The Atlas
The watchmaking world isn’t spread evenly across it. A handful of valleys, towns, and city districts hold almost every name in the catalog — the Vallée de Joux, Glashütte, Geneva, Le Locle, Biel/Bienne, Schaffhausen, and the Shiojiri / Iwate studios in Japan. Place mattered for the craft historically and still organises the supplier networks today. This is the map.
Click a country with a denser cluster — Switzerland, Germany, Japan — to drill into the regional view.
21 manufactures across 9 regions. Hover or focus a pin for the brand name; click through for the brand’s catalog page.
Explore by country
By region
Regions are listed densest-first. Each cluster has its own history — winter isolation in the Vallée de Joux, post-war reconstruction in Glashütte, ducal patronage in Geneva, mid-century precision engineering in Shiojiri and Iwate.
Glashütte valley
Founded by Ferdinand Adolph Lange to bring watchmaking to the impoverished Erzgebirge; expropriated after WWII, refounded by Walter Lange in 1990 and now the anchor of the modern Glashütte revival.
Successor to GUB, the East-German state watch combine that consolidated the surviving Glashütte makers after WWII; privatised in 1994 and bought by the Swatch Group in 2000.
Founded by Marco Lang and Mirko Heyne, both graduates of the Glashütte watchmaking school; the workshop sits in Radeberg, in the Dresden hinterland adjacent to the Glashütte cluster.
The 19th-century Grossmann manufacture closed in 1885; the modern brand was re-established by Christine Hutter in 2008 to produce watches at the finishing standard of the pre-war Saxon makers.
The original Robert Mühle workshop supplied precision measuring instruments to the Glashütte watchmaking industry from 1869; re-established as a wristwatch maker in 1994 by Hans-Jürgen Mühle.
Founded by Roland Schwertner in the months after reunification; the brand's Bauhaus-derived design language and in-house calibres made it the most-recognised post-revival Glashütte name outside the haute end.
Originated in the pre-war Glashütte cluster as UROFA, the rohwerke (movement) supplier; the brand was rebuilt in West Germany after the war and returned to Glashütte in 2011 after reunification settled supply chains.
Genève
François-Paul Journe set up his eponymous house in Geneva to be inside the supplier network and finishing tradition that an independent at his scale could not have built from outside it.
Founded in Geneva as Patek, Czapek & Cie; the Plan-les-Ouates manufacture has kept the brand inside the Geneva watchmaking enclave for the better part of two centuries.
Founded in London by Hans Wilsdorf, relocated to Geneva in 1919 to be inside the Swiss watchmaking trade and closer to its movement suppliers.
Founded by Hans Wilsdorf as a sister brand to Rolex, sharing the Geneva headquarters; movements (the MT calibres) are now made at the Tudor manufacture in Le Locle.
The oldest continuously-operating watch manufacturer in the world; founded in Geneva by Jean-Marc Vacheron and still in the Plan-les-Ouates industrial belt south of the city.
Vallée de Joux
Founded by Jules-Louis Audemars and Edward-Auguste Piguet in Le Brassus; the Vallée de Joux winter isolation made watchmaking the off-season livelihood for the local farming families.
Founded by Jehan-Jacques Blancpain in Villeret in the Bernese Jura; the modern brand operates its haute-horlogerie manufacture in Le Brassus, alongside Breguet under the Swatch Group.
Antoine LeCoultre opened his workshop in Le Sentier; the manufacture there has produced more than 1,200 distinct calibres and supplies movements to much of the Vallée and beyond.
Biel/Bienne
Louis Brandt's workshop moved to Biel in 1880, where Omega still operates the manufacture that produces the Co-Axial Master Chronometer calibres.
La Chaux-de-Fonds
Édouard Heuer's chronograph house was founded in St-Imier and consolidated in La Chaux-de-Fonds; became TAG Heuer in 1985 and still bases its chronograph manufacture there.
Le Locle
Founded by Georges Favre-Jacot in Le Locle and the El Primero — the first high-beat automatic chronograph — was designed and made here in 1969.
Paris
Founded by Louis-François Cartier in Paris as a jeweller; the watch manufacture is in La Chaux-de-Fonds, but the maison, the design language, and the archives remain Parisian.
Schaffhausen
Founded by the American watchmaker Florentine Ariosto Jones, who chose Schaffhausen for its Rhine hydropower and German-speaking workforce — the only major Swiss manufacture east of the Jura.
Shinshu Watch Studio (Nagano)
Mechanical Grand Seikos are built at the Shinshu Watch Studio in Shiojiri (Nagano); Spring Drive and the high-end mechanical lines are made at the Shizukuishi Watch Studio in Iwate.
Why this map?
The first reason is editorial: the watchmaking world isn’t uniformly distributed, and where a watch is made is part of what it is. A movement finished in Glashütte is the product of a specific German trade-school tradition that survived the GDR; a movement finished in the Vallée de Joux comes out of an alpine craft economy that grew up to fill the winter months when nothing could be farmed.
The second reason is practical: clustering is how the supplier networks survive. The Vallée de Joux holds AP, JLC, Blancpain, and Breguet’s manufacture inside one valley; that proximity is why those four houses can run the kind of haute horlogerie they do. Glashütte has six major manufactures within a two-kilometre radius; the dial makers and case finishers walk between them. The map makes those facts visible at a glance.
We deliberately left the rest of the world off the map. The catalog presently covers Switzerland, Germany, France, and Japan; there’s no Detroit RGM pin yet because there’s no RGM reference in the catalog yet. When the catalog broadens, the map will.