Cédric Johner

Cédric Johner came to watchmaking by an unusual path: he began as a jewelry apprentice at Chopard in 1982, before completing his technical training at the École d'Horlogerie de Genève in the early 1990s. He then worked as a freelance craftsman for several major Swiss watchmaking houses, an experience that allowed him to develop cross-disciplinary skills spanning jewelry-making and high watchmaking before striking out on his own.

In 1997 he founded his own brand in Geneva, presenting as its first model the Abyss, a sculptural-profile case designed and shaped entirely by hand. Around the same time he was among the co-founders, alongside François-Paul Journe and Maximilian Büsser, of Les Cadraniers de Genève, a dial manufacture created to meet the needs of independent brands that struggled to find suppliers — an episode that places Johner among the key figures of Geneva's first generation of independent watchmaking.

His approach remains deliberately artisanal to this day: Johner states that he uses no CNC machines and no computer-aided design, personally making a large share of his own case components. The result is a style often described as minimalist and architectural, built from pure volumes and essential surfaces that recall Swiss design as much as the Bauhaus tradition, applied to a deliberately limited production numbered piece by piece. In 2024 the brand signed a collaboration with Louis Erard (the Le Régulateur model), while in 2025 Johner celebrated thirty years of activity by reinterpreting the original Abyss and presenting the brand's first fully in-house manufacture movement.