Nivada Grenchen
Brand History
Nivada Grenchen was founded in 1926 in Grenchen, in the heart of the Swiss Jura arc, by Otto Wüllimann, Hermann Schindler and Jakob Schneider. The house quickly stood out for an "instrument manufacture" approach, focusing on watches designed to withstand extreme conditions — water resistance, shock and magnetic-field resistance — rather than on high-horology complications. In the 1930s the brand entered the US market through an agreement with the Croton Watch Co., operating for a time also as "Croton Nivada Grenchen"; the name Nivada Grenchen was adopted for good in 1958, after a legal dispute with Movado, and within the following decade the company came to be distributed in over 80 countries.
The 1950s and 1960s are the brand's golden period, the one that still defines its identity today: instrument watches made for those who worked or ventured into hostile environments. The Antarctic, presented in the mid-1950s, accompanied the U.S. Navy's Operation Deep Freeze I in Antarctica in 1955-56, the expedition led by Admiral Richard Byrd — an exposure that earned the model the name by which it is still known today. In the same period came the multifunction chronograph Chronomaster Aviator Sea Diver, designed for pilots and divers, and later, in 1965, the Depthmaster, a dive watch capable of reaching depths of up to 1,000 meters: instruments built for real professional use, not for the display case.
The quartz crisis of the 1970s hit Nivada Grenchen as it did much of the Swiss mechanical watch industry, leading to the closure of its factories and a long period in which the brand survived almost only in the memory of vintage watch collectors. The relaunch came only around 2018-2020, when Guillaume Laidet and Rémi Chabrat reacquired the rights to the name and decided not to invent a new brand, but to bring the historic one back to life: they studied the archives and period pieces and recreated with great fidelity the models that had built Nivada Grenchen's reputation, updating the movements and finishes while keeping the aesthetic language intact.
