Porsche Design

Porsche Design was founded in 1972 in Stuttgart on the initiative of Ferdinand Alexander "Butzi" Porsche, the designer responsible for the Porsche 911's lines and grandson of the car manufacturer's founder. The idea was to bring the principles of automotive industrial design — function before ornament, clean forms, technical materials — into everyday objects unrelated to the world of engines, starting with watches. The first result, the Chronograph 1, made with the Swiss manufacture Orfina, went down in history as the first entirely black chronograph ever produced: case, dial and bezel treated with a dark coating that was then unprecedented in watchmaking.

In March 1978 Porsche Design entered into a twenty-year agreement with IWC Schaffhausen that marked the brand's most fruitful period in watchmaking: first came the Compass Watch, a watch-compass with a mechanism patented more than once, and in 1980 the Titan Chronograph, history's first series-produced chronograph with a case and bracelet entirely in titanium — a material until then unknown to watchmaking and which became one of the brand's distinctive traits in subsequent years, later also adopted in 1983 by the Ocean 2000 diver, rated to 2,000 meters.

1997 marked a turning point: IWC passed to the Richemont group and the collaboration ended, while Porsche Design was acquired by Porsche AG itself. After some years in which its watches were made by relying on other Swiss manufactures, the death of Ferdinand Alexander Porsche in 2012 accelerated the decision to turn the brand into an independent watchmaking manufacture: in 2014 the newly formed Porsche Design Timepieces AG opened its headquarters in Solothurn, in northwestern Switzerland, under the declared motto "Designed in Austria, Swiss Made". It is from here that the collections developed and assembled in-house take shape, including the proprietary WERK 01.200 chronograph caliber.