Milus

Milus was founded in 1919 in Biel by Paul William Junod, in the very heart of the Swiss Jura watchmaking region. The name comes from the Latin miles ("soldier"), chosen because it was easy to pronounce in any language even on a small dial, while the logo is inspired by Hermes, the Greek god of ingenuity. Having weathered the crisis of 1929 with a drastic downsizing, the family business passed in 1951 to the son, Paul Herbert Junod, who modernized the workshops, doubled production and in 1962 had the new headquarters built to a design by architect Édouard Lanz — the same address, on Reuchenettestrasse in Biel/Bienne, where Milus is still headquartered today. In the 1970s the brand won the Rosa d'Oro of Baden-Baden three times for models such as "La Mer" and "Avant-Garde", before the baton passed in 1982 to the third generation, brothers Pierre and Paul Junod.

Milus did not passively endure the quartz crisis: in 1972 it founded Ditronic SA together with four other Swiss manufacturers, which produced one of the world's first watches with a liquid-crystal display. During the same decades the company often worked "in the shadows", as a third-party producer of watches branded by others — from Aston Martin to Bucherer, from architect Mario Botta to FC Barcelona, up to a collaboration with New York's MoMA in 1992 — a low profile which in 2006 was paired with an invention of its own, the TriRetrograde mechanism, with three small independent hands each marking a 20-second cycle before returning to zero.

The most delicate turning point comes in 2003, when the Junod family sold the company to the Hong Kong group Peace Mark, followed in 2008 by the large conglomerate Chow Tai Fook: years in which Milus progressively lost identity and autonomy. In 2016 the brand was taken over by Luc Tissot — a descendant of the family that founded the eponymous Tissot brand in Neuchâtel in the 19th century, but with no connection to the Tissot that is part of the Swatch Group today — who in 2019, the brand's centenary year, led its relaunch as an independent manufacture with an ICONIC collection dedicated to reissuing historic models and a LAB line with a more contemporary language. In 2024 the brand received the Switzerland Prestige Award as luxury watch brand of the year, confirming a small manufacture that has returned to charting its own course independently.