“Day & Night” magazine sat down with Alexandra Lanz, CEO of Cimier, on the sidelines of Watches & Wonders to understand the ethos of the brand and the role of its Watch Academy in furthering a love for haute horlogerie
Can you give us a brief history of Cimier?
Cimier was founded by Joseph Lapanouse in 1924 near Basel, and the watches were sold under the brand Cimier. The watches featured an inexpensive movement with a pin-pallet escapement – produced by a German watchmaker in 1925. Around 21 million of those movements were sold in the 1970s. Cimier had around 500 employees based in Basel, in 1970; it was a huge company. The Lapanouse family ceased production in 1985, and in 2002 a former director took over the company and relaunched the brand with new Cimier collections.
At that time, they bought the movements from ETA, which is still the case today. We have moved from ETA to Sellita now for the automatic and mechanical movements. In 2010, Cimier was the very first watch brand that launched the Watch Academy – a unique experience where you can build up your own watch choosing your own watch components. In 2011, Cimier also worked on developing an automatic module on a 6497 calibre from ETA. This is also a movement we offer under our Watch Academy.
The Watch Academy is a very unique experience; we have 3 different courses running there. A Full Day course where you can build up your entire watch, including the movement, a 6497. Then, we have the Half-Day experience where you can build your watch, but not the movement which would be pre-assembled. We have also decided to offer an introductory course where there is some theory on watchmaking industry in general, and some hands-on work on the watch, which would make the entire experience something really special.
What are the timeframes for these courses?
For the Full Day, we welcome the participants around 9am and give them a short introduction on the brand, its history, and the program for the day. They then choose their components; they have a choice of cases, different colours, dials, colours in dials, hands, straps or bracelets, and buckles. They then go into our workshop to build their entire movement. We break and have a lunch together. In the afternoon, they finalise the assembly of their watch – casing, setting the dial, putting the hands, straps and so on. By the end, they would have produced their own Cimier watch.
In which locations are these classes available?
These classes are based in our headquarters in Biel; in 2021, we started to offer and promote these Experiences abroad, and we have created a Mobile Watch Academy. We have moved to new premises in 2020, so we have 600 sqm dedicated to this Watch Academy development where we have two beautiful rooms, workshops. We have produced workbenches that are very similar to the ones used in our Manufacture. We wanted it to be as professional as it is inside in our workshops. This is really important to us. We work with Master watchmakers, who have a lot of experience within the watchmaking industry, some of them more than 40 years. It has become a great success. We have had very good feedback about developing our Watch Academy abroad from our partners and I hope that we can develop this in other places as well.
Are these classes only for men?
We are thinking of also creating a class for children; we are already discussing this. The manipulation is different, and since we are using the Calibre 6497, which is very big, the case consequently is also big – around 43 mm. When we were in Germany for the Watch Academy, we observed something interesting. We had a group of 10 people attending the Watch Academy and they came with their wives. The wives chose the components for their men. Most of the wives commented, “Your watches are so beautiful but so big for my wrist.” The men then remained for the class, while the women went shopping.
We decided to develop a new case for the Watch Academy and have designed it. I have decided to also develop a case for the ladies. Meaning, if we go small for the ladies, we will still go for an automatic movement, or a mechanical one with hand winding. What is important for the ladies is the aesthetics of the watch. So, the ladies can come in, join the Watch Academy, and choose the components. Since they cannot actually assemble the automatic movement, perhaps they could do some of the end manipulations, and also play around with the bezel – giving them choices of diamond- or emerald-set bezel. The idea is to push the personalisation as far as possible.
Our watches are available for purchase on the Cimier website.
