Oliver Ebstein came to watchmaking from banking and pharma, bought a company in trouble, and rebuilt it. Staying private, for him, is a strategy, not a sentiment.

The weekend the United States set its tariff on Swiss goods at 39 per cent, Chronoswiss spent it packing watches. The rate applied on the date of shipment, not arrival, so the company rushed as much stock as it could to its American partner before the number took hold. “We asked everybody to come in to help pack watches to be sent to our partner in the United States,” Oliver Ebstein says. “They only gave us like 48 hours.”

The tariff fell back to 15 per cent within months. “They went back to 15 per cent and then we left it as it is.” Nothing structural changed; there is no production in the United States to move. This is what an independent watch company is: twenty-odd people in a building in Lucerne, improvising against a number set in Washington, absorbing what they cannot dodge.

Ebstein is not a watchmaker, and that matters to how the company is run. He came from banking — UBS — then spent years in pharmaceuticals, and arrived at Chronoswiss sideways, as a collector who admired the brand before he owned it. “It was kind of a coincidence that I met with Mr Lang,” he says. His parents had been in jewellery and accessories, and as a boy he went to the Basel fair for the catalogues. He did a due diligence, took a month or two, and bought.

What he bought was in trouble. The founder, Gerd-Rüdiger Lang, had built Chronoswiss out of the 1983 quartz crisis, but by 2012 it was distressed, and the product was the only part working cleanly. “I had issues in supply chain. The first year I was just trying to repair the supply chain.” The disorder was startling: “We had 50 different SKUs and I think 30 different cases. And 30 different fournisseurs.” He treated it as a business to organise, not an atelier to admire — the reflex of the industries he came from. It took years; a watch company cannot be rebuilt the way a bank is. “If you are in banking and you go to another bank, you can take your key team with you. We had nothing.” Owning the company outright was its own hazard. “Suddenly you are sitting in a driver’s seat and you can do whatever you want, which is not so easy, because nobody is hindering you.” Nobody hindering him also meant nobody catching the mistakes: “a lot of money that I paid for learning, a lot.”

That outsider’s method now governs the numbers. Chronoswiss makes about 1,500 watches a year, with a staff of between twenty and thirty. The figures look like the ceiling of a brand that would grow if it could. They are a decision, and Ebstein is about to reverse it.

The company once made more. “If you go back 10 years, probably double,” he says. It cut the number on purpose. “The idea was also to reduce the volumes to make more complicated watches. So making more complicated watches is more pricey. In terms of financial, we stayed similar, but we reduced.” Now the direction changes again. “We are about to lifting it. The strategy is to go up in volume.” The target is modest and specific: “We would like to probably double the volume. Still small, still exclusive, but having a wider distribution.” Not more. “The plan is not to go to 10,000, because then you become already kind of a mass producer. But let us say 3,000 is a nice goal.”

The obvious move runs the other way — fewer watches, higher prices, the model many new independents have taken. He has refused it. “In the end, I want to have a product that can grow. The range where we are in, between 8,000 to 15,000 Swiss francs, gives you a lot of customer. If you only do 500 pieces, you are a bit more limited.” And volume is a form of protection. “Having a caution for the security of the company and my employees — this amount of volume is a good and healthy environment.” Growth, here, is ballast, not ambition.

The Neo Digiteur is a reissue — a mechanical watch that shows the time with no hands, first made twenty years ago, revived this year. Reissues are everywhere now, and the logic is usually financial: the design exists, the story exists, half the work is done. Ebstein rejects the premise for a house his size. “Economics is not so much behind it, because everything has to be done new. It is not like you take something out of the drawer. The case is new, the movement is new, the dial is new.”

The distinction he draws is the entire argument of the independent. A large company reissues cheaply because it still holds the tooling and the parts, written off years ago, and can spread the cost across a catalogue. He holds nothing. “We are a small company, so we do not have stock that we can write off.” Built from old inventory, a Chronoswiss revival would be twenty pieces. “We cannot make a series of 20 pieces.”

