To celebrate its 20th anniversary, MeisterSinger is celebrating with a number of new innovations.
Its Bell Hora model is now reviving an almost forgotten complication – the “sonnerie au passage” – which rings out a chime every hour on the hour.
In a limited anniversary edition, the Bell Hora has been designed in the style of an early pocket watch.
MeisterSinger’s successful moon phase display has also been reinvented in the form of the Stratoscope.
Housed in an impressive 43-millimeter case, the luminous moon orbits the earth across the dark night sky above a horizon of blue aurora borealis.
A highlight among this year’s novelties is the Edition Planet Earth, which was created in cooperation with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
For every watch sold, MeisterSinger and its business partners will waive an equal share of €200, which will be donated to WWF as direct support.
Reflecting on the brand’s 20-year history, the vision of founder and managing director Manfred Brassler was to create a watch that reflects not only the precision, but also the aesthetics and fascinating charisma of early measuring instruments.
Furthermore, the watch had to be designed with just one single hand.
With this characteristic, MeisterSinger goes back to the very beginnings of watchmaking, as all mechanical watches and clocks made up to the 18th century featured only one hand.
It was only with the onset of industrialization that minute and second hands were added.
Today, MeisterSinger shows how relaxing it is to read the time in an original, traditional way.
How it all began
Manfred Brassler’s initial ideas about creating his own watch brand go back to the year 1998.
With his first accurate drawings, Brassler commissioned the making of the first 1,000 watches in 2001.
Three months later, armed with some pre-production samples, he went on his first sales trip and managed to get 76 jewelers in Germany interested in MeisterSinger watches within the first 12 months.
For the first four years he ran his watch brand as a one-man show, including product development, purchasing, graphic design, marketing, sales, service, and a great deal of talking to various banks.
Today
The MeisterSinger brand is now supported by a team of highly motivated, enthusiastic employees while over 500 highly regarded watch and jewelry retailers sell MeisterSinger single-hand watches.
Brassler himself comments: “The challenge of reinventing the brand with its products year after year is still driven by a tremendous amount of enthusiasm. And that’s the way it has always been, because when I do something with joy, it’s no longer work, but a sheer pleasure and always a matter very close to my heart.”