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Two names share this dial, and only one of them made the watch. Beneath the chronometer wording on this Omega Seamaster 168.023 sits a second signature, MEISTER, and it belongs not to another watchmaker but to a Zurich jeweller whose history begins in 1881.
Emil Meister was a goldsmith. In 1881 he opened a shop for jewellery and silverware at Münsterhof 16 in Zurich. Within two decades the business was trading at the Paradeplatz, and the Bahnhofstrasse is where the Meister name is still found. From that single shop grew a house with its own gold and silver workshops, hand engraving done on the premises, and watchmakers who looked after modern and antique watches alike.
A particularly strong period of growth came under Walter Meister between 1950 and 1980, when it pushed well beyond the goldsmith’s trade it had started in. Those are the same decades in which this Seamaster reference belonged to Omega’s collection, which is the real reason the second signature is worth reading. Four generations ran the business. Adrian Meister, the fourth, led it for more than forty years before selling to the fashion house Akris in 2025, 144 years after Emil opened his door.
At Meister, jewellery, silverware and watches belonged to the same house. The workshops made the firm’s own collections, carried out hand engraving and maintained watches, bringing several branches of the craft under one name. That is the background to the capitals on this dial. They sit between Omega’s chronometer wording and the Seamaster script, within the hierarchy of a watch made by someone else. We find the pairing more interesting than either name alone: Omega supplies the model and movement, while MEISTER adds the history of a Zurich business that began with a goldsmith and a shop for jewellery and silverware.
Omega’s archive places the 168.023 reference family in its 1968 international collection, fitted with the automatic calibre 751, a 24 jewel day and date movement built to chronometer grade. This Omega Seamaster 168.023 carries that calibre, signed on the movement, in a 36.5mm round case of 14k gold and stainless steel with a textured bezel, 42mm from lug to lug on 19mm lugs. The champagne dial is textured across its surface and set with applied baton markers, a doubled marker at twelve, a framed day and date window at three, and the Meister signature printed between the chronometer wording and the Seamaster script. The inner case back is stamped with the 168.023 reference. It comes on a black ostrich strap with an OTTUHR buckle and fits wrists up to 8.25 inches.
