Is Corum back? Why the Brand That Built A Watch Inside A President's Coin Is Just Getting Started

From a $20 Double Eagle to a fully sapphire case - Corum has never once asked the market what it wanted. In 2026, under new Swiss ownership and with its boldest collection in years, it may finally be rewarded for that defiance. The name was always a statement. René Bannwart chose it in 1955, borrowing from the word quorum, the minimum number of people required to make a binding decision and simplifying its spelling to Corum. Two men, one uncle, one nephew, one workshop in La Chaux-de-Fonds. That was sufficient. What followed over the next seven decades was one of Swiss watchmaking's most singular, frustrating, and quietly brilliant stories.

Corum did not grow by doing what was expected of it. In 1958, it produced the Chapeau Chinois, a watch with a bezel shaped like a Chinese conical hat. In 1964, it sliced an authentic $20 Double Eagle gold coin along its edge, inserted an ultra-thin movement, and called it a Coin Watch. The modification of American currency being illegal on US soil, Corum performed the conversion in Switzerland and exported - a legal workaround that became a legend. Six consecutive sitting presidents wore one: Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.

Then came 1980, and the creation that would define Corum more completely than anything else. The Golden Bridge housed a caliber whose components were arranged in a single straight line - a baguette movement suspended behind four sapphire panels, every gear and spring visible. The young watchmaker Vincent Calabrese had conceived it; Corum built it. No one had done it before. No one, in the words of the brand's own press materials, has ever copied it since. In a craft where homage is euphemism and imitation is industry, that is a remarkable claim and an accurate one.

The Admiral's Cup - first introduced in 1960 with a square case, then reimagined in 1983 with a twelve-sided dodecagonal bezel and nautical pennants drawn from the International Maritime Signal Code became the brand's commercial anchor. It was a watch that could function on a racing yacht and at a board dinner without apology. By 1986, Corum had pioneered the use of meteorite dials, cutting stone from a rock discovered in Greenland by explorer Robert Peary. It was a first that the wider industry would eventually adopt.

Then came the harder years. Ownership changed. Creative momentum wavered. The brand spent much of the 2010s under the stewardship of Hong Kong-based Citychamp Watch & Jewellery Group, navigating the tension between commercial realism and its own eccentric heritage. Great houses have survived worse. But the question of identity of what Corum actually stood for when stripped of novelty lingered.

The answer arrived on May 5, 2025 (5.5.25, a date the brand notes with evident pleasure). Haso Mehmedovic, Corum's International Sales Director and a trained watchmaker who had joined the manufacture as a bench watchmaker in 2011 and never left, completed a management buyout and became Chairman and CEO. His story is as unlikely as the brand's own: born in Srebrenica in 1992, he arrived in Switzerland as a three-year-old refugee. His parents found work as watchmaking operators. He attended the watchmaking school in Le Locle, one of thirty students admitted from nearly three hundred applicants and sent a single résumé upon graduating. To Corum. He was hired immediately. On the wall of his classroom, he later recalled, hung a poster of the Golden Bridge.

Under Mehmedovic, Corum arrives at Watches and Wonders 2026 with its most focused and credible collection in years. Eleven new Admiral references in 39 mm and 36 mm built around a completely redesigned case by Emmanuel Gueit, the designer formerly behind some of Audemars Piguet's most celebrated work. A new proprietary automatic caliber, developed with La Chaux-de-Fonds partner Concepto, beats at 4 Hz with a 72-hour power reserve; the balance sits at 12 o'clock, a configuration deliberately chosen to echo the Golden Bridge's own baguette movement. Six new Golden Bridge Sapphire references debut Corum's first-ever fully translucent sapphire case, returning the model to the transparent spirit of its 1980 origins. And two Heritage pieces: the Coin, now housing a $50 gold coin, and the return of the Golden Book, first released in 1996, whose hinged cover opens onto a Hemingway quotation.

Distribution has been pulled in sharply from over 300 points of sale to approximately 70 by spring 2026. The logic is deliberate: fewer doors, more signal. Corum holds its position in the United States, Japan, and the Middle East; Europe is managed directly from La Chaux-de-Fonds. The brand's long-term goal is to bring movement production fully in-house, to its historic site, step by step.

Seventy years in, the key still points upward. Whether the market is finally ready to follow it is, as ever, an open question.The question remains… Is Corum back?