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| Ventura Watches |
The Ventura brand was literally created in flight. "Years ago I was flying over the West Coast of the U.S.A. and found the name Ventura on a map, a place near Los Angeles. I thought this would be a good name for a contemporary watch," Pierre Nobs reminisces.
The adventure of starting his own brand began for Zurich native Pierre Nobs, as he relates himself, with the will to break out of his old job at a private label company. "The way that watches were produced between 1920 and 1950 has always fascinated me," he explains his passion. "Back then a new model was planned as an architect would plan a house, with a sense of longevity." It was this belief in quality as well as the support of his wife Yuko that finally made it possible to realize the dream of creating his own watch brand.
The first watches with the brand name Ventura came on the market in 1987. The brand brought out the highly successful digital watch by Danish designer Flemming Bo Hansen called "Watch" in 1989. Shortly thereafter the unconventional timepiece with the large rectangular digital display was taken into the design collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. "Watch" lives on in today's
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d_SPARC fx, contemporarily outfitted with an autoquartz movement that doesn't need batteries. Since the bulbous case shape is not to everyone's taste, the company recently introduced a rectangular, slightly wedge-shaped version that cunningly conceals the volume of the rotor-driven movement called d_SPARC px. Hannes Wettstein has, in the meantime, completely taken charge of Ventura's design. This is the man whom mechanic freaks might know from Ventura's cult object v-matic. Wettstein, for whom the subject of "watch" was new, needed clear requirements for the product before he could begin designing it. "That's why the v-matic was the first watch for which we had to create a specification booklet," Nobs remembers.
Wettstein's shapes may seem unusual at first glance, but they always prove to be ergonomic and practical, as seen in both the downward tapering body of the v-matic, the cylindrically arched case of the v-tronic SPARC, and the desk shape of the recently introduced v-tec Alpha. This digital innovation shines not only with its shape, but also with the "skroll" that it borrows from computer technology and with which all of the functions are controlled. Nobs always seems to find the respective material for his products:
Following surgical stainless steel and sintered hard metal, nitrogen-hardened titanium is now being utilized.
A further specialty of the house and perfectionist owner Nobs is the fact that almost all Ventura watches sold today are delivered with COSC. official chronometer certificate. This also includes the current new mechanical model v-matic myEGO Adrian Frutiger. The man for whom the watch is named has created a dial that can hardly be beat for clarity. Adrian Frutiger is a designer who has already created numerous well-known fonts such as Univers and Frutiger, and was also responsible for the labeling of the entire Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.
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Vulcain
Stettbachstrasse 6
CH-8600 Dubendorf
www.ventura-watches.com
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