Claude Greisler & Serge Michel

Image
Claude Greisler & Serge Michel - Armin Strom
Co-Founders*

Serge Michel and Claude Greisler have been friends since childhood. They were both born in 1978 in the town of Burgdorf, near Bern, where a certain Armin Strom happened to have set up his first watch shop. Their career choices originally sent them down separate paths. Serge went into advertising and marketing, while Claude trained in watchmaking in Solothurn, then Le Locle, before going to work for Christophe Claret as a designer. In 2006, they both joined Armin Strom, at that time a small, niche brand that nonetheless had an amazingly well-defined identity thanks to the style flair of founder Armin Strom himself, who specialised in the restoration and skeletonisation of movements.

Claude Griesler & Serge Michel

Serge Michel ended up buying out the brand, by this time based in Bienne, and he and Claude embarked on its metamorphosis. Originally, Armin Strom had focused on the work of skeletonising movements, for his own pieces as well as subcontracting for other brands. In 2008, however, the brand entered a new phase, as it started to develop movements and the manufacturing capabilities to produce them. Mr Strom retired in 2011, leaving Serge Michel and Claude Greisler on their own at the helm; they proceeded to launch a large number of highly technical pieces featuring 8-day movements, skeletons, tourbillons, resonance, and the like, whilst remaining loyal to the Strom ethos: skeletonisation that manages to be both expressive and discreet, designed to display the exclusivity of the movement rather than create a ‘wow’ effect.

*On the occasion of GMT Magazine and WorldTempus' 20th anniversary, we have embarked on the ambitious project of summarising the last 20 years in watchmaking in The Millennium Watch Book, a big, beautifully laid out coffee table book. This article is an extract. The Millennium Watch Book is available on www.the-watch-book.com, in French and English, with a 10% discount if you use the following code: WT2021.

Order now

Featured brand