Marathon

Marathon Watch Company was founded in 1939 in Montreal by Morris Wein, heir to a family already active in the watch trade since the early twentieth century with Weinstrum Watch, later renamed Wein Brothers. The first military contract came as early as 1941, when the company began supplying watches to the Royal Canadian Air Force and, more broadly, to the Allied forces engaged in the Second World War: a relationship with North American governments that has never been interrupted since and remains, to this day, at the heart of the brand's identity.

In the following decades Marathon extended its supply business to the United States as well, becoming one of the few manufacturers still able to produce watches compliant with the US military standard MIL-PRF-46374G — successor to the specifications adopted during the Vietnam War — complete with a NATO Stock Number engraved on the case back. Today more than 90% of the brand's production is destined for armed forces, search and rescue units and government agencies in various countries; the rest is sold to civilian customers, a channel that for most of the company's history remained secondary or even inaccessible.

While remaining a company designed and run from Canada — today led by the fourth generation of the Wein family — Marathon manufactures its watches in Switzerland, in La Chaux-de-Fonds. Another, more technical, distinguishing trait is the systematic use of tritium tubes in place of traditional photoluminescent paint: a choice designed to guarantee constant legibility in real operational conditions, without needing to be recharged by light. Precisely because of its almost exclusively governmental and military positioning, the brand remained largely unknown to the general public for a long time, being rediscovered by civilian collectors only starting in the early 2000s.