History of Mido Watches
WWII era Mido Multifort / Credit: WatchestoBuy
Mido is a storied brand that isn’t particularly popular in the watch community. Alas, there are no Facebook groups dedicated to vintage Mido, no community obsessed over every detail of their old releases. Even though Mido has a very interesting and somewhat well documented history. Now, we’ve talked about some of their more well-known vintage models, but what about their early operation in itself?
Mido was founded in 1918, and according to the brand themselves, on the very same day as the armistice was signed between the Allies and Germany, November 11th. Mido was founded by already experienced watchmaker Georges Schaeren, who, together with shop owner Hugo Jubert, created the company called ‘G. Schaeren & Cie, Mido Watch’. After the war, in the 1920s, Mido had started out selling fairly regular pocket watches and wristwatches. Although as Art Deco caught on, it quickly joined the party and started making wristwatches with unique and colourful designs. Mido made watches shaped like car radiators for men, pendant and baguette watches for women, with a variety of case shapes, markers and dial adornments. Mido even filed a patent in the mid-1920s for their radiator shaped watches, which also included table clocks and the like, and were inspired by popular car brands of the day like: Benz, Ettore Bugatti, Alfa Romeo, and Chevrolet among others. In 1925, Mido was producing over 5,000 timepieces per year and exporting them to markets in Europe, but also as far as Egypt and the Philippines. A note I find a bit funny since people consider markets like those ‘developing’ today, and I myself have alluded to that in other articles (in the context of the watch market). The end of the 1920s was marked with many milestones, the company producing its 500,000th timepiece in 1929. Little would they know the challenges that awaited during the Great Depression.
1951 Mido Multifort Superautomatic ad
In many ways, all of the company’s past developments led to the creation of a very important wristwatch in Mido’s collection, the Multifort. However, as a result of the financial crisis, Mido was losing money in the early 1930s and relocated all of their operations to Biel. This also forced them to focus on more practical timepieces as opposed to their creations of the previous decade. The Mido Multifort was launched in 1934 and made to be antimagnetic, water resistant, and shock resistant. These characteristics were added to the following year with the release of the Mido Multifort Automatic, which were fitted with self-winding A. Schild movements. Mido was still recovering economically but was seeing sales increase largely due to the Multifort’s popularity. The watch was also praised by pilots that used the Multifort during the Second World War. Mido deservingly used their testimonies as marketing material even to this day, material that made this model and its iterations even more popular after the war. They also continued making more unique models, amongst which were the rectangular Multifort and the Mido Radio-Time, both 1939 Baselworld releases.
In many ways, the story of Mido’s earlier models is formed between the two most significant events of the 20th century – the World Wars. Founded at the end of one war and coming into its own throughout the second, Mido and its early wrist watches set the pace for the development of the company going forward. Today, the Multifort is still a part of their offerings, as it has been since the watch’s release.
By: Andres Ibarguen