking with the team at The Limited Edition to receive a small gift with any order!