What is one supposed to make of H. Moser & Cie.? Ask a room full of collectors to describe the brand, and there are a handful of responses you’re sure to get: exciting, modern, and fun being foremost among them. Moser, under the watchful eyes of the Meylan family, has cultivated a unique offering, one characterized by a contemporary, streamlined (pun regrettably intended) catalog and an eye toward collaboration.

Whether you’re wondering at one of the brand’s latest high-complication pieces or throwing on any of their impeccable time-only sports watches, it’s hard to deny that few brands manage to balance an appetite for solid, wearable, everyday watches with elegantly implemented complications, so nimbly as Moser. Even fewer manage to accomplish this while navigating the self-serious world of watches with the same sense of humor and energy that H. Moser & Cie. has under the stewardship of the Meylan family. 

I was lucky enough to spend an hour with Edouard Meylan, the CEO of H. Moser & Cie., to talk about everything Moser, and right off the bat, he acknowledged this tightrope. “I think we went further into this idea of bringing those two worlds together [the traditional and the modern]. Staying very traditional, like the movements and those kinds of things,” he explained, “but at the same time bringing a touch of more modern, more us. I couldn’t picture it back then I knew I wanted to bring that.”

“I remember the first Baselworld, it was like the first months after I started, the gift we brought to our guests was a green apple. We didn’t have a budget, so we gave them a green apple with our logo on it. And I was like, this is the fresh taste that we want to bring. And the green — like this bright green apple is what I want to project for our brand. I had a picture of a Porsche 360 in bright green, the same color as that apple. And I was trying to say, you can be this vintage car, but at the same time, because it’s green, it’s super cool. That’s what I want to do with Moser. So I didn’t know in what form, but there was this idea of being this kind of bridge between traditional and modern watchmaking.”

If you’ve found yourself paying attention to Moser at any point over the last dozen or so years, it’s hard to deny that Moser has turned this bridge concept into a powerful brand identity, to the point that it’s hard to predict what turns the brand might make. After all, while Moser may be a brand you can easily turn to for a handsome perpetual calendar or high-end chronograph, they’re the same brand that makes watches out of cheese and reimagines the Apple Watch as a Vantablack-dialed minute-repeater with no discernible display of time. “I think when you have a wide collection, sometimes you need those kinds of outlier watches,” Meylan told me.

“I think it’s a little bit of who we are, and at the same time, I’d like to say, Moser, at that time, we were kind of teenagers as a brand. It was a teenage brand, in the sense that you need to emancipate. You need to express your opinions and play a little bit — elbow against the adults. There’s this struggle of showing who you are and where you stand because the big question was why do you need another brand like this one?”

Landing on the right approach was a process. “Suddenly we struck a formula that worked for us,” Meylan explained, “which was to use symbolism to express our opinions — it’s kind of activism for us. And when we realized that worked for us, then we said, okay, let’s use the same formula over and over again. And that meant finding the right message, creating a crazy product, using humor and provocation, and doing it in January every year, pretty much. That was the formula, and that’s what we did until we burnt a little bit our fingers.”

“I think we continue to try things, to explore, to do things a little bit differently from the others. It’s part of what Moser stands for today. I think it works because it is quite consistent across the products and the communication and also a little bit of who we are as people.”

Of course, none of this is to say that the profound sense of irreverence that winds its way through the brand comes at the price of the watches themselves. On the contrary, the watches Moser is putting out into the world are among the best you’ll find today. And no watch is a better example of this reality than the H. Moser & Cie. Endeavour Perpetual Calendar Tantalum, which I was fortunate to spend some time with in the days after my sit-down with Ed Meylan.

A Unique Take on the Perpetual Calendar

If I asked you to conjure up an image of a perpetual calendar in your mind, what would you imagine? Whatever the answer, my guess is that a near-sterile dial tantalum watch with a violently blue dial isn’t what you imagined. In the hundred or so years since Patek Philippe produced the first perpetual calendar wristwatch, the formula for a perpetual calendar has been relatively set, with subdials aplenty and a tendency to skew towards the classical.

Even the most modern perpetual calendars, like Patek’s in-line 5236P, default to presenting you with as much information as they can. Not so with Moser’s Perpetual Calendars. Instead of rubbing your nose in the sheer complexity of a watch that can theoretically keep time and date for the rest of our lives, Moser’s take on the iconic complication strips away the detail, applying the brand’s signature minimalist approach to an otherwise crowded complication.

The result is something immensely special, and unlike anything else you’ll find on the market — even if some might mistake it for a simple time and date watch (at least if they don’t know better). “The philosophy of the brand in terms of products,” according to Meylan, is “minimalism, understated [watches] with very ingenious movements.”

But the real magic of the Endeavour Perpetual Calendar Tantalum is just how easily it could be confused for any number of other watches from the brand’s catalog. On its surface, the minimal layout of the Endeavour Perpetual Calendar seems to leave a lot to the imagination, and without the typical subdials and pointer hands found on other perpetual calendars, it can be easy to feel a bit lost, but the watch’s perceived sterility and simplicity belies a world of work, thought, and real-world practicality.

Small technical details can easily be forgotten in the face of a watch as beautiful as the Endeavour Perpetual Calendar, but they aren’t secondary to Moser. Subtle details, like the ability to set the calendar forward or back at any time of day, may seem trivial, but in the history of perpetual calendar watches (which have often demanded a sensitive hand even when performing the simplest adjustments), it’s a big step forward.

