Maurice Lacroix

Maurice Lacroix's roots go back to 1961, when the Zurich import-export company Desco von Schulthess — itself founded back in 1889 — took over a small assembly workshop called Tiara in Saignelégier, in the heart of the Swiss Jura, initially active as a third-party subcontractor. It was only in 1975, however, that the actual watch brand was born from that production base, named in memory of a company associate who had passed away in those years: a detail that makes Maurice Lacroix a rare case in Swiss watchmaking, a given name that belongs to no founder-watchmaker but to a person remembered through the brand itself.

The decade following its founding was one of building production independence: in 1980 Desco von Schulthess stopped third-party manufacturing in Saignelégier to focus exclusively on the Maurice Lacroix brand, and in 1989 the company acquired Queloz SA, a casemaker that gave it direct control over one of the most delicate stages of manufacturing. In 2001 Maurice Lacroix finally became an autonomous legal entity, separate from the parent group that had founded it: a step that consolidated the brand's identity as a manufacture in its own right, with its own workshops and its own creative direction.

The most significant chapter on the manufacturing side came in 2006, with the presentation of the ML106 caliber, the first chronograph movement developed in-house in collaboration with independent watchmaker Andreas Strehler: from that moment Maurice Lacroix began building its own family of "ML" calibers, supported by a subsidiary dedicated to precision components, the Manufacture des Franches-Montagnes, which also works on behalf of other major haute horlogerie houses. Even today the brand combines this in-house manufacturing capability with the use of mechanical bases from suppliers such as ETA and Sellita, suitably modified: a deliberately pragmatic philosophy, which the brand itself sums up as high-end complications at accessible prices, without chasing the myth of an entirely proprietary movement at any cost.

Since 2011 majority ownership of Maurice Lacroix has been in the hands of DKSH, a Swiss distribution group based in Zurich, for which the watch brand still remains the only watchmaking business in its portfolio: an ownership structure that is therefore not independent in shareholding terms, but one that leaves intact the independence the brand claims relative to the three major Swiss watchmaking luxury conglomerates (Swatch Group, Richemont and LVMH), to which Maurice Lacroix does not belong. Under the leadership of CEO Stéphane Waser, in office for over a decade, the brand built a sharper identity in the 2010s around the concept of accessible luxury and contemporary urban design, culminating in the launch of the Aikon in 2016 and, in 2025, in the celebration of the brand's fiftieth anniversary with the opening of its first European boutique in Zurich and the launch of the "1975" collection.