So the reissue is not a shortcut. It is storytelling, and it is taste. “I would not do this if I would not wear the watch myself. Even though it might be super economic, profitable — if I would not wear the watch myself, I would not do it.” At this scale, heritage buys no efficiency. It buys a story, at full cost.

The absence of anyone hindering him — so expensive at the start — is now the whole point. He answers to no one on a schedule. “I do not have the shareholders in the back saying, listen, next year, 10 per cent. So there were years we did not grow much, but we also did not lose shares.” The priority he names is not the number. “It is the balance of growing, but also making sure our employees are on the secure side.”

The freedom shows most in what does not ship — the veto is his, a matter of taste. “If I would not wear the watch, it does not go out.” He measures himself against the listed houses and their swelling catalogues — thirty pages once, a hundred and fifty now, a model for every market until the identity is gone. “You do not see the DNA any more. Less is more.”

Underneath, one principle. “That is the beauty about being private. I make sure that I create value for the long term.” He is not selling only watches. “The actual watch is maybe only 25 per cent. And 75 per cent is the people behind — the service, the quality, the story.” That is not sentiment; it shows in who comes back. “We have a lot of repeat customers. Not only because of the watch, but because of the product, brand. Because what they get here is a story.” A listed brand exists to return value on a schedule. This one exists to still be here.

That instinct is inherited, not invented. When Lang decided to sell, he had offers from groups and turned them down; he spent three or four years looking for a family instead, because a group would keep the name and let the rest evaporate. He sold to Ebstein, a collector, over a long evening. The refusal at the start of the ownership story now waits for Ebstein at the other end of it.

Every independent reaches that question eventually, and his honest answer, for now, is that he does not have one. His children are young. The younger daughter likes the bench, sits at the machine, went through the new brochure and marked the names she would change — but he will not push her. “You should never push your kids. I was never pushed. It needs to come by themselves.”

If it does not come, the instruction holds regardless. “My goal is to make sure it keeps the company independent. I would make very much sure that it stays in family hands.” He reaches for one comparison to explain why — the Italian family firms his own tailor buys from, shirtmakers a century old whose names no one knows and whose quality is a promise precisely because the family is still there. That, he thinks, is where luxury is turning: not the name on the dial but the provenance behind it. “Why not go for something where you have the promise of how it is produced?” Whether Chronoswiss outlasts the Ebsteins is unsettled. What it is meant to be — a story that needs no single owner to keep telling it — he has already decided.

About the Author

Sergio Galanti is a Swiss-based independent writer specialising in the luxury watch industry, and an advisor to private collectors and investors. He is the editor of WatchDossier (watchdossier.ch), a publication exploring the cultural and philosophical undercurrents of contemporary horology, and the author of Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Swiss Independent Watchmaking.

No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.

Subscribe to watchdossier.ch to receive more insights on luxury, craftsmanship, and collecting.

In May, the Chapter 7 Skeleton arrived in anthracite PVD, a coating engineered to swallow light. This month it arrives with the coating gone. The steel beneath is what you now see. Everything else holds — the 40mm case, the Soprod P024, the thirty-eight hours, the faceted bezel, the crown pushed to four o’clock. A single process has been subtracted, and a cost subtracted with it. BA111OD calls this being revealed by light.

It is worth pausing on the verb. Nothing was revealed. A decision was taken — to stop laying down a dark PVD layer — and then narrated as though the steel had been waiting all along for summer to find it. This is not deception. The specification sheet is candid: it names the Soprod caliber without flinching, states the reserve honestly, makes no certification claim it cannot keep. The mythology works one storey above the facts, in the register where a colourway becomes a season and a finishing choice becomes a property of the light over Lake Neuchâtel.

Barthes1 catalogued this exact operation. Take something contingent — a decision, a cost, a market calculation — and let it harden into essence, into something that simply is, timeless and unchosen. The release is a small museum of the technique. The watch is not cheaper to produce; it is brighter, distinctly summery, a fresh expression. It did not lose a coating; it evolved. The light of Neuchâtel did not brief an agency; it shaped the brand’s vision. Agentless, essential, continuous. Somewhere a person removed a step from a production run, and the sentence reporting it has no subject at all.

