OISA was Italy's only watch movement manufacture — the quartz crisis ended it

OISA (Orologeria Italiana Società Azionaria) was founded in Milan in 1937 by Domenico Morezzi, a master watchmaker trained in Switzerland. It was the only Italian factory producing mechanical movements for wristwatches — a true manufacture, designing and machining its own calibers rather than assembling imported components. At its peak, OISA produced up to 10,000 movements per month across about ten different calibers, and over its lifetime it manufactured more than 4 million movements.

The quartz crisis of the 1970s devastated the mechanical watch industry worldwide. Swiss manufacturers that had dominated for centuries were either wiped out or forced to consolidate. For OISA, the impact was terminal: the company's entire production was mechanical, and it had no capacity or plan to transition to quartz. Production ceased in 1978, when Morezzi's grandson Carlo Boggio Ferraris shut down the factory. The brand that had been the only Italian movement manufacture fell silent.

OISA was not a small workshop — it was an industrial operation that had supplied movements for its own watches and for third parties across decades. But its expertise was entirely in mechanical movements, and the company could not (or chose not to) adapt to the new quartz technology. The decision to remain mechanical-only was not a single moment but a strategic posture that left the company with no way forward when the market shifted.

The brand was revived in 2015 by the founding family and entered a new phase in 2018 under Benedetto Perrotta, the founder's grandson, with production based in Albuzzano, Pavia. The revived OISA 1937 produces high-end mechanical movements for Italian and international brands, as well as a small collection under its own name. But the original company — the factory that had produced 4 million movements — was gone for 37 years, a casualty of the same technology shift that reshaped the entire watch industry.