In 1983, with mechanical watches nearly gone, the master watchmaker Gerd-Rüdiger Lang started Chronoswiss in Munich with a garage full of parts and a belief in traditional watchmaking.
How it began
Chronoswiss was founded in Munich in 1983 by Gerd-Rüdiger Lang. He had recently lost his job after the collapse of Heuer Time in Germany. Mechanical watches, meanwhile, had nearly disappeared in the wake of the quartz crisis.
Lang founded his own brand anyway. His mission, as the brand puts it, was to revive traditional mechanical watchmaking, with a focus on transparency, craftsmanship and technical expression. His earliest watches revived rare calibres and embraced what the brand calls mechanical honesty, just as the industry was abandoning it.
The regulator
The house found its signature in 1987 with the Régulateur. Its layout came from the regulator clocks once used by watchmakers to set precision, with the hours, minutes and seconds each shown on their own.
Chronoswiss calls it the world’s first serially produced wristwatch with a regulator-style dial. It ran on calibre 122, which the brand refined in-house.
The Régulateur also set the design codes that still mark the brand: the onion crown, straight lugs, a finely fluted bezel and a case built from 19 parts. The aim, in the brand’s words, was a watch recognised at a glance.
The watches
New ways of showing the time followed. The Kairos of 1991 was, the brand says, the first automatic chronograph with a decentralised hour and minute display. The Cabrio of 1992 was a reversible wristwatch.
The Opus of 1995 was the first automatic skeletonised chronograph. The Delphis of 1996 combined digital jumping hours, retrograde minutes and analogue seconds, which Chronoswiss calls a first in history. The Timemaster of 2000 paired oversized luminous hands with the onion crown.
In 2005 the Digiteur showed jumping hours with digital minutes and seconds, without traditional hands. In 2018 the ReSec added a three-dimensional regulator layout, retrograde seconds and dials guilloché in-house.
The house today
In 2012 the Swiss entrepreneur Oliver Ebstein and his family took over and moved the brand to Lucerne. Chronoswiss is family-owned, and its atelier in Lucerne makes each watch in small batches.
In 2014 the house set up its own guilloché and enamelling atelier. Its guillocheurs work on straight-line and rose engine machines, and a complex dial takes several hours. Enamel is fired at 850°C, in layers built up over several firings.
New manufacture calibres arrived in 2023, starting with the C.6004 in the Delphis Oracle. Developed with La Joux-Perret, it has a 55-hour power reserve and Côtes de Genève that radiate from the centre, echoing the brand’s ray guilloché. In 2025 the Pulse One became its first titanium watch with an integrated bracelet.
The house calls its philosophy Modern Mechanical, a way of keeping Lang’s codes while adding three-dimensional dials and new materials. Ebstein, owner and CEO, sums it up. “We don’t repeat the past; we reimagine it for the modern collector.”
At a glance
- Founded: 1983, in Munich
- Founder: Gerd-Rüdiger Lang, master watchmaker
- Based in: Lucerne, Switzerland (since 2012)
- Known for: The Régulateur; the onion crown and fluted bezel; the Opus, Delphis and ReSec; hand guilloché and enamel
- Independent: Yes, family-owned by Oliver Ebstein (the brand’s own words)
Sources: Chronoswiss’s own website (About Chronoswiss: history, milestones and quick facts; the Delphis Oracle model page).