BRAND IDENTITY: Oris CEO sees sustainability as a design for life

One of the few remaining heavyweight independent Swiss watch brands, Oris has been going since 1904 and is headquartered in German-speaking Hölstein. Serving as sole CEO since the start of this year, Oris stalwart Rolf Studer lives and breathes the brand, and is absolutely clear about where its priorities should lie. Speaking with Watch Insider’s Daniel Malins during a trip to London, Studer embraces the company’s independence and explains why sustainability is an attitude, not just a PR opportunity.

Daniel Malins: What is the best and worst thing about being an independent brand and not part of a big group?

Rolf Studer: Well, this is the very essence of Oris, right? Being independent is a key element of what makes us and it is a challenge being independent because you do everything yourself. I talk to my colleagues who work for group brands and they’ll say: “Yeah, that’s provided by the group.” We do everything ourselves, from finance to IT to research to technical developments. But that also makes us gold, it inspires us, and being an independent brand in this environment means you really have to work hard to keep up. You need to give 420% if you work at Oris and the independence lets people do that.

I don’t want to foster a culture where we have a common opinion, but I want us to have a common attitude, and this releases energy that you can only have when you are independent. There are no boundaries other than the boundaries we set ourselves. You can develop the way you want instead of being restricted by what someone in Paris or Geneva says. It makes you responsible in every sense of the word, which also leads to the topic of sustainability — it gives you a long-term perspective that you would never have if you were not independent.

DM: Do you feel one of the biggest benefits is from a design perspective? It must really help being independent when it comes to being brave with the design of the actual watch.

RS: Yeah, exactly. We are a brand that is very close to the community. I spend a lot of time with our consumers, the people that actually buy our watches, to hear what they say, and that has a huge influence on how we develop things. You can only do that if you have that freedom and if there is no corporate structure overlooking the whole thing and saying “No” in the boardroom. We are free to go the way we choose, but we also have the responsibility for that, in every sense — from a brand development point of view, from a financial point of view, from a technical point of view.

DM: It’s still a big operation though. How possible is it for you to be on top of every decision at every level, whether that’s marketing, product design, training, or events. Do you have to be good at delegation? 

RS: You’d have to ask my team to get the proper answer, but yes, I like to inspire people and foster an atmosphere of sharing the same attitude but not the same opinions. We are a team because people are better at doing things than others, including me, and if we don’t take that energy and take advantage of what people are good at, I don’t think that this would develop the company in the right direction. Yes, my job is to keep things together, but I think it would be wrong to think that I’m good at everything, because no-one is.

DM: How do you feel about the industry and the company today compared with maybe 10 years ago?

RS: Well, I’ve been with the company now for 20 years and it certainly was a different industry when I joined, Oris was in a different place. Things have changed massively.

DM: For better or worse?

RS: I think for better. In the end, it doesn’t matter because they have changed, so the only thing you can do is to embrace that change and use it to your advantage. Many of the things that have changed are to our advantage.

Covid led to a situation where people know much more about mechanical watches — things are much more transparent. Social media democratized knowledge about mechanical watches and this really helped us go to the next level, because we always had a good reputation with consumers, with people in the know, and we could never have imagined the publicity that social media has brought. Being active on social media was a huge leverage for us and that was only possible because people being at the helm of Oris before me did such a good and responsible job in creating that reputation, which we can now build on.

Also, we take watches seriously, but don’t take ourselves too seriously. I think developing an energy from that is quite unique in the industry and leads to things that you might not see from other brands. Things will continue to change — they’re changing at the moment a lot — but we will continue to take elements of that to further develop.

DM: I want to pick up on the point of being fun. Do you feel squeezed out now between the legacy and heritage of the big Swiss groups on the one hand, and then the new wave of independent brands on the other hand? The rise of those independents has made the whole industry come round to Oris’ fun way of thinking, but it also might mean that you’ve lost some market share to them.

RS: I think it’s good for us because it drives the industry in the direction that it should go. A watch is an object that you don’t need, but want, and if it doesn’t cheer you up then what is it good for? The more that people are aware of that, the better. I welcome, and also like, these independent brands that we see and I like many of the things they do. In the UK, you have some fantastic brands that really have gone from being very niche to being now a bit more mainstream. I think that only helps the industry.