The campaign supplies a human face for the essence. Loïc Huguenin, the Neuchâtel wingfoiler, works his home lake daily with the wind and the light — an approach the release assures us echoes the precision, balance and control of watchmaking. It is a graceful association and a wholly constructed one. A man rides a foil in the same canton where the watches are assembled, and from that adjacency the copy manufactures a shared soul. Precision. Balance. Control. The words describe the athlete, the object, and the brand at once, which is exactly their assignment: to make a marketing choice feel like a property of the place.

None of which makes the object dishonest. That is the part worth holding onto.

Because beneath the weather system, BA111OD is one of the more genuinely disruptive propositions in accessible Swiss watchmaking, and the disruption is real precisely where the poetry is decorative. Founded in 2019 — from a garage, launched over LinkedIn, financed by pre-orders rather than banks — the brand sells directly, prices transparently, and has spent five years demonstrating that a Swiss mechanical watch need not carry the industry’s customary markup to reach a wrist. That is the substance. Everything layered on top is the tax — in money and in myth — the substance apparently still has to pay.

Consider the heritage. The release invokes two hundred and fifty years of Baillod watchmaking, a line running to 1775. True enough, on the record. But by the brand’s own telling, Thomas Baillod founded the company first and discovered the bloodline afterward, uncovering the ancestor once the enterprise already existed. Which inverts the story on offer. A start-up did not descend from 1775; a start-up went looking and found a 1775 to descend from. The lineage is real. Its function here is mythological — a garage experiment handed a coat of arms.

The same halo hangs over the movement. Flying tourbillons. Observatory-certified chronometers. Métiers d’art dials painted one at a time. The About section runs the entire vocabulary of high watchmaking, and this watch speaks none of it. It runs a Soprod P024: a sound automatic built on the ubiquitous ETA 2824-2, made by a division of the Festina Group, shared without embarrassment across half the accessible-Swiss field, from Nivada Grenchen to Jacques Bianchi. There is nothing wrong with a good outsourced base. Most of the industry runs on them. But the brief invites you to feel the tourbillon workshop’s gravity through a caliber that has never been near it.

Pick the watch up, though, and the argument tilts back toward the object.

In natural steel the openworking reads differently than it did in anthracite. The dark coating flattered by concealing; bright steel has nowhere to hide and survives the exposure anyway. The bridges are genuinely layered, not a handful of decorative holes over a solid plate. Vertical brushing runs the flanks of the case; the bevels take a polish that throws a hard line of light as the wrist turns; between the indexes, sandblasting keeps the glare down to a matte hush. The ruby bearings sit exposed, small red punctuation in the mechanism. Against the very lake-light it means to evoke, the steel does what the PVD could not: it answers back, scattering rather than swallowing. For a watch under a thousand francs, the finishing is not pretending. It is doing the work.

Which is where the collector actually lives — not in the heritage paragraph but on the wrist, inside a very particular appetite. The Chapter 7 speaks the integrated-bracelet dialect fluently: the faceted bezel, the unbroken case-to-bracelet line, the whole Genta-descended grammar of the luxury sports watch. That grammar usually costs five figures. Here it costs four, and the low ones. The desire it serves is not for rarity. It is for access — for the look and the real finishing of an idiom whose entry fee has, until lately, been the entire point.

So run the subtraction. Strip the Neuchâtel light and the frost-blue reflections. Strip the wingfoiler on his home lake. Strip the 1775 that was found rather than inherited. Strip the tourbillon halo, the Soprod base it shares with the field, the colourway that is the only thing this release actually changed. Then ask what remains singular to this watch. The honest answer is nothing. No technology no one else has. No mechanism, no provenance that this piece alone can claim. On the axis of singularity the subtraction leaves the wrist bare, and pretending otherwise would be one more myth.

