Some watch brands are built on a single icon. Tissot is built on something rarer: more than 170 years of saying yes to the world. A family workshop in a Swiss mountain town that sent its son across an empire by sledge, outlasted a revolution, helped found the group that saved Swiss watchmaking, and is still putting serious mechanical watches on ordinary wrists today. This is that story.
Tissot began in 1853 in Le Locle, high in the Jura mountains, the cradle of Swiss watchmaking. The founders were a father-and-son team: Charles-Félicien Tissot, a gold case-fitter, and his son Charles-Émile Tissot, a trained watchmaker. Father handled the cases; son handled the movements. It was a small assembly workshop, run out of the family home, much like dozens of others in the valley.
What set Tissot apart from day one was not the workshop. It was ambition. The Tissots aimed their watches abroad, at a time when most of their neighbours were content selling locally.
Charles-Émile was the business dreamer of the family. After opening up the American market, he set out for the Russian Empire in 1858, just five years after the company was founded. He travelled huge distances to build a clientele, selling Tissot's elegant savonnette (hunter-case) pocket watches, and secured permission to sell them across the Tsar's vast territory.
Over his career he made dozens of journeys. Tissot's own historians have added it up: roughly seven years and 99 days spent away from home on his major trips to America and Russia alone. In an age of steamships and horse-drawn travel, that is a life spent on the road for the brand.
The Russian connection became a family affair in the next generation. In 1885, Charles-Émile's son, Charles Tissot (the founder's grandson), moved to Moscow to run the branch his father had set up there. He married a Russian woman and raised his family in Russia; his son Paul, who would later lead the company, was born in 1890.
Russia became Tissot's single biggest market, and its pocket watches made their way into the circles of the imperial court, with sources linking them to the court of Tsar Alexander II. Tissot also supplied the military: around 1904 it produced the so-called "Tsar watch" for an officer of the imperial guard, and it was making watches for the Russian Imperial Army in that period.
A quick note for accuracy: there was no Russian president in this era. Russia was ruled by the Tsar, and the connection was to the imperial court and army, not to an elected leader.
Then history turned. The October Revolution of 1917 swept away the Tsar, the court and Tissot's largest market almost overnight. It was a blow to both the business and the family. Many watch houses never recovered from losing Russia. Tissot adapted.
Instead of mourning the old empire, Tissot reinvented itself for the wristwatch age:
The Great Depression hit Swiss watchmaking hard. Tissot's answer was partnership. Building on a commercial agreement with Omega from 1925, Tissot and Omega joined forces in 1930 to create SSIH (Société Suisse pour l'Industrie Horlogère). Paul Tissot, the boy born in Russia, became a key figure in the new group.
Lemania soon joined, and over the decades SSIH added more names. The Tissot-Omega watches of this era are still prized by collectors. More importantly, SSIH would become one of the two pillars of the modern Swatch Group.
In the 1970s, cheap and highly accurate quartz watches, mostly from Japan, flooded the market. Swiss mechanical watchmaking went into free fall, and SSIH's revenues collapsed. At one point, creditor banks were even weighing a sale of the Swiss groups to Japanese buyers.
Enter Nicolas G. Hayek. Hired by the banks to restructure the industry, he pushed for SSIH (Omega and Tissot) to merge with its rival ASUAG, the movement maker that owned ETA. The merger came in 1983; in 1985 Hayek and a group of investors took control, and the company became SMH, renamed The Swatch Group in 1998. The plastic Swatch watch generated the cash that financed the revival of everything else.
So why did Tissot survive when so many old names disappeared? It was already one of the founding pillars of SSIH, so it came into the new group from the inside. But Hayek also had good reasons to keep it and invest in it:
Today Tissot still lives in Le Locle, sells in some 160 countries, and is the Swatch Group's mid-range anchor.
Tissot's importance now is about access. Its Powermatic 80 movement, with an 80-hour power reserve and an anti-magnetic Nivachron balance spring in many versions, put specifications once reserved for expensive watches into watches under $1,000. The PRX, revived from a 1978 design in 2021, became one of the defining watches of the decade and pulled a whole new generation into mechanical watch collecting.
For many collectors, a Tissot is the first Swiss watch they ever buy. That has been the brand's role since 1853: taking good Swiss watchmaking and getting it out into the world.
That history comes full circle with this year's new Tissot Visodate, released in March 2026. It revives the 1950s classic that followed the Centenary model, the watch Tissot made to celebrate its first hundred years.
It is the whole Tissot story in one watch: a design born from a centenary, powered by modern Swatch Group engineering, priced so that people can actually wear it.
From a father-and-son workshop in Le Locle, to a dreamer crossing the Russian Empire, to a grandson raising a family in Moscow, to the merger that built SSIH and the rescue that built the Swatch Group, Tissot's history is woven into the history of Swiss watchmaking itself. More than 170 years later, the brand is still doing what Charles-Émile set out to do in 1858: bringing Swiss time to the world.
What's your favourite Tissot, vintage or modern? Tell us in the comments or share it in the Rehaut 1775 community.
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