Rado
Brand History
Rado's origins go back to 1917, when brothers Fritz, Ernst and Werner Schlup turned their family home in Lengnau, in the canton of Bern, into a small watchmaking atelier operating under the name Schlup & Co., specialized in supplying movements to other Swiss manufactures. It was only in 1957, with the launch of the Green Horse model, that the company began signing its own watches with the Rado brand — a word that means "wheel" in Esperanto — launching an independent path oriented from the outset toward technical research into materials.
The turning point that defined the brand's identity came in 1962 with the Rado DiaStar: a case made of tungsten carbide, an extremely hard ceramic-metal material, which allowed Rado to present it as the first scratchproof watch in the world. It was a founding moment, giving rise to the motto that still accompanies the brand today, "Master of Materials", and that guided decades of subsequent research into high-tech materials applied to watchmaking.
From the 1980s Rado extended this vocation to high-tech ceramic, introduced on a large scale with the 1986 Integral and later refined into proprietary solutions such as Ceramos, a combination of metal and ceramic introduced in 2011. Having become part of the Swatch Group, Rado keeps its headquarters and production in Lengnau, the same village where it all began more than a century ago, continuing to present itself as the Swiss brand most identified with material experimentation.
