Certina

Certina was founded in 1888 in Grenchen, in the heart of Swiss watchmaking, when brothers Adolf and Alfred Kurth opened a small workshop for producing parts and movements, attached to the family home. In its first decades the company worked mainly as a supplier of components and movements for other manufacturers, before gradually moving into making complete watches. The name "Certina", from the Latin "certus" (sure, certain), was officially registered only in 1939, but it aptly sums up the spirit with which the brand would present itself to the market: reliability and precision even before luxury.

Growth continued throughout the twentieth century — from about 250 employees in 1938 to 500 in 1955, with production reaching a thousand watches a day — until a turning point in 1959, when Certina introduced the DS (Double Security) concept: a construction system designed to make watches far more resistant to shocks and water than the standards of the time. In the following years the brand put this robustness to the test in a series of high-profile undertakings, from the 1960 Italian-Swiss expedition to Dhaulagiri to the Sealab II (1965) and Tektite (1969) underwater projects, building a reputation as a tool-watch rather than a simple accessory.

On the corporate side, in 1971 the Kurth family ceded control to General Watch Co., a subsidiary of the ASUAG group; with the 1983 merger between SSIH and ASUAG, which gave rise to what would become the Swatch Group, Certina became part of the major Swiss watchmaking group, sharing facilities and management with brands like Mido and Tissot at the Le Locle headquarters. In 2013 the brand renewed its visual identity by adopting a stylized turtle as its logo, a direct reference to the DS concept and to the "shell-shaped" caseback that had made the line's first watches famous.