MeisterSinger

MeisterSinger was founded in 2001 in Münster, Germany, by Manfred Brassler, a self-taught watchmaker who in 1989 had already co-founded the company Watch People with Klaus Botta, a maker of quartz watches later sold in 1999. With MeisterSinger, Brassler decided to take a radically different direction: not yet another watch with two or three hands, but a mechanical timepiece with a single hand, able to indicate both hours and minutes together on a dial divided into twelve sectors.

The idea did not come out of nowhere: Brassler drew it from observing old bell towers and medieval sundial clocks, which for centuries marked time in European cities with a single hand, as still happens today on the clock of Westminster Abbey in London. To make this solution legible, MeisterSinger numbers the dial from 01 to 12, with a leading zero before the first nine hours: a detail born out of a need for legibility rather than aesthetic taste, which nevertheless became the brand's most recognizable visual signature.

The name itself, which in German recalls the medieval "master singers" able to invent new melodic forms, reflects the company's stated philosophy: to offer a more "relaxed" reading of time, less anxious about minute-by-minute exactness, running counter to the increasing precision pursued by the rest of the watch industry. Born with supplied movements (ETA, then Sellita), the brand later developed its own manufacture caliber, the MSH01, which debuted in 2014 on the Circularis, growing over the years into a small independent manufacture with several design accolades (including iF awards in 2015 and 2016 and a Good Design Award).