Adam Reeder
Mathey-Tissot is a Swiss watch brand that you’ve probably never heard of, but should know about. First off, the brand has nothing to do with Tissot, another heritage Swiss brand that you probably know. While Tissot makes great timepieces at affordable prices, the two brands have no connection whatsoever. However, Mathey-Tissot is a watchmaker whose history and future are worth discussing and perhaps pondering.
A complicated past
The brand was founded in 1886 by watchmaker Edmond Massey Tissot in Pont de Martel, Switzerland. Although the company had early success with well-made complications such as chiming minute repeater pocket watches, Massey Tissot’s biggest growth came from armed conflict. One of the brand’s first major orders was for minute repeater pocket watches for an entire British regiment sent to fight local forces in South Africa. It would not be the last time Massey Tissot was asked to supply watches to the military.
Massey Tissot watches were beloved by military personnel for their accuracy, and over the brand’s first 30 years, it won numerous prestigious awards for accuracy, including a “Class A” rating at the Kew Observatory competition in London. Massey Tissot quickly became one of Switzerland’s most respected watchmakers, and their watches were considered to be among the best that money could buy.
With the outbreak of World War I, opportunities for Massey Tissot expanded even further. The company’s high-precision chronographs were adopted by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, a major endorsement of the quality and precision of the company’s watches. Furthermore, one of the most famous leaders of the American military, General Pershing, gifted his staff with Massey Tissot watches. The brand supplied thousands of watches to both the US and British armies during World War II.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the French military commissioned a project that would produce one of the most iconic chronographs in history. The French Ministry of Defense requested the development of a pilot chronograph, including a dual-register flyback chronograph measuring approximately 38mm. The result was the Type XX, a military-spec pilot chronograph that would be issued to military personnel for decades. It was also produced for the civilian market. Massey Tissot was not only one of the first suppliers of Type XX watches to the French military, but was also contracted by Breguet to manufacture the early Type XX models. Many of the early Type XXs under the Massey Tissot brand can fetch tens of thousands of dollars on the vintage watch market. Only a handful of modern watch brands can boast such a storied military pedigree as Massey Tissot. While this history is impressive, it is important to remember that the brand’s reach extended far beyond trench warfare and aerial combat.
Fit for a King
In the 60s and 70s, Massey Tissot established itself as a popular brand among the general public and celebrities alike. The King himself, Elvis Presley, commissioned dozens of customized Massey Tissot watches for his closest friends and family. Customized directly by Massey Tissot, the gold-plated automatic watches feature Elvis Presley’s name engraved on the bezel around the edge of the dial. The watches come with a certificate signed by one of Elvis’ entourage, explaining that the owner of the watch has exclusive access to the King’s entourage – the front gate, backstage and everywhere in between.
Throughout the 1970s, Massey Tissot held a global reputation for luxury timepieces that combined tradition and glamour. This reputation is reflected in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, where notorious union boss Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) presents union official and hitman Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) with a gold-and-jeweled Massey Tissot as a symbol of the important role he played in Hoffa’s organization. While watches are often used as symbols in art and literature, the watch was an important metaphor in Scorsese’s storytelling.
Lost Years
As the old saying goes, nothing lasts forever. Since the 1990s, Mathey-Tissot’s presence and reputation in the international watch market has slowly declined. Part of this decline can be attributed to the quartz revolution and Mathey-Tissot’s need to rely on quartz to survive. As a smaller brand, Mathey-Tissot is responsible for its own survival and does not have the benefit of a larger corporation to back its reputation.
As a result of this decline in influence, the brand seems to have focused much of its energy over the past decade on creating homage watches to brands like Rolex, Patek Philippe, and others. Watch collectors are a fickle lot, and this may have been the only way to keep the money flowing to the brand and the stores afloat. Whatever the reasons for this decision, no one would dispute that Massey Tissot has managed to remain a viable business through these difficult decades. But the brand seems ready to change direction.
The way forward
Those who have always believed in the brand and its heritage point to its staying power as the company’s greatest asset. Alberto Frigerio was enthusiastic when he became CEO of Massey Tissot in 1994. He was a fan of the brand and had a passion for its history. He believed in the brand so much that he bought the company in 2013 and owns it to this day. In recent years, Massey Tissot has slowly started to move away from a strategy of primarily offering homage-style watches to other Swiss luxury brands. They have started to place more emphasis on their own heritage.
The most interesting of these releases are the reimaginings of some of their earlier Type XX designs. They have collaborated with popular aviation-based microbrands Hemel and Asian Mechanical Watch Group to offer period-accurate 38mm Type XX chronographs in both quartz and mechanical. They have also begun digging deeper into their catalog to reissue other models, such as the 1970s Melgrador diver. This test run is encouraging for those rooting for these phoenix brands to rise from the ashes of obscurity and return to greatness, but there is still a long way to go. A good start would be to pare down the collection, which currently counts around 500 references across dozens of model families. If Breitling’s acquisition of the Universal Genève brand proves anything, it’s that anything is possible when it comes to a traditional brand like Massey Tissot.
