Why Armin Strom might be the most technically interesting watch brand you've never worn
From raw steel to resonance: a rare look inside a Swiss manufacture building some of the industry's most technically ambitious watches
One of the most appealing aspects of the world of watches is how there is always more to learn. People dedicate their lives to watchmaking, and still can't make it through a day without learning something new, and Armin Strom is a great example of this.
Ask a collector where serious Swiss watchmaking happens, and they'll say Geneva, or the Vallée de Joux. But in Biel, a Swiss-German city two hours north of Geneva, a 55-person-strong independent has built one of the more technically uncompromising watchmaking operations in the industry.
As Guerric Merrer, Head of Marketing and Communication at Armin Strom put it, the reputation of the Swiss-Germans is that they're strict, straight to the point, no emotion. "Which is not the case," he said.
Founded by master hand-skeletoniser Armin Strom himself in 1967, the brand as it exists today really began in 2006, when Serge Michel and Claude Greisler took it over. Michel came from marketing and sales, whereas Greisler was a trained watchmaker, having spent his early career restoring antique pocket watches, and it was his technical grounding that enabled the pair to build a manufacture from scratch in Biel in 2009.
Their first calibre, the RSR07, still powers the One Week model today, yet eighteen calibres later, the original split- one man telling the story, one man building the mechanism- still defines how the place runs.
What's easy to miss is that Armin Strom markets itself purely through the merit of its watches, not a lifestyle around them. That conscious decision to put its watches not only first and centre but at the heart of everything, the brand is focused on is indicative of a watch brand that conceptualises, manufactures, and brings its pieces to life.
This showing-the-working instinct runs straight through the product too. "We try to never hide anything in the movement," explains Merrer. Every bridge hand-decorated, every angle finished across fifteen types of decoration, whether the watch is the CHF 22,000 entry model or the CHF 390,000 Minute Repeater Resonance 12:59 released this year at Watches and Wonders. Openworked doesn't mean undressed here, and no component gets a pass just because it's hidden.
The process required to deliver impressive finishing might not be understood by many, but it can certainly be appreciated; with Armin Strom, it's really the engineering of these highly finished components that gets underrated.
Take the brand's approach to resonance. This complication sees two balance wheels in close proximity sharing vibration, resulting in each correcting the other's rate and synchronising. In the traditional method, best known through F.P. Journe's Resonance, the vibrations travel through the main plate and bridges, synchronising the balance wheels indirectly via the movement's solid structure.
Armin Strom, however, developed a clutch spring that links the two balance wheels directly, a built-for-purpose suspension carrying vibration between them. What takes only a couple of sentences to explain took the brand roughly three and a half years and around 35 discarded prototype shapes, starting with something as basic as a wire strung between the two wheels before the shape was refined into what sits in the watch today.
Using steel, not silicon was a deliberate choice so it could be made in-house on their own machines rather than depending on outside suppliers. It's the reason a resonance watch here starts well under what some rivals charge for the same idea, while doing something more mechanically committed underneath.
Out of the 55 people who work out of Biel, 34 are watchmakers, including the three engineers who design every calibre in-house. 97% of components are produced on-site, including screws cut on six CNC machines, with a current production capability of 400 to 450 watches a year. Eighteen calibres, entirely in-house, in fifteen years, is a startling number for a company this size.
Within Armin Strom’s building (that was previously owned by Rolex), what struck me was as much the atmosphere as the output. The space is compact, closer in feel to a well-run workshop than an industrial site, and every square metre of it is put to work. There's a calm to the place that seems almost at odds with what's coming off the benches, a brand capable of building a resonance minute repeater staying tastefully humble about the space it's built in rather than turning the manufacture itself into part of the marketing.
Design decisions get made in one office, right next door to where the technical conversations happen that turn those decisions into something that can actually be built, engineering and creative direction sitting together. Greisler has described the arrangement plainly: he handles the technical side, Michel handles sales and marketing, but all decisions are made hand in hand.
Every new model still starts as sketches and renderings before the brand uses 3D-printed prototypes early on to check that proportions feel right on the wrist, with that work happening in the same building as the production floor rather than being farmed out to a design studio elsewhere. The people making the calls and the people building the thing are, quite literally, one door apart.
Which is really what makes Armin Strom. This isn't a manufacturer chasing the wider audience that already thinks it knows what Swiss watchmaking looks like. The brand builds for the collectors who look past the assumptions, and it seems entirely undisturbed by everyone else.
After spending a day on the manufacture floor, you realise the secret to accessing a brand like this isn’t exclusivity, you just need a little curiosity and a lot of unyielding ambition.
