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Joël Pynson
May 2025
1. A difficult start
Roland Rüefli founded his own watchmaking factory in Grenchen in 1923 [1]. The period was not favorable, which no doubt explains the name changes to Fabrique d'Horlogerie Jorin in 1927, then Finora in 1929 [2].
1928
1930
The Orfina brand was registered in 1932, and it was this brand that made the company famous from the 1940s onwards. The company is a generalist manufacturer, producing good water-resistant watches, ladies' watches, calendar watches and chronographs, some of them water-resistant as early as 1942.
1940
1943
1943
1944
2. Montres Orfina
In 1947, the company became Montres Orfina, and the Rüeffli family joined the board of directors: Roland's wife Frieda and sons Hans and Roland Jr. [3].
The number of classic models increases rapidly.
1949
1955
1956
Roland Rüefli died in 1960, but the company remained in family hands.
1966
1970
1974
At the 1975 Basel Fair, Orfina presented two watches developed in collaboration with German designer Porsche Design [4].
The first was an automatic chronograph, based on the Valjoux 7750, and the second was an automatic ladies' watch. Both watches have PVD-treated cases and bracelets for a uniform black color.
This collaboration ended in 1982 when Porsche Design chose IWC to produce watches under its name.
1975
In 1981, Orfina collaborated with another designer, Pininfarina, to launch a range of quartz watches.
1982
1986
After Roland Rüefli's death in 1982, the Italian Umberto Maglioli took over as president of the company [5]. But the company was one of the many victims of the "quartz crisis", and disappeared in 1995.
[1] FOSC 1923
[2] FOSC 1927 and 1929
[3] FOSC 1947
[4] Europa Star, Europe edition, 1975, 90-6, pp. 150-151
[5] FOSC 1982
The FOSC (Feuille Officielle Suisse du Commerce) is available on E-periodica
Notes :
About Time To Tell: Time To Tell has one of the largest private digitized databases on the history of Swiss watchmaking, with over 2.3 TB of data on more than 1,000 Swiss watch manufacturers. This database has been built up over a period of some thirty years, and continues to be fed with around 50 to 100 GB of data every year. The database is made up of old documents, mainly Swiss trade journals, dating from the late 19th to the late 20th century. Most of these documents are not available on the Internet. Historical articles published on the time2tell.com website always cite the sources used.
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