Frederique Constant

Frederique Constant was founded in 1988 by Peter Stas and Aletta Stas-Bax, a Dutch couple who named the brand after their great-grandparents Frédérique Schreiner and Constant Stas. The first collection appeared in 1992; the company later moved to Geneva and since 2006 has occupied its own manufacture in Plan-les-Ouates. Its stated aim from the start was to make classically styled Swiss mechanical watches more widely accessible. In 2004 it introduced its first in-house calibre, the hand-wound FC-910, in the Heart Beat Manufacture, which exposes the balance through an aperture on the dial; a tourbillon with a silicon escape wheel followed in 2008 and a perpetual calendar in 2016.

The group acquired Alpina in 2002 and was a co-founder of Ateliers deMonaco. In 2015 it launched the Horological Smartwatch, an analogue watch with connected functions. Citizen Watch Co. bought the company in 2016; it continues to operate from Geneva with the Classics, Slimline, Highlife and Manufacture lines as its core collections.