But singularity was never the thing being sold, and the wanting does not vanish with the myth. What survives the strip is quieter and entirely real: finishing that holds up in unforgiving light, at a price the direct-to-consumer model genuinely makes possible. A provenance that checks out — not a bloodline, a business model.

The forbidden thing, then, was never the watch. It is the appetite the watch flatters: the wish to wear the sports-luxe idiom without paying the idiom’s toll, to have the line and the light and the layered bridges for the price of a sensible three-hander, and to feel — quietly, on the wrist, where no one audits your reasoning — that you have got away with something. The trade spent decades teaching collectors that Swiss mechanical seriousness must cost dearly. This one hands you the look of it for under a grand and leaves you to decide whether that is a bargain or a small heresy. The steel tempts you toward no flaw. It tempts you toward the suspicion that the tax was never the watchmaking.

The blue arrives before anything else. At the center a skeletal tourbillon turns beneath the domed crystal, the HYT monogram floating in its cage; around it the colour organises into rings — a pale cyan track hugging the mechanism, then a deeper cobalt arc that climbs the left flank and stops, the fluid caught mid-retrograde. It is the most saturated thing on the dial: brighter than the white numerals, brighter than the gold. Set the watch going and the colour moves in more registers than a photograph can hold — the fluid rising and jumping back through its borosilicate hair, three small spheres circling the cage at different speeds (one four turns a minute, one five, one six), a central hand sweeping the minutes. Around all of it, this time, gold. Not the blue’s rival but its setting: 5N rose gold on the crown and the flanks, black DLC titanium receding behind it, a case built, HYT says, to let the blue be seen.

It is a beautiful object. That should be said plainly, because most of what follows complicates the saying.

The Midnight Blue’s whole argument is material. HYT has taken the Conical Tourbillon — its most technical creation — dressed it in 5N gold, and the release reaches for metamorphosis: a “bold evolution,” a “new form of life.” The prose wants you to feel a threshold crossed. Look at the price list instead. The 2023 Titanium Blue, in carbon and titanium, listed at CHF 335,000; the 2024 Panda, in titanium and white ceramic with no gold, at 355,000; the gold Midnight Blue, at exactly that. The most precious material the house can name commands not a franc over a ceramic-coated cousin. This is not an accusation — gold is an honest thing to sell. It is only worth noticing that a maison calling this a metamorphosis has priced it, to the franc, as the colourway it is.

And the thing being framed is not, in the sense the boilerplate implies, HYT’s own. The brand’s “About” text still describes an approach “developed entirely in-house.” The tourbillon at the center of this watch — the reason it exists, the reason it costs what it costs — is Eric Coudray’s. Coudray is the maestro behind Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Gyrotourbillon and the Spherion in watches by MB&F and Purnell; he works today through Tec-Group. His conical tourbillon reinterprets an inclined design Walter Prendel built in Groitzsch in 19281, itself an application of Alfred Helwig’s theory2. HYT credits every name of this generously — in the same document that elsewhere says “entirely in-house.”

That is the gap. It is not a lie.

The decision HYT made was the correct one: partner with the finest living tourbillon-maker and hang his work at the center of your dial. The story told over that decision is one of essence — an independent maison whose excellence is native, unbroken, its own. Both are true at once. Mythology is not the opposite of fact; it is the tense fact gets told in. Here the tense is timeless, and the timeless quietly erases the invoice from Tec-Group and the name of a man who has spent twenty years making other people’s tourbillons famous.

Where HYT’s own genius actually lives is quieter, and harder to photograph. It lives in the fluidic module: a glass capillary eight-tenths of a millimetre across, a pair of bellows with walls a quarter the thickness of a human hair, a system that translates the movement’s energy into the motion of a liquid with nothing visibly driving it. This was Lucien Vouillamoz’s problem3, solved through the sister firm Preciflex, and it is genuinely HYT’s — the one thing nobody else in watchmaking does. Turn the case and the fluid answers. Bring it to the light and the line where the blue meets the clear is the hour itself — a moving boundary you learn to read the way you learn a tide. It is unreasonably satisfying, and the satisfaction is real craft, not narrative.

