Nivada Grenchen

Nivada Grenchen was founded in Grenchen in 1926 by Otto Wüllimann, Hermann Schindler and Jakob Schneider, and first traded as Wüllimann, Schneider, Nivada SA. The house describes its early self as one of the pioneers of the automatic watch, known for instrument watches: water-resistant pieces, chronographs and precise movements. From the late 1930s it reached the United States through Croton Watch Co., where the watches were sold as Croton Nivada and Croton Nivada Grenchen. Movado contested the Nivada name in 1939, and after years of legal pressure the company took the name Nivada Grenchen in 1958; by the 1960s it was distributed in more than 84 countries. Its own timeline runs from the Antarctic of 1954, worn on the US Navy's Operation Deep Freeze expedition to Antarctica in 1955 and 1956, through the Chronomaster Aviator Sea Diver of 1961, which combined a tachymeter, a diving bezel and a regatta timer, the Depthomatic of 1964, an automatic diver rated to 200 m, and the Depthmaster of 1965, rated to 1,000 m, to the Alertamatic alarm watch of 1968. The quartz crisis and the 1973 oil shock cut demand, the production in Solothurn closed in the late 1970s, and the name changed hands several times. Guillaume Laidet and Rémi Chabrat relaunched it in 2018 with reissues of its historical designs, beginning with the Chronomaster, the Antarctic and the Depthmaster.