Ulysse Nardin is a Swiss watchmaker founded in 1846 in Le Locle by Ulysse Nardin (1823-1876), a watchmaker who trained under his father Léonard-Frédéric and the masters Frédéric-William Dubois and Louis JeanRichard. The company spent its first century making marine chronometers, the shipboard clocks navies depended on before electronics, and it was extremely good at it: over fifty of the world’s navies used Ulysse Nardin chronometers from the late 1800s through about 1950. The brand nearly died in the quartz crisis, was rescued by a businessman in 1983, went on a twenty-five-year run of genuine invention, got bought by the luxury conglomerate Kering in 2014, and then got sold back out again in 2022. It is now independent, still headquartered in the same Le Locle building it has occupied since 1865.
A Ulysse Nardin marine chronometer. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
The chronometer years
The founding Ulysse Nardin made complicated pocket watches too (minute repeaters, moon phases, perpetual calendars), but marine chronometers were the business, and the numbers are absurd in a way that has to be read twice. The Neuchâtel Observatory’s final official report on chronometer testing, published in 1975 and covering 1846 to 1975, credited Ulysse Nardin with 4,324 performance certificates, 2,411 special prizes, and 18 gold medals at international exhibitions. The company won the Prize Medal at the 1862 London International Exhibition for complicated watches and pocket chronometers, gold at the 1889 Paris Universal Exhibition, and first prize at Chicago in 1893, and by 1946 it supplied 77 percent of the marine chronometers tested by the Neuchâtel Observatory. When the founder died in 1876, his son Paul-David Nardin took over and kept winning: tourbillon-equipped pocket chronometers, Swiss patents, the US Navy coming aboard as a customer in 1902. None of that protected the company from quartz. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, a business built on mechanical precision was running out of road, which is where the second act starts.
Schnyder and Oechslin
In 1983, Rolf W. Schnyder, a Swiss-German businessman who had spent years at Longines and Jaeger-LeCoultre before running restaurants in Malaysia (there is no boring version of this man’s résumé), bought Ulysse Nardin and set about saving it. His masterstroke was partnering with the independent watchmaker and horologist Ludwig Oechslin, and what came out of that partnership was the Trilogy of Time: the Astrolabium Galileo Galilei in 1985, the Planetarium Copernicus in 1988, and the Tellurium Johannes Kepler in 1992, three wristwatches that displayed the motions of the stars and planets with real astronomical accuracy. Nobody was asking for a tellurium wristwatch in 1992. That was the point. Schnyder kept going: the Perpetual Ludwig perpetual calendar in 1996 (adjustable forward and backward from one crown), the GMT± dual-time system in 1999, the Sonata alarm watch in 2003, and the Genghis Khan minute repeater with Westminster carillon in 2002, which won the Watch of the Year innovation prize in 2003. This was the brand’s creative peak, and it ran on Schnyder’s willingness to let Oechslin build things the market had not requested. Schnyder died in 2011, and his wife Chai ran the company until Kering came calling.
The Freak
The Freak, unveiled at Baselworld in 2001 by Schnyder and Oechslin, remains the single most important thing Ulysse Nardin has ever made. It had no dial, no hands, and no crown: the movement itself was flipped inside out and rotated to indicate the time, wound by turning the caseback bezel after unlocking a tab at six o’clock. That was enough of a stunt on its own. The quietly bigger deal was the escapement, which used silicon for the first time in any mechanical watch, because silicon is light, non-magnetic, corrosion-resistant, and low-friction enough to run nearly dry. Silicon escapements and hairsprings are everywhere in high-end watchmaking now, and this was the watch that started it. Ulysse Nardin patented the DiamonSIL treatment (silicon with a synthetic diamond surface) in 2009, and the Freak has generated more than twenty patents across its family: the Freak X as the entry point, the Freak S with twin silicon oscillators, the Freak One (which won the GPHG Iconic Watch prize in 2023), and the Super Freak released in 2026 for the line’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Concept watches usually amount to marketing. This one ended up changing how everybody else makes movements. It is also worth saying plainly that the rest of the catalog can be gaudy: a lot of Ulysse Nardin’s marine line leans hard into nautical kitsch, anchors everywhere, and some of it is aimed at people who want the watch to be noticed before they are. The Freak carries the brand’s credibility, and it earns it.
The Ulysse Nardin Freak Vision. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Kering, then independence
Kering acquired Ulysse Nardin in 2014, taking a 100 percent stake and folding it into the Sowind Group alongside Girard-Perregaux. In 2017 the group appointed Patrick Pruniaux, formerly of Apple’s smartwatch division and TAG Heuer, as CEO of Ulysse Nardin (and of Girard-Perregaux a year later). The Kering years were not kind. By 2021 the two Sowind brands were estimated at around 75 million euros in combined sales against operating losses of roughly 30 million, a long way down from the roughly 190 million euros Ulysse Nardin alone was turning over when Kering bought it, and Kering booked heavy impairment charges on its watch division. Early in 2022, Kering sold its stake in Sowind Group to the management team in a buyout led by Pruniaux, who is still CEO, and Ulysse Nardin became independent again. Manufacturing is spread across Le Locle (headquarters and the Donzé Cadrans enamel dial workshop), La Chaux-de-Fonds (research and movement production), and Sion (Sigatec, which makes silicon micromechanical components). It is a small brand punching above its weight, which has been the story of this company since roughly 1846.
A Ulysse Nardin Freak X. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Why it matters
Ulysse Nardin matters for two reasons, and they are a century apart. First, the chronometer era: for decades this was the company navies trusted when getting the time wrong meant getting lost, and the prize record backs up the legend instead of requiring you to take it on faith. Second, the silicon era: the Freak was the first watch to put silicon in a movement, and that bet changed the whole industry’s materials. The brand is not perfect. Some of its designs are loud in a way that will not age gracefully, and the Kering decade showed what happens when a creative company lands inside a conglomerate that does not quite know what to do with it. But a company that survives its own funeral (the quartz crisis), invents the future once (silicon), and buys its own freedom back from a luxury group is doing something right. Watch what it does with its independence.
Official site: ulysse-nardin.com
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