So the object is honest even where the copy turns mythological. But the copy asks for one thing more than the object can carry. This is the sixth dress on one caliber. The Eklipse. The Sapphires. The Titanium Blue. The Panda. The Diamonds. Now the Midnight Blue. The same 750 components, counted the same way each time — 533 in the movement, 159 in the cage — redistributed across cases, colours, and stones. Metamorphosis is a strong word for a colourway. Eight pieces of it, forty-eight millimetres across and twenty-five deep, engineered so the time is the hardest thing on the dial to read. A watch that buries the hour inside a spectacle is not concealing a flaw. It is stating a preference, loudly, in gold: this is for being seen wearing, only incidentally for telling the time.

Which is the strategy, and a shrewd one for a house in HYT’s position. The “About” section narrates an unbroken line — born 2012, faithful to its philosophy to this day. It does not mention that in March 2021 the company filed for bankruptcy, that Kairos Technology Switzerland bought the assets, that the maison you are reading about died and was repurchased. The continuity is the myth performing its most useful labour: sealing a rupture so cleanly you would never guess the watch on your wrist comes from a company on its second life. The leadership has turned over again since — the chief executive who ran the revival’s later phase left in late 2025. A CHF 355,000 gold tourbillon, editioned to eight, is how a revived independent buys back its seriousness. It may well work.

Strip the myth to the wire — the bought-in tourbillon, the colourway sold as metamorphosis, the maison that died and was reassembled — and one decision survives every subtraction, because it was never a claim. This watch makes the time the hardest thing to read on its own dial, on purpose — not a defect it failed to fix but a position: that the hour is worth more as spectacle than as information. Most watches want to be read at a stoplight. This one wants to be watched, and dares you to prefer that.

The nerve of it is the thing that lasts. Not the gold, which is priced by the gram; not the story, which unravels on contact. The conviction.

Which leaves the reader somewhere less comfortable than admiration. To want this watch is to agree with it — to concede that you, too, would rather have the illegible column of moving liquid than one that merely tells the time. That is the small transgression, and it survives full knowledge of the overstatement.

The watch is not the transgression. Wanting it, eyes open, at that price, from that brand, is.

Good sense would file this under things one admires from a safe distance.

Good sense is not what anyone spends three hundred and fifty-five thousand francs to acquire.

But curiosity is. HYT is the only house on earth that tells the hour in liquid — and it died once and came back to keep doing it. Forget the story. What it makes next is worth waiting for.

The brand that made its name by taking things away has made a watch about showing everything.

For a decade, H. Moser & Cie. built its reputation on subtraction. Logo-free dials. Fumé gradients that said nothing and meant it. A watch cased in real Swiss cheese to mock the “Swiss Made” label; a mechanical answer to the Apple Watch, delivered deadpan, that spent its whole life as an industry in-joke. The house learned that in a trade drowning in its own seriousness, the most valuable thing you can do is leave the room. So there is something almost confessional about the Endeavour Minute Repeater Cylindrical Tourbillon Skeleton Cosmic Rain, a titanium edition of twenty in which nothing is hidden.

Everything, instead, is staged. The minute repeater, that most secretive of complications, whose hammers and gongs have spent two centuries working on the dark side of the movement, has been turned around to face the wearer. You can now watch the hours being struck. The tourbillon turns openly at six. The plates and bridges have been cut back until the calibre reads less like a movement than a diagram of one. And into this hall of glass, at two o’clock, Moser has set the single thing you cannot see through: a small domed sub-dial of aventurine, streaked with mother-of-pearl, sold to us as a shower of stars.

This is the reversal worth sitting with.

