H. Moser & Cie.
Brand History
The story of H. Moser & Cie. unfolds across two eras separated by more than a century. Its founder, Heinrich Moser, was born in Schaffhausen in 1805, trained as a watchmaker including in the Swiss Jura, and in 1828, barely in his twenties, opened his own watchmaking house in Saint Petersburg. In Tsarist Russia his watches became status symbols of the aristocracy and the imperial court: among his clientele were Russian princes and, according to several sources, Vladimir Lenin himself purchased or owned a Moser. In 1848 Heinrich Moser returned to Switzerland and built a manufacture in Schaffhausen to supply the Russian business, while in the meantime also becoming a leading industrial entrepreneur: among his ventures were the co-founding of SIG and the construction of the first hydroelectric power plant on the upper Rhine.
When Heinrich Moser died in 1874, the company was divided among his heirs and the directors who carried on the business: the Russian branch was expropriated by the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution of 1918, while the Swiss business, based in Le Locle, continued under different ownership. Over the course of the twentieth century, and in particular with the quartz crisis, the brand progressively lost its prestige: absorbed into the Dixi industrial group, the name was even mangled into "Hy Moser & Cie," a sign of an almost forgotten legacy.
The rebirth came in 2005, when watchmaker Dr. Jürgen Lange and Roger Nicholas Balsiger — a direct descendant of Heinrich Moser — refounded the manufacture in Neuhausen am Rheinfall, directly facing the Rhine Falls, bringing the historic name back to life with a new philosophy oriented toward minimalist design and manufacturing independence. Since 2012 ownership has passed to the MELB Holding group of the Meylan family, led by CEO Édouard Meylan, who has brought H. Moser & Cie. to produce almost all of its components in-house — including, since 2007, the internally developed Straumann hairspring — and to become known as well for irreverent marketing campaigns targeting the very concept of "Swiss Made."
