Candino
Brand History
Candino was founded in Switzerland in 1947, at a time when the Swiss watch industry was still dominated by thousands of small manufactures and subcontractors scattered across the Jura and the Swiss plateau. Sources agree less on the details of its founding than on the substance: the company was later formally established as a corporation — Candino Watch Co. — in the early 1950s, based in Biel, one of the historic centers of Swiss watchmaking. Over the following decades the brand carved out a niche as a maker of accessible-tier Swiss Made watches, without the ambitions of high watchmaking but with a declared attention to build quality.
The most significant turning point in the brand's recent history came in January 2002, when Candino was integrated into the Spanish Festina group — a company itself born in Switzerland in the 1970s and today among the largest watch groups worldwide, also owner of brands such as Festina itself, Lotus, Jaguar, Calypso and Perrelet. Within the group, Candino is placed alongside Jaguar and Perrelet in the Swiss Made watch segment, an intermediate positioning between the group's low-cost fashion lines and the upper tier occupied by brands such as Perrelet itself.
Today production is concentrated at the Herbetswil plant, near Solothurn, where the brand employs around 120 people together with the Biel headquarters and develops its watches through a process the group describes as integrated, from movement assembly to finished design — a structure that allows a declared production capacity of up to two thousand watches a day and export to over 65 countries, across Europe, the Middle East and the Far East.
