Drive south from Biel into the Franches Montagnes and the road climbs for half an hour. Farms give way to spruce, the air thins, and eventually you reach Les Genevez, a village small enough that the whole of it fits in one glance. There is a workshop here. Every Claude Bernard watch in the world is put together inside it, by hand, one at a time.
That is an unusual sentence to be able to write in 2026, and it is the reason this brand exists in the shape it does.
A company from 1973
The paperwork is dull and we love it anyway. On 13 September 1973 a watch company was entered in the Swiss commercial register at this address. It has belonged to the Strambini family from that day to this. No investors, no holding structure, no parent group in another country deciding what happens next.
Fifty-two years is long enough for the founder's son to be running the business, which is exactly what happened. Alexandre Strambini leads it now.
The year the industry nearly ended
By the early 1980s Swiss watchmaking was in freefall. Quartz had arrived from Japan, and it had taken the trade apart with a speed nobody had planned for. Workshops closed across the Jura. Names that had existed for a century were put up for sale by the groups that could no longer carry them.
One of those names was Edox, founded in Biel in 1884. In 1983 Victor Strambini bought it and brought it up the hill to Les Genevez, to sit alongside the smaller company he already had.
Both are still here, in the same building, under the same family. Your Claude Bernard is assembled by the people who also build Edox, on the same benches, to the same standard. That is not a marketing arrangement. It is simply where the work happens.
What Swiss made has to mean
Two words on a dial are governed by Swiss federal law, and the law got stricter on 1 January 2017. At least 60 per cent of what a watch costs to make must now be spent in Switzerland. The movement has to clear that bar on its own. The case has to be closed in Switzerland, and the finished watch has to be inspected there before it leaves.
Those rules are hardest to meet at the affordable end, where every franc is visible in the retail price. Keeping production in a Jura village was never the cheap option. It is the reason we can put the words on the dial and mean them.
The things you will actually notice
Sapphire glass on every watch we make. It is the second hardest material on earth after diamond, and it is why the crystal still looks new after two years in a coat pocket, on a desk, against a car door.
Swiss movements throughout, in quartz and automatic. On the automatics we favour complications you can see working: a moon phase that tracks the real one, an open heart aperture showing the balance wheel, a fully skeletonised dial for anyone who wants the whole mechanism on display.
And assembly by hand, by a watchmaker, in a workshop where the person fitting your movement could tell you their name.
Seven collections
Slim Line for a watch that disappears under a cuff. Aquarider when it needs to survive water. Dress Code for the evenings that call for something quieter. Proud Heritage for aviation styling and mechanical movements. NEO 1973, named for the year on that register entry. Ora Vera for everyday. Classic, which is exactly what it says.
Around 224 references between them, which means the difficulty is rarely finding something you like. It is usually choosing.
Where to see one
Canadian dollar pricing and the full range sit on this site, and the store finder will point you to an authorised retailer near you. If you would rather read an outside account of the company first, Canadian Jeweller Magazine published a detailed history of the brand and the 1983 Edox purchase: Claude Bernard Watches: The 1973 Swiss House Behind Edox.