The Rado Watches
With a total of around three hundred employees, the Rado Watch Company of Lengnau Switzerland has become known for making watches that are made from scratch proof material and because of this they are considered a pioneer in that area.
The company is relatively young having been formed in 1917 and for the first forty years of manufacture, they focused primarily on the manufacture of the internal movements of the watch and not actually producing a physical watch.
Between 1957 and 1962 they perfected the watch design and then in 1962 came out with the worlds first scratchproof watch sold under the name of Diastar. The company continued to flourish under this setting until around 1983 when another company, the SMH GROUP that was renamed in 1998 as the Swatch Company, which is still known today, bought it.
One huge difference between Rado and the traditional Swiss watches is that the Rado company utilizes unconventional high tech designs and materials in the product and a lot of those materials are actually new to watch making. They incorporated hard metals such as titanium carbide and tungsten and later produced a watch with a coating of high tech diamond, which is the hardest watch on earth.
The Rado Company has gotten many awards for the design of the watches they produce and they have been quite innovative in that design. However, the traditionalists of the Swiss watch community would prefer that they stay along the tried and true designs.
While they range from the affordable four hundred dollar range well into the tens of thousands of dollars they remain a popular watch and is sought after by people from all walks of life. Like all manufacturers there has been a proliferation of counterfeit watches copying the designs and generally sell for fewer than two hundred dollars,
The Rado Company has countered these fakes by having a rather small and limited dealer network and not allowing them to be sold on line. So if you happen to find a Rado watch on line, it is quite likely a copy and not the real thing.
In the current market Rado is making nearly half of a million watches per year in its factory and these contain models of every price and style imaginable and are in high demand the world over.
Their website contains not only information about the line but a useful list of other information, from Frequently Asked Questions which contain some interesting information about battery life and water proof capabilities and why your 30 meter watch might actually leak in your kitchen sink and it not be defective. Lots of useful information for everyone that owns a watch and not just folks who own or are looking to own a watch made by the Rado Company. You can also down load a user manual, which is a nice touch because I can’t tell you how often I need my manual and never can seem to find it.
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