Urwerk is an independent Swiss watch brand co-founded by Felix Baumgartner (master watchmaker) and Martin Frei (artist/designer) in 1997.

Since its establishment, Urwerk ’s original approach to watchmaking has shaken the traditionalists and won the respect of collectors. Irreverent, rebellious, eccentric can each describe Urwerk ’s watchmaking with varying accuracy, but its watches unerringly open the way forward for mechanical watchmaking in the 21st century.

Urwerk  is what translates the hearts and minds of its founding partners into sensational watchmaking. Felix Baumgartner, a watchmaker like his father and grandfather, has time running through his veins. A star graduate from the Schaffhausen watchmaking school, Felix learned the secret language of minute repeaters, tourbillons and perpetual calendars at his father’s bench.

Martin Frei is the artistic counterweight to his partner’s technical expertise. Accepted into the Lucerne’s college of art and design in 1987, Martin delved into every form of visual artistic expression from painting and sculpture to video, emerging as a mature artist. The two men met by chance and discovered a common fascination with the measurement of time, spending hours analysing the gap between the watches they saw in the shops and the vision of their future creation.

Their first watch, developed in the early nineties, was inspired by the 17th-century night clock built by the Campanus brothers. In it, each hour on a rotating disc rises and sets in an arc like the sun. The wandering hour has since formed the basis for Urwerk ’s astonishing 103 watch and the latest model, the 201. Both feature highly original design, advanced watchmaking techniques and new concepts such as the control board.

Urwerk  means “original accomplishment,” and Ur of the Chaldees, in Mesopotamia, is where the Sumerians first observed the concurrence of the heavenly bodies with the seasons, and so developed the first measurements of time.