WAT C H E S


MY OTHER WATCH IS A


The timepieces produced by high-tech Porsche Design now share more than just a name with the prestige car brand – and are all the better for it


PORSCHE WOR D S C HRIS HA L L 85


LEFT AND BELOW: 1999 Datetimer Eternity 70Y Sports Car limited edition; Monobloc Actuator Chronotimer Flyback limited edition


became a subsidiary of Porsche AG in 2003, date back to 1972, when Ferdinand Alexander Porsche, grandson of the car maker’s founder and designer of the 911, leſt the car business to set up the Porsche Design Studio. One of his first commissions came from the family business itself, which was looking for a watch to give to long- serving employees: the result, the Porsche Design Chronograph 1, would go on to make history as the very first all-black watch – a look so commonplace today it’s hard to imagine a time before it existed. Porsche Design (which has undergone


P bus ine s s tr a v el ler .c om


a number of name changes over the years; the watches, however, always bore the name “Porsche Design”) never actually built the watches itself. Instead, it worked with various Swiss partners; firstly with a little-known brand called Orfina, then most successfully with IWC, a partnership


erhaps better known for its sunglasses, luggage and cooler-than-ice looks, Porsche Design has in fact been a noteworthy name in watchmaking since the mid-1980s.


Te origins of the company, which


that gave rise to the world’s first fully titanium-cased watch in 1980 and oddities such as a watch with a dial that flipped upwards to reveal a compass underneath. From 1998 to 2014 it worked with Eterna


(which was itself owned by a subsidiary of Porsche AG from 1995). Sadly, the latter years of this partnership yielded little in the way of interesting watches, as Eterna was sold to Chinese owners in 2011. Ten in 2014 it was announced that Porsche Design would be bringing control of its watchmaking in-house. Today, the watches are designed at


Porsche Design’s Zell am See headquarters in Austria and produced in Switzerland by Porsche Design Timepieces AG, benefitting from R&D input from Porsche AG’s team in Stuttgart. Te company structure is complex but, in a nutshell, what used to be a brand that traded on its design know-how and derived more than a little cachet from having the word “Porsche” in its name, now Porsche Design is very much the car maker’s in-house watch brand. Regardless of this history of complicated


corporate manoeuvres, talk to staff at Porsche Design and there is a proud sense that their watch business belongs with the →


SEP T E M B ER 2 0 18


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