Vintage Technos Watches
Technos was the affordable Swiss watch of 1960s and 70s Japan, and most examples here were sourced from Japanese collections. Each watch is one of a kind and photographed exactly as it is. When a Sky Diver sells, it can be a long wait before another appears.
Read the detailed Technos history2 Technos timepieces in stock
The Technos Story
Japan was a customer long before it was the problem: by 1930 the Gunzinger factory in Welschenrohr, a Solothurn Jura village, had 360 workers and sold mainly to Japan and China. Melchior Gunzinger opened the workshop in 1900; his son Joseph took over in 1920 and in 1924 registered a brand name from the Greek techne, meaning craft. The Gunzingers made solid mid-range watches on bought-in Swiss movements.
Heiwado Trading imported the brand to Japan from 1952; its quiz-show giveaway, a pair of Swiss Technos watches, became a television catchphrase, and the Sky line and the tough Borazon models were hits there in the 1960s and 1970s. In Brazil, where Mario Goettems imported it from 1958, the brand says it led the market by 1973. Collectors hunt the Sky Diver, an A. Schild or ETA automatic in a case shared with the Universal Geneve Polerouter.
Joseph Gunzinger died in May 1970 with 450 people on the payroll, and the following year the firm was sold to General Watch Co., part of ASUAG, forerunner of Swatch Group. Japanese quartz, from the market that had fed it, nearly killed the firm in the mid-1970s; in 1977 the remnant moved to Biel, and by 1984 company and trademark had gone to Heiwado, its Tokyo importer. The Brazilian importer, assembling in Manaus from the early 1980s, carried on under license and bought the rights in the 1990s.
Grupo Technos is the Brazilian heir, a Rio de Janeiro company listed in São Paulo since 2011. It calls itself Latin America's largest watch company, sells ten brands, from its own Condor and Dumont to licensed Fossil and Michael Kors, and marked the Technos centenary in 2024. The Welschenrohr factory is now a watch museum; in Japan the name survives on automatics with Japanese Miyota movements. The Swiss-made pieces here mostly date from the Gunzinger and Biel decades, before the name went to Tokyo and then Manaus.