Amida

AMIDA is a Swiss watchmaking name with an origin story that runs from 1925 to the Quartz Crisis and back again — a brand that shocked the watch world once before and has returned to do it again. Founded in Grenchen in 1925 by Joseph Zwahlen, AMIDA quickly embraced new manufacturing methods and affordable pin-lever movements, earning a reputation for forward-looking, democratic watchmaking that placed mechanical ingenuity within reach of a broad public. Over the following decades, the brand accumulated an impressive portfolio of patents. Patent No. 3 685 283 — the Jump-Hour Patent — re-imagined how time could 'jump' from one hour to the next, replacing the continuous sweep of a conventional hour hand with an instantaneous digital-style advance. Patent No. 3 786 626 introduced the LRD: Light Reflecting Display — a sapphire prism system that projects horizontal discs into a crisp, vertical readout, described by the brand as 'a submarine periscope for the wrist': the viewer reads the time through a prism that bends the light through 90 degrees, so that what is mechanically horizontal becomes optically vertical at the aperture.

The culmination of these innovations arrived in 1976 at the Basel Watch Show, when AMIDA unveiled the Digitrend — the world's first mechanical 'casquette' driver's watch. The casquette form — a wide, flat, rectangular or tonneau-shaped case worn low on the wrist with the dial recessed and angled toward the driver — was at that moment the most futuristic watch silhouette in existence, pioneered for electronic and LED watches but never before achieved in a fully mechanical format. The Digitrend brought the jump-hour and light-reflecting display together in a space-age mechanical package that stunned Basel. Then the Quartz Crisis arrived. Like dozens of Swiss mechanical watchmakers, AMIDA's creative momentum was frozen in mid-stride.

Nearty five decades later, in 2024, after six years of planning, a small crew of pioneers — Matthieu Allègre, Bruno Herbet, and Clément Meynier — reclaimed the AMIDA name and its patents, determined to 'resume the future.' Their stated philosophy is expressed in exactly those terms: the break wasn't an ending, it was a comma, an intermission. The brand is now headquartered at Rue Emma-Kammacher 6 in Meyrin, Geneva. The revived team's approach has been to refine every component of the original Digitrend while preserving the rebellious spirit that defined it — it is still Swiss-made, still rebelliously innovative, and still convinced that every great leap forward begins with a stubbornly creative idea. The result is the new Digitrend collection: a mechanical casquette driver's watch that carries both the jump-hour complication and the Light Reflecting Display prism system directly descended from AMIDA's original patents, in a form that is faithful to the 1976 original's DNA while being built to contemporary standards. Matthieu Allègre — who is also the designer who created the concept sketches for Maison Alcée's Persée clock — brings an established creative pedigree to the visual reinterpretation of the casquette form.

The Digitrend's mechanical display system is as unusual in 2024 as it was in 1976. Where virtually every mechanical watch of the contemporary era displays time through rotating hands on a dial face visible from directly above, the Digitrend presents time through a prism aperture: the movement drives horizontal jump-hour and jumping minute discs, whose numerals are reflected and projected upward through the sapphire prism so that the wearer reads crisp, vertical, digital-style numerals through the aperture on the watch's face. The overall effect is entirely mechanical yet reads like a digital display — an analogue engine producing a digital experience, at a moment when the distinction between the two was not yet commercially significant but was intellectually prescient. The brand sells through its own online store and an international network of authorised retailers, and describes the Digitrend as both a piece of watchmaking history and a live argument that mechanical ingenuity and democratic accessibility are not mutually exclusive.