Weil, who led the company for about 20 years, combined high-quality mechanisms produced in his own and other Swiss factories with original designs and features. Most people in the industry considered it a mad scheme, Professor Raffaelli said - about 800 Swiss watchmaking companies died in the 1970s. He began modestly, selling his first designs from a foldout bridge table in a stall in Geneva, he said in a 2011 company promotional video interview. Weil started his company in 1976, when he was 50. Raffaelli, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School who has studied the Swiss watchmaking industry.īy the late 1980s, Professor Raffaelli said, the Swiss companies still standing had followed suit. Hayek, founder of the Swatch Group, sought to reposition them as paragons of haute fashion - “an emotional product, carrying a message about the authenticity, uniqueness and excellence of the wearer,” said Ryan L. Beginning in the late 1970s, Weil and major Swiss watchmakers like Nicolas G. Swiss watches had been marketed as symbols of intellectual rigor and personal integrity. Raymond Weil started a watch company that bore his name in the midst of all that, joining a watchmaking vanguard that saved the nation's signature product by redefining it. Industry analysts called it the “quartz crisis.” Swiss watch companies had dominated the world of precision timekeeping for two centuries by the 1970s, when a technological marvel known as the quartz watch - a cheaper, more accurate work of horology mass-produced in Asia - threatened them with extinction.īetween 19, as watch buyers abandoned windup mechanical timepieces for digital ones, the Swiss lost half their watch companies, two-thirds of their watchmaking jobs and their unrivalled authority as the world's most reliable timekeepers.
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