Movado was founded in 1881 in La Chaux-de-Fonds by Achille Ditesheim, who was nineteen years old and set himself up with six craftsmen to make pocket watches, which is a considerably more ambitious teenage plan than anything I ever had going. In 1905 he registered the trademark Movado, a word meaning “always in motion” in Esperanto, back when Esperanto was the international language of the future and not a pub trivia answer. The early company was a serious technical operation, racking up chronometry prizes and more than a hundred patents, before it became the brand it is now: the one with the black dial and the single gold dot, owned by a New Jersey corporation that also makes Tommy Hilfiger watches.
A gold Movado wristwatch from around 1950, in its original wooden presentation box. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
A teenager with six craftsmen
Achille Ditesheim was joined by his brother Isaac, and together they built a company that made pocket watches and dashboard chronometers (the latter from 1899 to 1939, which is a whole forgotten corner of watchmaking worth a detour someday). The early decades were inventive in a way that might surprise anyone who only knows the modern brand. Movado patented the Polyplan in 1912, a movement shaped to follow the curve of the wrist, and the Ermeto in 1926, a travel watch in a sliding rectangular case that you opened and closed like a little metal book. These were clever, well-made objects from a company that took the engineering seriously.
The family era
Movado stayed a family business for most of its first eighty years. The second and third generations took over in turn: Georges Ditesheim (Isaac’s son), Pierre Ditesheim (Achille’s son), and Bernard Ditesheim (Georges’s son). This was the chronometry era. From 1950 to 1969 Movado was regularly winning prizes in the Neuchâtel Observatory timing competitions, the Swiss watch industry’s old proving ground for accuracy. When Georges retired in 1960, the company employed 325 people. It was, by every measure, a proper manufacture with a real technical reputation.
The dot at twelve
In 1947 an American designer named Nathan George Horwitt, working in the orbit of the Bauhaus idea that form should follow function without decoration, designed a watch dial that was almost nothing: a black field with no numerals, no markers, no lines at all, and a single gold dot at twelve o’clock meant to represent the sun at high noon. Photographer Edward Steichen called it “the only truly original and beautiful one for such an object.” The first watches were made by Vacheron & Constantin-LeCoultre, and in 1960 the design entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the first watch dial ever admitted. That is where the name Museum Watch comes from.
Here is the part Movado’s marketing does not lead with. Movado began producing its own version of Horwitt’s dial in 1948, without his permission, and spent years in disputes with him over it. The matter was finally settled in 1975 with a payment of $29,000. That is roughly the price of a nice used car, paid for the design that would go on to define the entire brand for the next half century. It was only after Horwitt’s death in 1990 that Movado began heavily promoting him as the designer of its signature watch. The dot is a genuinely brilliant piece of design, and it is worth knowing what it cost the man who drew it.
The El Primero detour
In 1969 Movado joined Zenith and Mondia in a holding company, Movado-Zenith-Mondia, and through that partnership Movado was part of the development of the El Primero, one of the world’s first automatic chronograph calibers, released that same year. Movado’s own version was the Datron HS 360 (1969-1974), powered by the Zenith caliber 3019PHC beating at 36,000 vibrations per hour, and it is now one of the great sleepers of vintage collecting: an El Primero for a fraction of what a Zenith with the same engine costs. The holding did not last in its original form. In 1972 the Zenith Radio Corporation of Chicago absorbed it and the Ditesheim family lost its majority stake; the company returned to Swiss hands in 1978. Then in 1983 the North American Watch Corporation, the American importer founded in 1967, acquired the Movado brand assets outright. In 1984 the new owners launched the Artists’ Series, limited edition dials by contemporary artists starting with Andy Warhol’s “Times/5,” and in 1996 the company renamed itself Movado Group Inc.
A 1928 Movado Ermeto chronometer in a lizard-skin-covered silver case, held by the Watch Museum of Le Locle. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The watches
The story comes first with this brand because the products, honestly, are the second act. The Ermeto (1926) remains the coolest thing Movado ever made, a travel watch in a sliding case that is still charming a century later. The Polyplan (1912) showed early form-watch thinking. The Datron HS 360 (1969-1974), with its El Primero engine and panda and reverse-panda dials, is the one vintage collectors actually hunt. The Museum Watch itself has been in production since the early 1960s in countless variations, rectangular cases, colored dials, the works, and the Artists’ Series (from 1984) put Warhol and others on the dial. The modern lineup is overwhelmingly Swiss-made quartz, dressy and inoffensive, sold largely through department stores. There is nothing wrong with it, and enthusiasts will tell you, at length, that there is nothing especially right with it either.
A quartz movement with a bridge personalized for Zenith and Movado: a small emblem of where the brand ended up. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Where it stands now
Movado Group Inc. is a public company (NYSE: MOV) based in Paramus, New Jersey, still led by Efraim Grinberg. The owned brands are Movado, Concord (whose Swiss manufacturer the company bought back in 1970), Ebel (acquired from LVMH in 2004 for $47.3 million), Olivia Burton (the British fashion brand, bought in 2017 for £65 million), and MVMT (the direct-to-consumer startup, bought in 2018 for about $100 million). Then there is the other half of the business: licensed fashion watches for Tommy Hilfiger (since 2001), Hugo Boss (since 2005), Coach (since 1998), Lacoste, Calvin Klein, and Kate Spade. This is worth saying plainly because it is the reality of the company. The engine of Movado Group is licensed fashion watches, and Movado the brand is the respectable Swiss face on top of it. The Museum dial remains one of the most recognized dial designs ever drawn, and the vintage pieces (the Ermeto, the Datron, the pre-1970s dress watches) have a genuine following. The current catalog is fine. It is just fine.
Why it matters
Movado matters for a few reasons that do not all flatter it, which seems fair for a brand with this particular history. It shows how a serious technical watchmaker becomes a design icon and then a mall brand, without ever quite disappearing. It gave watchmaking one of the most famous dials ever drawn, even if the drawing was not exactly acquired cleanly. And it is a useful reminder, every time you see that gold dot, that the watch industry’s prettiest stories usually have a second page. The dot itself is worth your attention regardless: time reduced to a black field and one mark, readable in any language, on any wrist.
Official site: movado.com
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