Yema was founded in 1948 by a French watchmaker born Henri Blum, who at some point decided that Henry-Louis Belmont sounded like a man who made watches and changed his name accordingly. I am not going to pretend I know how he explained that one at dinner parties. Belmont had graduated top of his class from the National Watchmaking School of Besançon in 1931, went on to pioneer automation in French watch manufacturing, and built Yema into the largest French watch company of the 1960s and 70s, selling over half a million watches a year at its peak. The name went dark for decades and was revived in 2009 by Montres Ambre, the Bôle family watch group in Morteau, which is where the story gets interesting. A resurrected brand trading on a dead man’s name is usually a red flag. This one is more complicated than that.
The man who renamed himself
Belmont built Yema around one idea: affordable technical tool watches for people who did things outside. Diving, racing, sailing, flying, the occasional trip to orbit. The company motto became “Time of Heroes,” which sounds faintly ridiculous now but made perfect sense in the era when brands still named watches after things men did while smoking. He was a manufacturing modernist, running an assembly line that could turn out 600 watches a day, and his catalog grew to more than a hundred models. For a stretch, Yema was the leading exporter of French watches, which tells you both how big Yema got and how thoroughly the French industry would later collapse. It is hard to hold that combination in your head. The biggest French watch company of its time and the average person today has never heard of it. Almost nobody knows any of this stuff. It is just us weirdos.
Yema Superman newspaper ad, 1963. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The golden era
The Superman arrived in 1963 and it was the real deal. A 38mm dive watch rated to 300 meters with a patented bezel-lock device at 3 o’clock, a little clamp that pinned the bezel in place when the crown was screwed down. Simple, clever, and genuinely new. French Navy divers and French Air Force flight crews both wore it, and the Superman has stayed the brand’s signature ever since, including on every modern reissue. Three years later Yema launched the Rallygraf, a motorsport chronograph with dashboard-inspired subdials, two red racing stripes, and a little checkered flag motif on the dial. It was powered by a hand-wound Valjoux, it looked like nothing else on a start line, and it got the best product placement in watch history. Mario Andretti bought one himself because he thought it was cool, wore it through the entire month of May 1969, practice, qualifying, and the race, and had it on his wrist when he won the Indianapolis 500. He later said it became as sentimental to him as the helmet and the race car. That was not a sponsorship. The man just bought a watch.
The same year brought the Yachtingraf, a sailing chronograph that became the official watch of the French sailing team at the 1972 Olympics and ended up on the wrists of Eric Tabarly and Florence Arthaud. There was also the Flygraf for pilots. Then came the peak year: 1970, more than half a million watches sold, with the brand crossing a million a year by 1977. And in 1982, the year Belmont stepped down, French astronaut Jean-Loup Chrétien carried a Yema Spationaute into orbit on the Soyuz T-6 mission, the first French watch in space. It was about as glorious a farewell as a brand can get. Unfortunately it was also a farewell.
The Yachtingraf, Yema’s sailing chronograph, 1970. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Sold, shelved, and nearly lost
When Belmont retired in 1982 he sold the company to the Matra group, and four years later it went to Hattori-Seiko, which owned it until 2004. The quartz crisis gutted French watchmaking and Yema took it the way everyone else did. By the time Seiko let go, Yema was effectively a name with a glorious back catalog and no company behind it, off the market for the better part of two decades. If you read Yema’s own marketing, you will sometimes see the brand described as being in “continuous operation” since 1948, which is the kind of thing companies write when they are hoping nobody reads too closely. There is a genuine gap in the story and it is worth saying so plainly. The current Yema is not a continuous line from Belmont’s workshop. It is a revival.
The resurrection
In 2009 the Bôle family, third-generation watchmakers behind the Montres Ambre group, bought the name and set up workshops in Morteau, in the Franco-Swiss Jura. In 2011 they launched their first in-house caliber. Then, in 2018, they ran a Kickstarter campaign for a faithful reissue of the 1970s Superman ref. 53.00.16 and raised over a million Swiss francs, which for a Kickstarter watch project is a result so good it almost looks like a typo. The Superman Heritage put Yema back on the map with enthusiasts, and the brand has been running crowdfunding campaigns for new models and new movements ever since. In 2019 they teamed up with Andretti himself to reissue the Rallye chronograph he wore in 1969, fifty years later, and they have since done bronze Supermen, GMTs, and a whole range of vintage reissues alongside modern designs.
Two caveats, because honesty is the point here. Some of the early Heritage models were manufactured and assembled in Biel, Switzerland, running Swiss Sellita movements, so the “French watchmaking” branding sat next to Swiss-made reality for a while. And Kickstarter, for Yema, is basically a preorder engine with better photography. It is not a startup begging for tools. It is a company using crowdfunding as cheap marketing and interest-free working capital, and it works embarrassingly well for them.
A modern Superman GMT Bronze. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The in-house question
Yema now fields a serious roster of its own calibers. The YEMA2000 and YEMA3000 GMT are French-made alternatives to ETA and Sellita three-handers and GMTs, 28,800 vph with 42 hours of reserve. Then came the ambitious ones. The CMM.10, launched via Kickstarter in November 2023 inside a limited run of 1,948 bronze Supermen, is a three-hand automatic with a 70-hour power reserve, rated at minus 3 to plus 5 seconds a day, developed with independent watchmaker Olivier Mory. The CMM.20, which debuted in the Wristmaster before landing in the Superman Slim in 2024, uses a tungsten micro-rotor to get roughly a millimeter thinner than a 2824. Here is the honest accounting: “in-house” for Yema means designed and developed in France, with mainplates and bridges made in their own Morteau workshops and the regulating organs sourced from Switzerland within about 72 kilometers, since they sit 15km from Le Locle and 20km from La Chaux-de-Fonds. That is a real manufacture effort, and the specs beat the price comfortably. It is also not the same thing as making every screw in France, and plenty of models in the lineup still run bought-in Swiss movements. Both things are true.
Why it matters
Yema is a zombie brand, in the strict sense that the original company died and new owners revived the name to sell watches. Most revived names stop at licensing the logo. Yema’s owners did something harder: they rebuilt actual watchmaking capacity in Morteau, developed their own calibers, and reissued the back catalog with obvious affection and real quality. The Superman Heritage is genuinely one of the best affordable mechanical divers you can buy, full stop, and the Kickstarter-era bronzes are fun in the way watches should be fun. The marketing can be a little much, the “since 1948” continuity claims are creative fiction, and the crowdfunding strategy is marketing wearing a costume. But strip that away and you have a French company employing French watchmakers, making French movements, at prices regular people can afford. That was exactly Belmont’s idea in 1948. Say this for the revival: it understood the assignment.
Official site: yema.com
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