Gucci
Brand History
Gucci was founded in Florence in 1921, when Guccio Gucci, who had worked as a bellhop in luxury hotels in Paris and London, opened a workshop for leather and saddlery goods inspired by the equestrian elegance he had observed among the international clientele of those hotels. In the following decades the brand established itself as one of the leading names in Italian leather goods and fashion, with symbols — the horsebit, the double-G motif, the green-red-green stripe — that would later also appear on its watches.
The entry into watchmaking came in 1972, when Aldo Gucci, the founder's son, struck a licensing agreement with Severin Wunderman, a watch entrepreneur and founder of Severin Montres: this gave rise to the first collection of Gucci-branded watches, produced in Switzerland (in the Neuchâtel and La Chaux-de-Fonds area) and distributed with growing commercial success as early as the first half of the 1970s.
In November 1997 Gucci decided to bring the watch business back under its direct control, acquiring Severin Montres (a deal finalized in 1999): the external license thus gave way to an in-house watch division, Gucci Timepieces, which remains based in Switzerland. Since then Gucci has been part of the French group Kering (formerly PPR), within which the house's watchmaking has gradually developed, culminating in 2021 in the first collection built around a manufacture movement developed internally within the group.
