Alps & Meters is proud to partner with Oris on a new activation inside of the Alps & Meters boutique at the St. Regis Hotel in Deer Valley, Utah.

Oris has a storied history and a sterling reputation for building some of the best performing, highest value watches available anywhere, and we are honored to share their story here.

The full list of watches available in the boutique are at the bottom of the page.

Few things are as synonymous with the Swiss Alps as watches. The Swiss watchmaking tradition is spread throughout the entire nation’s villages and centers, as opposed to centralized in one city, as it is elsewhere in Europe. It’s an iconic part of Switzerland’s national identity, embedded in the very fabric of Swiss society.

It all started in Le Locle, Switzerland, nestled in the Jura mountains, today the third smallest city in Switzerland but then the center of watchmaking and where the entire industry was born. Dating back to the 1600s at least, skilled artisans crafted watches and clocks and passed those techniques onto the next generation. Paul Cattin and Georges Christian, two watchmakers in the town with an entrepreneurial spirit, met and decided to strike out on their own.

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Setting up a factory in Hölstein, the two men were driven by a determination to create watches of an extremely high quality that also delivered performance and exceptional value. They named it after a brook near the factory: Oris.

The vision worked, a pocket watch was produced within the first year and by 1910, Oris was the largest employer in Hölstein, building houses in the town for the expanding workforce. Initially, the fledgling aviation industry offered a perfect place to focus production for Oris. By 1911, a pocket watch was developed for pilots, and in 1917, Oris created its first pilot’s watch - a watch that remains an icon to this day.

The signature “Pointer Date” on a modern Big Crown model

That first pilot’s watch helped to define the key aesthetic for the brand - large, easily readable information on the face and the big crown, built as such so that pilots could still use it with leather gloves on. The updated pilot’s watch from 1938 also introduced a signature “pointer date”. The combination of these two features further signified the classic pilot’s watch as the most recognizable style of the brand, a style that carries through to the “Big Crown” series today.

Innovation was also a driving force behind the brand’s success. While the design of that first pilot watch was iconic, so was the movement: the Calibre 40 was designed to be wound by hand, but for security purposes, a mechanism in the movement meant that the time could only be adjusted if a button positioned at 2 o’clock was pressed simultaneously. This was just one of the more than 270 in-house movements developed by Oris in the 115 year history of the brand.

“Oris builds watches that are no-nonsense, with complications meant to encourage you to get out and enjoy the world around you.”

— Jason Heaton, Hodinkee

That legacy of innovation with a strict focus on tradition is a hallmark of the brand, and one of the reasons why Oris and their watches speak to us so much. When war again broke out on the European continent, severely impacting the distribution of wristwatches, Oris pivoted to focus on making clocks for the Swiss market and ended up making an eight day power reserve alarm clock in 1949, unheard of at the time. When the industry was faced with punitive measures that limited what new technologies could be used in wristwatches without government approval, it was Oris who successfully lobbied the Swiss government and forced a reversal of the law, allowing new technological advances that pushed the entire industry forward. Within just two years of the law being overturned, Oris introduced the Calibre 652 movement - awarded full chronometer certification, the highest distinction for accuracy, by the Observatoire Astronomique et Chronométrique.

Not forgetting the roots of their founders, Oris ran its own training and apprentice program that produced 40 engineers and watchmakers per year throughout the 1960s. Yet as the 1970s turned into the 1980s, cheaper quartz movements fundamentally changed the global watch market and Oris was not immune to the crisis. The brand that once employed over 900 people at its peak was down to a few dozen employees. Ownership changed hands, and it appeared for a moment that one of the great watch houses of the world would cease to exist as we knew it.

Yet Oris persevered by drawing on their history, doubling down on the vision of the founders by recommitting to what built the brand in the first place: producing only handmade automatic movements and shunning the use of any quartz in their watches.

The perfect balance of innovation and tradition continues to this day, and the watches are true precision instruments. The collection is spread out across dive watches, pilots watches, motorsport watches, and dress watches - all with adherence to a storied tradition, yet constantly pushing to innovate and improve all while developing a signature aesthetic.

We’re excited to provide Alps & Meters customers the opportunity to craft wardrobes centered around their favorite Oris watches. With a legacy of tradition and innovation that mirrors our own hopes for Alps & Meters, Oris is a natural fit.

THE ORIS x ALPS & METERS COLLECTION

Contact us at support@alpsandmeters.com to inquire about any of the watches’ availability.