This focus on even the smallest details, both technical and aesthetic, is a sign not just of Moser’s commitment to making great watches, but also of the brand’s awareness that the goalposts are always moving, especially as other brands try to play catch-up with Moser — especially when it comes to dials.

“Now we see more and more people copying the Moser dials,” says Meylan. “And they really go to the suppliers [saying] can I have a Moser dial? So that’s why we started doing the enamel dials, because I always told the team, we need to have the most beautiful dials. We need to be better. We need to be one step ahead of the others. In two years’ time, everybody will have those, so we need to continue to push there.”

Black, or Slightly Darker Black

Possibly the best example of this push toward new and different dials comes thanks to the innovative material Vantablack, a unique coating that absorbs nearly all light. The absolutely bonkers material is as black as you can possibly imagine, to the point that it slightly breaks your brain to see it in person. H. Moser & Cie. was the first (and so far only, to my knowledge) brand to make use of the material, and it has, in the space of a few years, become as much a part of the brand as any other visual hallmark. 

“The origin is, we’re known for fumé. So at some point, we’re like, black is still the color forever — like the little black dress type of thing — but we cannot do a black fumé, it doesn’t make any sense. So how do we make something? Because at Moser, the philosophy is it has to be different from the others. Otherwise, people start comparing and they usually buy the most known brand. So we need something that is completely different. That’s when I came across Vantablack.”

Not everyone was immediately on board with incorporating Vantablack into the lineup, however. “I talked to the team and they said it’s too complicated,” Meylan explained. “It’s too difficult. We’re not going to be able to use it as a brand [but] let’s try. It’s not because nobody else has done it that we cannot do it. And if it requires special tools, it’s brands in our price point that can do this. And to be honest, I think we slowly, over the years, managed to build a brand and a team that is open to those kinds of things. In the beginning, they were pushing back on anything that was slightly innovative. It was like, ah, no, we cannot do it. And suddenly they realized that it was actually cool. And we give them the freedom and the time to do it.”

Of course, working with a material entirely new to watchmaking presents its own set of challenges, especially one as delicate as Vantablack, which is essentially destroyed if you touch it the wrong way. “To be honest, with Vantablack, it’s like super complicated to set the hands or indexes and stuff, et cetera. So one opportunity we had with Moser is that we don’t have a logo and we don’t have indexes. So we’re like, we just need a small hole in the middle…and make sure that we don’t break the structure when we set the hands.”

“And when Mark [Cho] came up with his ideas of having indexes with small holes, the team said, no, it’s impossible because we cannot put anything on the Vantaback. So I told the team, I said, but we can make the hole for the, for the hands. They’re like, yeah. I said that means that if we have the hole from the indexes and we put something behind, we will see it. Yeah. And they’re like, okay. So that’s when it started.”

An Eye Toward Collaboration

Moser’s conversations with Mark Cho eventually led to the Endeavour Small Seconds Total Eclipse, a refined take on the Endeavour with clear nods to classical watchmaking. That watch is just one (well, technically two) of the many collaborations H. Moser & Cie. has participated in during Ed Meylan’s tenure at the helm of the brand. In fact, collaboration has been one of the key tools the brand has used to push itself forward.

In speaking with Ed, it quickly became clear that the brand’s inclination toward collaboration isn’t just functional to the brand, it’s foundational. “Since day one, I’ve worked a lot with independent brands and I always saw the struggle. If you focus on your core circle of collectors, you’re so dependent on those guys that every year you need to strike a novelty, something hot — we realized that collaborations helped expand that circle within the watchmaking community, but also beyond that.”

It’s in that spirit of expansion that Moser has looked beyond the world of high-end watches to fuel their collaborative fire. Over the last few years they’ve worked with everyone from streetwear brands, like Undefeated, to the Alpine F1 team, who they began working with as a sponsor at the beginning of the 2024 season — they managed to bring the first of two Alpine edition Streamliners to market in just four months, a remarkable timeline for any watch brand, but an absolutely incredible achievement for one of Moser’s scale.

That’s not to say that they’ve shied away from working with watch brands — two of their most exciting collaborators in recent years have been watch brands at polar opposite ends of the watch world; MB&F and Studio Underd0g — the latter of which yielded one of the most discussed and exciting collaborations of 2024. “I love that so many people said, ‘Oh, I didn’t see it coming.’”

“When we did something with Studio Underd0g, the idea was really, they [are] very young and extremely dynamic. [We have] a lot of overlaps in terms of community, but a lot of their people don’t know us and a lot of our people don’t know them. So we thought by coming together we expand, again, the circle… It’s important while continuing to be fresh, different, create the unexpected.”

So Where Does Moser Go From Here?

So what will the unexpected look like for Moser moving forward? Well, from the sound of it, there is plenty of excitement on the horizon (much of which I’ve promised to keep under my hat for now), but one big step will come in the next generation of Moser complicated watches.

“Right now with Moser, we have a lot of the complications, but we never really combined the complications. So now it’s more the idea of how to bring them together… My dream is: we have an amazing repeater, we have an amazing chronograph, we have an amazing perpetual calendar. How do you put them together?” H. Moser