Every Watch Secretly Powered by the Zenith El Primero

When Zenith dropped the cover on the G.F.J. Calibre 135 Double Signed with Naoya Hida & Co., the ten-piece platinum watch kicking off its new Double Signed Program, my mind wandered less to the watch than to the long line of watches behind it. "Watchmaking has always evolved through exchange: between cultures, crafts and passion," Zenith chief executive Benoit de Clerck said of the program. While that's true enough, Zenith has been handing its movements to other people far longer, and those deals were rarely as romantic as a co-signed dial suggests.

There's the Zenith-powered Daytona, familiar to all, but that conversation's been beaten to death. The more you dig, the deeper the rabbit hole goes.

For six decades, Zenith calibers, the El Primero chief among them, have kept surfacing under other brands' names, and the bargain almost never changed; the partner leaned on the Zenith name and its movement, while Zenith reached a corner of the market it wouldn't have on its own.

"Zenith is certainly famous for supplying movements to third parties," said Sébastien Chaulmontet, a vintage chronograph collector and head of innovation and marketing at Sellita, Switzerland's second-largest movement maker, "but they were far from unique. Historically, companies such as Jaeger-LeCoultre (LeCoultre to be historically accurate), Angelus, Minerva, Excelsior Park and many others supplied movements to external brands. In fact, Jaeger-LeCoultre became a major supplier long before it became successful as a watch brand in its own right." What sets Zenith apart is less the practice than how long it kept at it.

In 1969 Zenith, Movado and Mondia combined into a single Swiss holding company, and the timing was no accident; selling under its own name in the States had long been a headache thanks to the Zenith Radio Corporation, which guarded the trademark, so the merger let it ship watches as Movado instead. Before long the El Primero was beating inside the Movado Datron HS 360, the same chronograph in a different suit; the kicker came a few years later, when the American Zenith bought the whole Swiss group.

Fast forward to the 1980s and things get bleaker. Zenith's owners had decided mechanical watchmaking was finished and ordered the El Primero tooling destroyed. Were it not for one senior engineer, Charles Vermot, who defied the order and walled up the tools, plans and parts in the factory attic, the next watch would’ve never happened. When Ebel came knocking for a chronograph it couldn't build itself, the tooling was right there, and the El Primero went into the Ebel Sport Classic Chronograph in 1982, six years before the first Zenith-powered Daytona turned up in 1988.

The full tangle of who owned whom is a standalone sidequest. By 1997 the El Primero had become a borrowed prestige for anyone who could get hold of it. Zenith and Movado were separate companies under separate owners by then, and it still didn't stop them; the Movado Group's Concord dropped the El Primero, in its triple-calendar caliber 411 form, into the bold and rather maximalist Impresario chronograph. That's the watch that sent me down this rabbit hole, because I own one, and it's one of the loudest, least subtle things in my collection.

Since 1999 Zenith has belonged to LVMH, which might have ended the lending, the brand now inside a group with watches to feed; instead it did the opposite. The caliber turned up in the TAG Heuer Monza Calibre 36 and Hublot's Spirit of Big Bang, and the group didn't even keep it in the family, sending some 250 El Primero movements to a rival in 2002, Richemont, for a limited run of Panerai's Luminor Chronograph, the PAM 121.

As Chaulmontet told Crown & Caliber, "I would even argue that Zenith's long history as a movement supplier is not necessarily a triumphant story. Rather, it illustrates how difficult it is to sustain a manufacture, even one with exceptional technical capabilities and a legendary caliber such as the El Primero. Zenith has struggled commercially for much of its modern history (let's say the last 50 years), and movement sales were often more a necessity than a strategic choice."

Plenty of Swiss names folded for good in the quartz years. Zenith survived, helped along by the movements it kept supplying to other brands, and today it makes watches of its own. The Double Signed program is the sequel. The old deals were struck out of need and kept off the dial; this one is the dial, two names there by design rather than desperation, and this time Zenith is choosing the company it keeps rather than being forced into it.

The crossover watches carry a present-day appeal of their own. An El Primero is an El Primero wherever it lands, so the Ebel Sport Classic, the Concord Impresario and most of the rest run the same movement that powers a Zenith-era Daytona, usually for a fraction of the price, which still makes them some of the smartest sleeper buys in collecting. Naoya Hida, who designed the watch's dial, said in Zenith's launch materials, "I have been captivated by the Calibre 135 since discovering it in the 1990s," and I understand the feeling. My loud little Concord isn't going anywhere, mind you, and I'm glad to own a small piece of a habit that, this one time, was nobody's emergency.