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Joël Pynson
February 2026
1. Création à Selzach
Bernhard Gisiger briefly partnered with Adolf Walter in 1915 to establish a watch manufacturing company in Selzach under the name Walter & Gisiger [1]. The following year, Bernhard was left on his own, and the company took his name: Gisiger-Greder [2].
Initially an assembly operation, the company shifted its focus to the production of ladies’ watches with cylinder movements [3], particularly wristwatches.
1918
1945
New buildings were constructed in 1924, and to weather the crisis of the 1930s, the factory also began producing Roskopf watches.
In 1938, Josef Gisiger, Bernhard’s son, joined the company. He would quickly transform his father’s factory. In 1947, he joined the board of directors of the watchstone manufacturer Pierrit SA in Biel and the bar-turning company Stähli & Cie in Selzach [4]. In 1951, he acquired the Fabrique de Montres Union in Solothurn, a long-established factory whose origins dated back to 1895 [5]. This acquisition was likely linked to the restrictions of the watchmaking regulations in effect at the time: as a manufacturer of cylinder and Roskopf watches, Gisiger-Greger was not permitted to produce anchor-escapement watches, whereas the Union factory did produce them.
2. Many brands
In 1953, Josef Gisiger took over from his father, and the company became Gisiger-Greder Fils [6]. The Eden brand was used for cylinder and Roskopf watches, and the Union brand for anchor watches.
1947
1950
1954
1955
Starting in the late 1950s, many brands were used: Eden, Union, and Gisa—particularly for watch-lighters—as well as Omnia, Gicyle, Greville, and Berelian.
1959
1959
1961
1961
In 1961, the buildings were expanded with an addition attached to the original factory [7].
Manufacturing keeps pace with advances in Swiss watchmaking: automatic watches and diving watches, for example.
1963
1965
1966
1967
1970
1971
1973
1974
1974
1974
In 1975, Gisider-Greder Fils introduced its first quartz watches with digital displays and launched what was likely its most original watch: a Gisa-branded model featuring the American flag, created to commemorate the bicentennial of the United States of America.
1975
1975
In 1978, Josef Gisiger’s son, Hanspeter, joined the board of directors. Production shifted toward fashion watches.
1978
1980
But like many other Swiss manufacturers, the Gisiger family was hit hard by the “quartz crisis” of the 1980s. In 1984, the Union watch factory became an IT company under the name Union Data Trading [8], and Gisider-Greder Fils ceased operations in 2003 [9].
[1] FOSC 1915
[2] FOSC 1916
[3] Europa Star, 1966, 6, pp. 142-143
[4] FOSC 1947
[5] FOSC 1951
[6] FOSC 1953
[7] Europa Star, 1962, 1, pp. 27-28
[8] FOSC 1984
[9] FOSC 2003
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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