NIVADA
Founded in Grenchen in 1926 by Jacob Schneider, Nivada spent the middle of the twentieth century supplying robust, legible tool watches to people who needed instruments rather than ornaments. The name carried the suffix Grenchen in some markets and Croton in the United States, a consequence of distribution agreements rather than of any difference in the watches themselves.
The Antarctic and the Chronomaster
The Antarctic of 1957 took its name from the US Navy expedition Operation Deep Freeze, whose members wore it on the ice. The Chronomaster followed in 1963, a chronograph that combined a rotating diving bezel, a tachymeter and a decompression scale on a single dial, and which is now recognised as one of the earliest true multi-purpose sports chronographs.
A Revived Archive
The brand was relaunched in 2020 with reissues drawn closely from its own archive rather than from a reimagined past. The Antarctic, the Chronomaster and the Depthmaster returned in their original proportions, and Nivada has since become one of the clearest cases of a heritage name rebuilt on the strength of the designs it already owned.