Rolex bought Bucherer — then killed its 137-year-old watch brand

Carl F. Bucherer was one of the oldest Swiss luxury watch brands held continuously by its founding family. Founded in 1888 by Carl Friedrich Bucherer in Lucerne, it built a reputation for manufacture movements and sporty chronographs, selling around 67,000 watches a year at prices from CHF 5,000 to over CHF 400,000. But the brand had never been a money-maker: in its best years it generated 80–100 million Swiss francs in sales, and Swiss financial media estimated its cumulative losses at around 250 million francs.

The losses were survivable only because the brand's patron, third-generation owner Jörg Bucherer, treated it as a personal passion project — he was described as both the brand's life insurance and its bank. When Jörg Bucherer sold Bucherer AG, the parent retail group, to Rolex in August 2023, the watch brand came along as part of the deal. He died in 2025, and Rolex, which had no emotional attachment to the brand, applied its own financial standards to it.

On 7 February 2025, Rolex CEO Jean-Frédéric Dufour informed Carl F. Bucherer employees that the brand was being discontinued. Its boutiques were closed, stock was cleared from roughly 250 points of sale, and about 70 of the production staff at Lengnau were offered jobs at Rolex's new factory in Bulle. On the secondary market, Carl F. Bucherer models traded at discounts of up to 90%.