What these brands often don’t have, because they are usually direct-to-consumer, is the distribution we have. Everyone has his own position and there is room for everyone and I think that’s quite special about our industry. We see each other not as competitors but as portrayers of the message. Hopefully, these added elements to the industry enlarge the community and broaden the number of people that are buying watches, which at the end helps us all.

DM: The subject of sustainability within the watch industry doesn’t seem as fashionable or trendy to talk about today as it was maybe before Covid. Some companies do it for pure reasons, but I think others simply felt they needed to be seen to care. Oris has always been one of the ones that has taken the matter seriously. Do you think there was quite a bit of green washing going on before? And what inspires you to keep driving sustainability as a company? Presumably there must be implications from a financial perspective.

RS: Yes, the topic of sustainability is maybe less fashionable than it was a few years ago, I agree. But that doesn’t make the topic go away. We, as an independent brand, have the privilege to speak our values. Being sustainable is part of our values and comes from being independent and taking responsibility. That naturally leads to the topic of sustainability, not just in an environmental sense but as an approach to life and to doing things. Sustainability is a triangle — there’s the social aspect, the economical aspect, the environmental aspect.

I just came back from New York where we launched the Lou Gehrig Limited Edition together with the [New York] Yankees to support an organisation that fights the disease Lou Gehrig died from — ALS, also known as MND (motor neurone disease). This is one of the things we do when it comes to sustainability to inspire people about “changing for the better,” as we call it, which is the umbrella for all of these things that we do.

Talking about such things, continuing to talk about the environment, is just natural to us. We take responsibility, we are independent, we want to do the right thing for our lives, for our children, for other people. From this energy, all our projects originate. You can tick a box and say you have done something within sustainability, but it’s not the same as, for example, the Billion Oyster Project in New York that wants to bring back the oysters to New York Harbour, which used to be one of the biggest oyster habitats in the world. The oysters help clean up the Harbour, which was polluted every day, but that’s not even the most important point. The point is that 15,000 pupils have gone through that program. It’s not about having plastic or oyster shells in a watch, that doesn’t make a difference. It’s about inspiring people to make a difference, inspiring them to change for the better. With the projects that we work on, that is what we try to do.

DM: That must mean that, culturally, you want to encourage people at an individual team level at the company to think about sustainability for themselves?

RS: 100%. We have done workshops and the point was not: “This is what we are going to do,” but rather: “What do you do?” Everyone had to bring an object and one of the watchmakers brought an old frying pan and he said: “This pan I bought 25 years ago when I had almost no money, it was very expensive, and I still have it because I buy things expensive and then I keep them for life.” I brought an apple from our apple tree which I use to try and teach my children that they should eat along the seasons. This is the attitude I want to foster, and then it’s something different than just paying money to an organization supporting a project. Then, it becomes part of yourself and that is what we want to encourage.

We are one of the few companies that really has analyzed its carbon footprint. Our carbon footprint doesn’t come from our products. We use about 15 tons of steel a year — the equivalent of about 10 cars — which is very little. The carbon footprint of that steel is one business class flight from Zurich to LA and back. It’s instead in these events we do, it’s in people flying around the world. Our number one source of carbon emissions is our own flights and number two is logistics. So, this is what you need to work on and it’s not our own emissions that make a difference.

DM: That goes back to the balance that you must strike as the leader of the company, because there are trade-offs like cancelling the flights or not going to the events, which would carry downsides. 

RS: It’s a triangle, and the economical side of things is also important. So, I need to be in the US, I need to tell the Oris story, I need to be in Geneva, but when you look at it from a 360-degree point of view then things come together. It’s not a forced thing, it doesn’t look like you’re just doing things for marketing reasons, but it is an approach. Not just an approach to do business or to manage Oris, but an approach to life.

It’s how I try to lead my life, it’s how I want to inspire my team to lead their lives, and how I want to inspire our consumers to lead their lives. I want to inspire, but I don’t want to be patronizing. I say: “This is what it is” and then everyone can do what they want about it, but if it inspires them then we have done a good job.

This article was first published in the August 2026 edition of Watch Insider.