BWC Swiss
Brand History
The BWC initials were born in 1924 in Buttes, a small village in the Val-de-Travers, in the canton of Neuchâtel, on the initiative of Arthur Charlet: the company name, Buttes Watch Company, derives in fact precisely from this village of the founder's origin — not, as one might imagine from the initials, from the city of Biel. Charlet started the business in an economically difficult moment, right after the Swiss crisis of 1923, initially focusing on producing pocket watches at accessible prices.
In 1953 leadership of the company passed to Edwin Volkart, under whose direction BWC became a prolific brand attentive to the sector's technical evolution: between the 1960s and 1970s production included electronic components, electromechanical watches and, from 1972, some of the brand's first digital quartz watches, followed shortly after by analog quartz versions. It was above all the decade of colorful-dial chronographs, often fitted with Lemania, Valjoux and Landeron movements, with an aesthetic compared by some observers to that of more celebrated contemporaries such as the Heuer Carrera and Autavia: lines like the military-cut Courage and the regatta chronographs with a large central counter — nicknamed "Big Eye" by today's enthusiasts — remain among the most recognizable proposals of these years, alongside a production of military and diving watches.
The quartz crisis of the 1980s hit BWC hard too, opening a phase of instability that in 1991 led to production being moved to the canton of Solothurn and commercial management shifting to Germany, at Reek GmbH in Pforzheim; in 1999 the company was absorbed by the German Maddox AG, also of Pforzheim, before passing in 2003 under the control of Starck-Uhren, another company based in the same city. From 2004 production was reorganized between Switzerland and Germany and, in 2010, on the eve of Baselworld, the brand presented the C-Type collection — chronographs and automatics — as a relaunch signal. Today the business is run by BWC Fabrique d'Horlogerie S.A., based in Biel/Bienne: a geographic coincidence that probably still fuels confusion today about the meaning of the initials, in reality tied since the beginning to the name of Buttes.
