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Joël Pynson
September 2025
1. Founded in Granges
Amida traces its origins to the watchmaking factory founded in Granges in 1918 by Eduard Braun and Josef Zwahlen [1].
The Amida trademark was registered in 1921. In 1925, the company became Amida SA [2].
In 1927, Ernst Triebold joined the board of directors [3]. The factory specialized in affordable watches, including Roskopf (pin-anchor) and cylinder movements, such as stopwatches with balance-wheel stops, but also produced alarm clocks (Revox) and pocket watches.
1930
1943
1940
1941
1945
2. The Golden Age of the Roskopf Watch
It was after World War II that Roskopf watches experienced a significant boom. Demand for affordable watches was indeed very high, particularly in the United States, where these types of watches sold in large quantities outside traditional retail channels, in general merchandise stores and through mail-order catalogs.
Furthermore, since Roskopf watch manufacturers were not permitted to produce classic lever-escapement watches due to the watchmaking status (statut horloger), they focused on making significant technical improvements and developed most of the models in demand by the public: calendar watches, automatic watches, chronographs, and so on. They were aided in this by Roskopf movement manufacturers, such as Baumgartner, who supplied them with high-quality movements.
Amida developed its own Roskopf automatic caliber and launched it around 1953. Furthermore, this caliber, measuring 23.30 mm in diameter (10.5 lignes) and featuring a date display, was only 3.60 mm thick [4].
1960
1965
With the end of its watchmaking status in the mid-1960s, Amida was also able to manufacture classic lever-escapement watches.
To facilitate its expansion, Amida acquired the Pivotex SA factory in Montreux in 1965 [5]. Amida took this opportunity to relocate to Montreux.
The arrival in the early 1970s of the first quartz watches with digital displays—first LED, then LCD—which were extremely expensive, would have a surprising consequence: the rapid development of a multitude of anchor-escape watches without hands, displaying the time via a window. Amida launched numerous models of this type, but one of them, introduced in 1975, was particularly original. This was the LRD (Light Reflecting Display) model, also known as the Digitrend, whose hour and minute discs were topped by an optical prism that allowed them to be viewed from the side.
1973
1974
1975
In the late 1970s, Amida attempted to enter the quartz watch and movement market, but was unable to compete with the plummeting prices of quartz watches from the Far East.
1978
In 1991, Amida moved to Vevey and became a simple real estate company [6]
It should be noted that in 2024, the Amida brand was relaunched to produce a new model, the Digitrend: https://www.amida-watches.com/
[1] FOSC 1918
[2] FOSC 1925
[3] FOSC 1927
[4] The Swiss Watch, 1957, 10, p. 27
[5] FOSC 1965
[6] FOSC 1991
The FOSC (Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce) is available at 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 2.5 TB of data on more than 1,000 Swiss watch manufacturers. This database has been built up over a period of around 30 years and continues to be updated with around 50 to 100 GB of data each year. The database consists of historical documents, mainly Swiss trade journals, dating from the late 19th century to the late 20th century. Most of these documents are not available on the Internet. The historical articles published on the time2tell.com website always cite the sources used.
Time To Tell is a private company, independent of any watch manufacturer.
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