Favre-Leuba: Conquering Frontiers for 280 Years
In 2017, Favre-Leuba celebrates its 280th anniversary. Founded as a small watchmaker’s workshop in Le Locle in 1737 by Abraham Favre, Favre-Leuba can look back on a successful history marked by uncompromising courage, a bold pioneering spirit, the enduring refusal to accept boundaries, and the drive to grasp opportunities and strive to achieve the extraordinary. The anniversary is a remarkable milestone in the illustrious history of Switzerland’s second-oldest watch brand, and something the company is celebrating with a truly unique watch that quite literally goes above and beyond what other watches are capable of and makes a very clear statement.
The Dawn of a New Era
In terms of function and aesthetics, the Raider and Chief lines from the current Favre-Leuba collection are inspired by the brand’s own legendary watches. Practical functionality, extreme precision, and outstanding reliability make each of these watches the ideal companion for those who refuse to set limits and unswervingly pursue their goals.
The models in the Raider and Chief lines are positioned in the CHF 1,500 to CHF 8,000 price segment and combine innovative technology with a unique design.
Unrivaled Innovation and Ingenuity
Favre-Leuba is a brand that refuses to rest on its laurels and is still striving to break new ground with its unrivaled innovation and ingenuity. When designing the Raider Harpoon, Favre-Leuba recognized the importance of having information displayed clearly during a dive. The result is a purpose-built and brilliantly functional watch that allows divers to read the time elapsed since the start of a dive in minutes – the most important unit of time under water – more quickly, easily, and accurately than ever before. The Harpoon therefore only features a minute hand, ensuring that the diver does not mistake the minute hand for the hour hand.
The ingenious interplay between this hand and the rotating ring at the edge of the dial – which bears Arabic numerals for the hours and is driven by a patented mechanism developed by Favre‑Leuba – means that the time in hours and minutes can still be read with ease.
Favre-Leuba is celebrating its 280th anniversary with a bang and making another very clear state¬ment in the watch industry. With the Raider Bivouac 9000, the brand’s designers have created a wristwatch that until now had been thought technically impossible. Like the legendary model from 1962, the new Bivouac measures altitude with the aid of an aneroid barometer, but now does so up to an incredible height of 9,000 meters above sea level. In addition to the altitude and air-pressure display, the watch also features a power-reserve indicator, which gives the wearer plenty of warning when the watch needs to be wound.
A Mindset that Conquers Frontiers
In addition to the current collection itself, Favre-Leuba’s revised mindset sets the brand apart. The claim, “Conquering Frontiers”, sums it up perfectly. This is the mindset that inspires the brand to follow new paths, to consistently challenge the status quo and view things from a different perspective in order to develop creative concepts, to view obstacles as opportunities and not as boundaries, and to continuously set ambitious goals and fully dedicate themselves to achieving them. At the same time, the company continues to focus on the very thing that its founders valued most: the ingenuity of exceptional watch engineering.
