Don't miss the next drop
Lift the back off this Movado Tempomatic and you get two answers to the same question. The rotor is signed MOVADO FACTORIES. The bridge underneath it, stamped inside a small hexagonal cartouche beside the balance, reads 2552 PC, which is a Zenith caliber number. Neither one is a mistake.
In 1969 Movado of La Chaux-de-Fonds and Zenith of Le Locle combined into a single holding company, and later that same year the group took in Mondia to become Movado-Zenith-Mondia. The reasoning was practical rather than romantic. Zenith had the movement manufacturing, and Movado had what Zenith wanted most, which was brand presence in the United States. Pooling those assets meant Movado watches began leaving Switzerland with Zenith calibers inside them, signed on the rotor as Movado’s own work.
The 2552 PC did not have a long life. Zenith built roughly 15,000 of them between 1969 and 1972, against something like 225,000 of the caliber it replaced, which makes this a thin slice of the output, and a successor caliber took over in 1972. The corporate weather moved quickly around it too. By 1971 Zenith Radio Corporation, an American electronics maker that had been trading under the same name out of Chicago since 1919, held the majority of the Swiss holding, and Movado had shifted its head office to Le Locle to sit beside its partner. Movado catalogued this same movement under a house number of its own, and the archives record no difference between the two. This Movado Tempomatic was never renumbered. The bridge still carries Zenith’s.
The Movado Tempomatic itself. A 35.2mm cushion case, reference 138-625-502, gold plated, with a stainless steel back, 40mm lug to lug on 18mm spacing, a fixed bezel and a domed acrylic crystal that pools light across everything beneath it. The champagne dial carries a fine vertical linen grain, twelve applied gold batons with black inlay, a printed railroad minute track on a raised outer ring, a framed date at three, and Tempo-Matic below center, hyphenated on the dial even though the name was registered in the United States, back in 1945, without one. SUB-SEA, the water-resistance designation Movado applied across several unrelated families, is stamped on the outside of the caseback rather than on the dial, which is the standard placement for it. Twenty-three jewels, automatic. The plating has worn thin at the lug corners and along the case flanks, and the luminous channels in the hands have softened to a faint cream, which is what five decades of wear look like when nobody has tried to erase them.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR and backed by our 2-year mechanical warranty, on a forest green Italian suede strap we chose to warm the gold without shouting over it. Movado on the dial, Zenith under the rotor, and not one dishonest thing between them.
