Carl F. Bucherer
Brand History
It all begins in 1888 in Lucerne, where Carl Friedrich Bucherer opened a watch and jewelry shop destined to become, within a few generations, one of the most respected names in independent Swiss watchmaking. His two sons soon joined the company, one trained as a watchmaker and the other as a goldsmith, laying the foundations of a family-run business that in 1919 launched one of the industry's first Art Déco-style women's collections. In the following decades chronometer production grew to place Bucherer, by the late 1960s, among the top three Swiss makers of certified timepieces.
The turning point came in 2001, when Jörg G. Bucherer — the third generation to lead the company — relaunched the watch division as an independent brand under the name "Carl F. Bucherer", a direct tribute to the founder, alongside the historic Bucherer boutique network. This marked the beginning of true manufacture status: in 2007 the atelier Techniques Horlogères Appliquées was acquired, giving rise to Carl F. Bucherer Technologies, and the following year saw the debut of the CFB A1000 calibre, the first series-produced automatic movement with a peripherally-mounted rotor instead of a central one. From that innovation came evolved generations of the same technology in subsequent years, up to the CFB T3000 peripheral tourbillon (2018) and the CFB MR3000 minute repeater calibre (2021).
In August 2023 Rolex acquired Bucherer AG, the family group that controlled both the retail network and the watch manufacture. In February 2025, however, Rolex decided to close the Carl F. Bucherer brand, which had never become fully profitable: this brought to a close, after 137 years, the history of one of the last independent watch manufactures still tied to a Swiss family. Chronopedia documents the brand as a closed historical chapter, with the collections that marked its journey.
