Zodiac
Brand history
Zodiac was born in 1882 in Le Locle, in the heart of the Swiss Jura Arc, when watchmaker Ariste Calame opened his own workshop. The name "Zodiac" was officially registered as a trademark only in 1908, under the leadership of his son Louis-Ariste Calame. In the following decades the company focused on extra-thin pocket watches and its own technical patents, including a shock-absorbing system (1930), before moving decisively into the wristwatch market and, in 1948, into automatics with the Autographic, one of the first automatic calibres to feature a power reserve indicator.
The 1950s and '60s were Zodiac's most creative period. Between 1957 and 1958 came the Sea Wolf, one of the first dive watches made for a wide audience; in 1960 the Aerospace GMT debuted, designed for pilots and travellers across time zones, followed in 1962 by the Aerospace Jet; in 1969 the brand dared even more with the Astrographic, a "mystery" dial watch with floating hands that brought space-age style to the wrist. It was in these years that Zodiac built its reputation as a Swiss brand willing to take risks on unusual technical and aesthetic solutions.
The quartz crisis of the 1970s and '80s hit Zodiac hard, like much of Swiss mechanical watchmaking: the brand changed hands several times (including a period in Zenith's orbit), temporarily disappeared from the market between the late 1980s and early 1990s, was relaunched in 1990 and went bankrupt again in 1997 as Montres Zodiac SA. After passing in 1998 to Genender International, in October 2001 the American Fossil group acquired the worldwide rights to the brand for around $4.7 million, making Zodiac one of its Swiss-rooted watch brands. In all honesty it should be noted that, in October 2025, Fossil Group began a debt restructuring in the United Kingdom recognised in the United States through a Chapter 15 procedure: for the moment Zodiac remains an active brand, with its historic collections still on sale, but the corporate situation of the group that controls it is less stable today than in the past.
