Montblanc is a pen company that makes watches. That is the whole story, really, but it takes a while to tell. The brand was founded in Berlin in 1906 as the Simplo Filler Pen Company, by August Eberstein, an engineer, and Alfred Nehemias, a banker, with the businessman Claus-Johannes Voss joining early to bring the money and steer the company toward Hamburg. It spent most of the twentieth century becoming the default luxury fountain pen, the thing you signed your mortgage with, and it did not make a single watch until 1997. That ninety-one year gap is the thing to keep in mind, because Montblanc now talks a lot about the year 1858, and the two dates belong to two different companies.
A mountain of a name
The three founders started small, a Berlin workshop making simple fountain pens at a time when the technology was still new. Voss was the one who saw the bigger play: he recognized that the little startup needed a real business behind it, raised the capital, and got the company established in Hamburg in 1907 as the Simplo Filler Pen Co. GmbH (incorporated in 1908), in the city that called itself Germany’s gateway to the world. Within a couple of years they had sales offices in Paris, London and Barcelona, which is a funny thing to imagine from a pen company barely out of diapers.
Their first model was the Rouge et Noir in 1909, followed in 1910 by the pen that would give the company its name: Montblanc, after the highest peak in the Alps, because the founders wanted their pens associated with the highest peak of quality. The white star logo, a stylized view of the snowcapped summit from above, was adopted in 1913, and the Meisterstück name (German for “masterpiece”) was introduced in 1924 for the top pen lines. The number 4810, the mountain’s height in meters, started appearing on nibs around 1930, and the company formally took the Montblanc name in 1934. The pens were a hit for decades. Nothing about any of this suggested a watch brand.
The Meisterstück, the pen that made Montblanc. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Dunhill, then Richemont
In 1977, Alfred Dunhill Ltd. acquired Montblanc, and the brand went upmarket on purpose: lower-priced pens were dropped, and the white star started appearing on things that were not pens at all, leather goods, fragrances, eyewear, the whole luxury lifestyle playbook. The pen company became a brand company. Then in 1993, Montblanc was absorbed into the Swiss Richemont group, joining Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Jaeger-LeCoultre and the rest of the family. The pen brand now had a parent company that knew exactly what a luxury watch should cost, and, as it turned out, wanted one of its pen brands to sell some.
Watches, starting late
Montblanc presented its first watch collection in 1997, and set up its watchmaking atelier in Le Locle, right in the heart of Swiss watchmaking country, which was a smart way to say “we mean it” without anyone asking where the watches came from. The TimeWalker collection followed in 2003, a sporty, motorsport-flavored line. But the moment Montblanc’s watchmaking got genuinely interesting was 2008, at the Geneva salon, when the brand unveiled the Nicolas Rieussec Chronograph with the caliber MB R100, the first movement developed in-house at Le Locle.
The namesake is a good story, which is not always a given in this industry. Nicolas Rieussec was the watchmaker who built the first real chronograph: in 1821 he timed horse races in Paris with an ink-tipped device, and on March 9, 1822, he received the patent for it. Montblanc’s tribute keeps the spirit of the original, with rotating discs that turn beneath fixed hands instead of conventional sweeping hands, giving the watch a look like nothing else on the shelf. It was the first time Montblanc had done something in watches that other brands were not doing, and people noticed.
A Montblanc Nicolas Rieussec chronograph, with the rotating-disc display echoing Rieussec’s original 1821 device. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Buying Minerva
Here is where the 1858 story comes from, and it is worth getting the order of operations right. The Fabrique d’Horlogerie Minerva was a real watch factory in Villeret, Switzerland, founded in 1858, and its prime years were the first half of the twentieth century, when it made well-regarded chronographs. It survived the quartz crisis without changing its ways, which is a romantic way of saying it shrank and shrank while doing beautiful old-fashioned work. In 2006, Richemont bought Minerva and folded it into Montblanc, which gave a watch brand that was barely ten years old a manufacture with a century and a half of history attached. Montblanc started using 1858 in its watch branding the way other brands use their founding year, except this one was acquired, not inherited.
To be fair, Montblanc did not waste the purchase. In 2018 the brand launched the Montblanc 1858 collection, drawing on Minerva’s 1920s and 1930s designs for military and exploration use, and the standout was the Geosphere: a 42mm bronze-cased worldtimer with two rotating hemisphere globes, powered by the in-house caliber MB 29.25, built around a Seven Summits mountaineering theme. It was well received, which is the watch press’s way of saying people actually bought it. And as of this year, 2026, Minerva has been repositioned as its own standalone brand, with its own dials, under Laurent Lecamp, who also runs Montblanc’s watch division. The reasoning was refreshingly honest: when Richemont bought Minerva, Montblanc was a young watch brand without an identity of its own, so it leaned on the old name; now Montblanc can stand on its own, and Minerva gets to be Minerva. Minerva stays under the Montblanc umbrella and will keep supplying selected pieces like the Geosphere, but the days of the borrowed heritage are officially over.
Detail of a Montblanc Timewalker chronograph. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
Where the watches stand now
Today Montblanc is one of the biggest names in luxury boutiques, the kind of brand you bump into in airports and department stores on four continents, and its watch range covers a lot of ground. The honest version goes like this. A good chunk of the entry-level lineup is conventional Swiss watchmaking on outsourced movements, priced at a premium because the dial carries the white star, which is exactly what you would expect from a pen company selling watches. The genuinely interesting stuff comes from Le Locle and Villeret: the Rieussec chronographs, the Villeret hand-made collection, the Geosphere and its successors. Those are serious watches, often priced well below the Swiss houses they get compared to, and they exist because Richemont kept writing checks. You are not buying into a century of continuous watchmaking tradition when you buy a Montblanc watch. You are buying a brand that bought its tradition wholesale, then put real work into earning it. There is a difference, and it is worth knowing which part you are paying for.
Why it matters
Montblanc matters because it is the rare outsider that took the watch game seriously enough to build the whole infrastructure: a Le Locle manufacture, an in-house movement program, and eventually the purchase and stewardship of Minerva, one of the most respected old chronograph makers in Switzerland. It is also a useful case study in how the modern industry works, where heritage can be acquired, assembled and, if the new owners do the work, eventually deserved. And for a crowd that argues endlessly about authenticity, there is something refreshing about a brand whose watch history started in 1997 and mostly stopped pretending otherwise. The pens are still the main business, by the way. The watches are the interesting side project, which is probably why some of them are so good.
Official site: montblanc.com
Thanks for reading this.
