Ollech & Wajs

Ollech & Wajs was founded in 1956 in Zurich by Joseph Ollech and Albert Wajs, who took a small shop at 55 Stockerstrasse with a retail counter just one metre long, selling Omega and Breitling. They began making their own watches in 1957, first as OWZ (Ollech & Wajs Zürich) and under the Helsa and Piz Palu names, settling on OW from 1959, the year Ollech designed the propeller-shaped OW mark. In 1958 they had become the first Swiss watch brand to sell by mail order, and in 1964 the Caribbean 1000 Precision shocked the industry with a certified 1,000-metre depth rating in a monobloc 'Triple-Safe' case, said to go 700 metres deeper than anything Rolex or Omega had achieved.

A young American soldier's suggestion of a solid, waterproof, accurate watch to replace the usual Hamilton led OW to supply US servicemen from 1965, through base exchange stores and classified ads, at up to 10,000 pieces a year. Wajs recalled assembling them from cases by Maison Bouille, dials from Lender of Le Locle, hands from Universo, and Dubois Depraz chronograph movements, alongside the Valjoux 72B. The Navichron 2002 was among the first chronographs certified to 20 ATM; an Astro-Chron was presented to NASA's Wernher von Braun; and a Ref. 105 dive watch appears in the official NASA portrait of Group 6 astronaut Anthony Llewellyn. The brand also tells the story of the Early Bird, a mail-order watch with a red-and-blue bezel for two time zones sold for US$39.95 through the Army Times; of Red Arrows pilots Terry Kingsley and Peter Evans wearing an OW Precision Chronographe in the 1969 London–Sydney Air Race; and of Sergeant Jerry Hinkle, who wore a Ref. 105 Precision Skin Diver during the siege of Khe Sanh.

OW survived the quartz crisis by scaling back, with Wajs refusing to make anything but mechanical watches, and it remains one of the few Swiss brands never to have used a quartz movement. In 1979 Ollech and Wajs, with Patek Philippe and Helmut Sinn, acquired the tooling, stock parts, and Navitimer designs of the liquidated Breitling and continued the pilot's watch under the name Aviator. Production was rebooted in 1995, and after Ollech's death in 2000 Wajs founded a new company and introduced the M-Series, including the Mirage chronographs on Valjoux 7750 and 7753 calibres. With his eyesight failing, Wajs decided to sell, and in 2017 he handed the company to its former French distributor, a long-term collector.

Every watch is designed at the Ollech & Wajs Precision AG headquarters on Bergstrasse in Zurich, in an 18-month process of more than 30 drawings and eight prototypes tested for water resistance at 100, 400, 1,000, and 1,200 metres. Each is then assembled and adjusted by hand in Haute-Sorne in the Swiss Jura, in a workshop the brand says has served it for over 60 years, with movements tested in three to five positions. Movements come from ETA (the 2824-2), Valjoux (the 7753 in the Navichron and Astrochron), and, since late 2022, Soprod, whose Newton P092 OW has modified to its own specifications with a brutalist finish, an 'OW Zurich 1956' engraved base, an OW-shaped rotor, and five-position adjustment, independently tested at Laboratoire Dubois and given OW's own Precision rating. A special projects division, Dept. 000, develops bespoke watches, recently for a tactical police unit and a US military regimental watch, and every watch carries a three-year warranty.

The current range of 17 watches is priced from CHF 1,596 to CHF 2,796. The Military line holds the Early Bird (CHF 1,956) and the M-52 AU, M-52B AF, MK-102, and numbered-edition MV-82 (CHF 1,596 each); the Pilot line adds the P-104 Selectron (CHF 1,796); the divers are the C-1000 MkII, C-1000 FAGN, C-1000 Y, and Ocean Graph MkII (CHF 1,996 each); the 8000 Series is the 8001 Havana and 8001 Tundra, listed as COSC-certified (CHF 1,996 each); and the chronographs are the Navichron-based Chronograph (CHF 2,496), the Rallychron, Coupe des Alpes, and Rallye de Paris (CHF 2,696 each), and the Astrochron (CHF 2,796). The Astrochron revives the 1967 triple-register chronograph in a 39.5 × 16.8mm brushed steel case with a Valjoux 7753, 500-metre water resistance, a rotating compass bezel with a 20-minute diver's scale, a five-minute Regatta counter, and the North Atlantic blue dial of 1968. A Classics archive lists 18 historic references, from the 1959 Diver and 1964 Caribbean 1000 to the 1995 Flieger.