Oris | Ten calibres in ten years
When the watchmaking house-started its Movement Creation Programme in the late 000s, it revived a part of its culture that had been dormant since the Quartz Crisis of the 1970s. Since 1904, Oris had created more than 270 unique calibres.
From the outset, the programme brief was clear. The movements had to be distinctly Oris. Which meant? Purely mechanical and Swiss made, with unique functions and performance, and at prices that make sense to today’s citizen.
It began in 2014 with Calibre 110, the first of the Calibre 100 Series of hand-wound movements. These movements had 10-day power reserves from a single barrel, patented non-linear power-reserve indicators, and often additional useful functions, such as a business calendar or a second time zone.
The programme followed in 2020 with the Calibre 400 Series, the first in-house developed line of automatics in more than 40 years. These featured five-day power reserves, elevated levels of anti-magnetism, 10-year warranties and 10-year recommended service intervals.
In the past nine years, Oris introduced nine highly original, high-performance calibres, installing them in Swiss made timepieces. And today, in the tenth year of the revived Oris Movement Creation Programme, the house is proud to announce a new high-performance hand-wound movement, Calibre 473.
The Big Crown Calibre 473 houses the new mechanical hand-wound movement designed from scratch by Oris watchmakers. This watch breathes new life into the company’s signature Big Crown Pointer Date, a mainstay of the Oris collection since 1938. For the first time in decades, this family of timepieces incorporates an in-house manual-winding calibre. Built on the same base as the self-winding Calibre 403, it has hours and minutes hands, a small seconds hand, the date pointer and a five-day power reserve, now indicated on the back of the movement. Calibre 473 took four years to develop.
As with Calibre 400 Series movements, Calibre 473 also has elevated levels of anti-magnetism, and each watch powered by it will come with a 10-year warranty.