Armin Strom

Mr. Armin Strom studied watchmaking and set up his own store in his native town of Burgdorf in 1967. In parallel with the normal activity of a small watch shop, he also offered a restoration service and gradually developed a particular knack for the art of hand skeletonizing, long before it became fashionable among the mainstream brands. His desire to push the limits of his skills earned him a Guinness World Record in 1990 after he created the world’s smallest hand-skeletonised watch for ladies. When Armin Strom was looking for someone to take over the company, Serge Michel, a watch collector and friend of the family, jumped at the chance, bringing his childhood friend and watchmaker Claude Greisler on board with him. With memories of the man of mystery who would head off in his exotic Jaguar E-Type to deliver watches to his customers personally, Serge and Claude drew up ambitious plans to uphold the Armin Strom legacy of skeletonizing and fine watchmaking and at the same time develop the brand into a fully-fledged “manufacture” in the true sense of the word, the young team producing the majority of their movement components in-house. Armin Strom started the production of its own mainplates, bridges, levers, springs, wheels, pinions and screws in 2008 and one year later presented its first in-house calibre, the ARM09 with 8-day power reserve. This established the brand’s credentials as a “manufacture”, which Armin Strom has constantly developed ever since, achieving a level of vertical integration that is now measured quite precisely at 97%. The rest is history. The relatively short history of a brand that has grown from zero to hero in a decade, starting out with its own base calibre and quickly evolving to produce its own design of a tourbillon and, more recently, revolutionizing the industry with the Mirrored Force Resonance.