If you were able to quit your job today with a golden handshake that let you do whatever you want, what would that be? Right now, I’d spend a year sunning myself on a tropical beach somewhere with a trio of nannies on rotation and a mixologist on hand. You might be more driven than that; Ed Tourtellotte certainly was.
After leaving the tech world behind him, Ed decided to blaze his own trail. Well, blaze three trails. In one fell swoop he started a drone company, a car company and a watch company. But while the drones are currently on the backburner and Righteous Motors is still in development, his third project is well underway. Indeed, it’s already been making waves since it launched at this year’s Geneva Watch Days. Its name? Stollenwurm.
While the name does indeed sound like a parasite with a taste for German Christmas cake, the Stollenwurm is very firmly of Swiss origin. It’s a mythical Alpine creature, a serpent with the head of a cat that jealously guards its horde of treasure with fiery breath. It’s like a dragon you might be tempted to pet. And for Ed, it perfectly symbolises his approach.
“I’m not a watchmaker and I didn’t want my name on the dial. And as everything we do is in Switzerland, I wanted something truly Swiss. So something rare, mythical and surprising… the Stollenwurm summed up what we wanted to do.”
Mythical sure, but when a purring dragon makes an appearance, it has an impact – and the eponymous watchmaker certainly did the same by launching with not just one watch, but two.
Series 1
First, is the aptly-named Series 1, an astronomical calendar that can be summed up as a day-date with symbols instead of the days of the week – Venus’ cross for Friday, the sun’s circle for Sunday, etc. It’s an evocative link to the astrological concepts that humans first used to tell the time for millennia before watchmaking became a thing. It comes with plenty of Stollenwurm motifs, with a snake-like periphery and a beautiful, multi-layered case.
Then there’s the Series 2 (go figure), which takes the mythical evocations of the Series 1 even further. These use a beautiful mix of enamels – grand feu, champleve and cloisonne – to create tarot card dials, with two already built and six more on their way soon, from The Fool to Death via The Lovers and The Hermit. There are plenty more planned to take the total to 22, but as a first clutch, the Series 2 is astounding.
Series 2
While the dials are very different, there are some linking characteristics between the two series, from similar movements developed in partnership with the maestros at Télôs watch (which are absolutely and unequivocally stunning), similar 42mm cases and, most importantly, an emphasis on metallurgy – most notably with Tantalum.
Tantalum’s an odd material. It’s highly resistant to pretty much everything, finding plenty of use in jet engines and nuclear reactors; it’s incredibly rare and just as heavy. There are obvious reasons in an industry currently obsessed with lightweight titanium that most brands don’t use it. But for Stollenwurm, it’s a focus. Why?
“Because it’s impossible of course,” says Ed. “I like to do things no-one else has done, it’s what I’ve done all my life. People have done tantalum, but not tantalum and platinum, and that’s just the start of what we have planned.”
He’s not wrong. The combination of two weighty precious metals doesn’t just feel like nothing else, it looks like it. And the bracelet on the Series 1 in the same combination of tantalum and platinum is a revelation. It’s not a combination of the precious and the non-precious, but two metals that are both precious, just in very different ways. Tantalum is precious enough, in fact, to be mythical in its own right.
“The Stollenwurm is a Swiss mythical creature,” says Ed. He obviously has a stash of tantalum!”
Oh, and if that weren’t enough, the movements combine titanium with tungsten microrotors, just to run the full gamut of high-tech watchmaking metals. It doesn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to reckon that there’s more alchemy in Stollenwurm’s future. After all, you don’t launch two shiny new collections in one go unless you have plenty more stashed in your metaphorical dragon’s cave.
And yet despite all this effort and expertise that has been funnelled into some exciting new pieces, only 12 of the Series 1 and five each of the Series 2 will be built. For a nascent haute horology label, that’s a bold statement. But as the Stollenwurm motto says, they’re meant to be ‘Rarely Seen.’
Yes, the brand’s tagline has echoes of Moser’s ‘Very Rare’ or Vacheron’s clunkier ‘One of Not Many’, but it’s one that in this case has a double meaning. After all, the Stollenwurm is, in Ed’s words, ‘Switzerland’s Nessie’, a sight rarer than a clear shot of bigfoot. But at the same time, Stollenwurm watches aren’t designed for everyone. Hell, they’re not designed for very, very few people.
In short, they’re the kind of collectors’ watches that like their namesake might occasionally be glimpsed in the wild – but rarely.
More details at Stollenwurm.