Read the press release the way you would read any myth—not for what it lies about, but for what it quietly turns into destiny. Cosmic Rain is described as a reinterpretation, a bringing-together, a celebration of the coming together of tradition, innovation and craftsmanship. The prose has no subject. Things are brought together; excellences converge; the watch celebrates. What actually happened is more modest and more interesting: earlier this year Moser released the skeletonised Minute Repeater Cylindrical Tourbillon, and this summer it fitted that existing watch with a new artistic dial and a name. A dial swap, elevated by grammar into an event. This is not a deception. It is how the industry breathes. The decision—enter the GPHG’s Mechanical Exception class, restate the credentials of an independent two years out from its bicentenary—becomes, on the page, an inevitability that simply arrived.

The hairspring earns the same treatment. It is cylindrical, a geometry inherited from eighteenth-century marine chronometers, rising vertically around the balance staff where a conventional spring lies flat. Almost nobody makes them anymore. Moser’s sister company, Precision Engineering AG, shapes each one by hand, and the release tells us this improves the isochronism and attests to a craftsmanship that has become extremely rare. It very likely does improve the isochronism. It is also worth noticing what the release does not say: that the watch is a certified chronometer. Precision, here, is a story about precision. The proof stays offstage—the one place in this watch where something remains hidden.

Hold it, if you are among the twenty who will, and the titanium does its quiet work: light, cool, acoustically generous, chosen as much for how it carries a chime as for how it sits. The eye falls through the movement and keeps falling, because there is so little to stop it. Then it hits the aventurine. Depth where everywhere else there is transparency; a wet mineral blue with copper suspended inside it; the mother-of-pearl laid in curved strips that catch and surrender the light as the wrist turns. It is the one opaque object in a watch built to be looked through, and the eye returns to it precisely because it withholds. Moser has staged, perhaps without meaning to, a small lesson in appetite. We want the part we cannot see into.

Which is the thing a dial-side repeater actually gratifies. Not the ear—a repeater sounds the same whichever way its hammers face. The appetite here is to witness. To see the invisible labour: the tiny mirror-polished hammers rising and falling, the proof of work made literal and set under sapphire. Veblen imagined conspicuous consumption as the display of leisure; this is its horological inversion, the conspicuous display of effort, the mechanism performing its own difficulty for an audience of one. The skeleton is not lighter or more accurate for being open. It is more legible. And legibility, at this altitude, is status—the ability to read the labour you have bought.

The economics, sensibly, are beside the point. Twenty pieces, price on request, from a house that makes around four thousand watches a year: this is not a product line, it is a position statement. Its job is not to sell twenty watches, which will sell themselves, but to lift the ceiling on what an independent is permitted to charge, to claim, to be. Independent grand-complication repeaters do not have deep secondary markets; the value does not accrue to whoever flips one but to the marque that made it. You are not buying an asset. You are buying a share in Moser’s argument about itself, and taking delivery of the certificate on your wrist.

Strip it all away, then. The name, the meteor-shower story, the two blue tones of hand-fired glass, the corporate line about Moser’s own and unique take on Haute Horlogerie. Take the marketing off the table entirely and ask what remains that no one else quite has. What survives is narrow and real: a repeater built to be watched, a cylindrical hairspring almost no one still hand-forms, a skeletonisation that carries all three complications without any of them crowding out the rest. The dial is the fiction. The movement is the fact.

And here is where good sense loses. Because once you have seen a repeater strike—actually seen it, the hammers moving in daylight where they were never meant to be seen—the wanting arrives, and it does not ask permission. It is not the aventurine you covet, whatever the name is selling. It is the transgression built into the mechanism: the two-century rule that a repeater is heard and not seen, broken in the open, and the small illicit pleasure of being the one watching. Moser has left nothing hidden. The one thing it forgot to warn you about is how badly you will want to keep looking.

About the Author

Sergio Galanti is a Swiss-based independent writer specialising in the luxury watch industry, and an advisor to private collectors and investors. He is the editor of WatchDossier (watchdossier.ch), a publication exploring the cultural and philosophical undercurrents of contemporary horology, and the author of Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Swiss Independent Watchmaking.

No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.

Subscribe to watchdossier.ch to receive more insights on luxury, craftsmanship, and collecting.

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