Christoph and Simone Schnee founded Belchengruppe in Basel with the aim of exploring the as yet undiscovered possibilities of watch design. In collaboration with Jens Neuber, the first case designs were created in 2017, and in October 2019 the first collection, featuring dials by Jens Neuber and Christoph Ruppli, was launched.

Belchengruppe takes its name from the “Belchen”, five mountains in the tri-border region of Switzerland, Germany and France. As an archaic solar calendar, these mountains around Basel served as a precise timekeeper long before the invention of the mechanical clock: viewed from the Alsatian Belchen (Ballon d'Alsace), the sun rising above the other Belchen peaks marks the beginnings of spring, summer, autumn and winter.

As our namesakes, the mountains embody our dual curiosity: a curiosity for the archaic and for tradition, but also for technology and the ways design continues to evolve.

Just as sunrise can be more than the beginning of a day, our watches do more than tell the time. They make time tangible, create space for personal rituals and bring a sense of joy to every glance at the hands.
 

Time, its passing and our individual perception of it are at the heart of what we do. Inside our watches, a highly precise Swiss movement objectively displays something we each experience differently. The technical accuracy of the mechanics is disrupted by the design, allowing our watches to embody the ambiguity of time: past and future, speed and permanence, day and night.

We take care of imprecise time with precision, both creatively and technically. Because no matter how differently each of us experiences time, whether we live in the Alps or on New York’s Times Square, whether we seek solitude or the company of others, life is shaped by routines, change and the rhythms of our own bodies. No one can escape time, and everyone engages with it, consciously or unconsciously.

But time is more than a social convention. It is also memory, the duration of an experience and hope.