Yema Did Everything the Swiss Get Worshipped For

In June 1982, a French astronaut named Jean-Loup Chrétien rode a Soviet rocket into orbit with a watch on his wrist. It was a Yema. Not an Omega. Not a Swiss anything — a tool watch from Besançon, strapped to the first Frenchman ever to leave the planet, eight days aboard Salyut 7 while most of the watch world wasn't paying attention. It still isn't.

You know the other space-watch story. Everybody does. The Speedmaster, the Moonwatch, NASA flight-qualified, the one your favourite reviewer strokes on camera while telling you it's the only watch worn on the lunar surface. All true. The Speedmaster got to space years before the Yema, and it got to the Moon, which the Yema never did. But it got there on American wrists, as American-issued kit, bought by a government procurement office in Houston. The Yema went up as France's own watch, on France's own man, sent by the French space agency. The hobby built a religion around one of those stories and can't be bothered to remember the other.

That gap is the whole point of this piece.

There's a reflex in collecting I want to name, because once you see it you can't unsee it. The assumption that a watch can't be serious unless it's Swiss. It's not stupid. Switzerland earned the shorthand over a century of doing the hard parts better than anyone. But shorthand turns into superstition the moment you stop checking, and Yema is the brand that punishes you for not checking.

A French watchmaker who liked machines more than mystique

Yema started in 1948. Henry Louis Belmont founded it — a Besançon man, top of his class out of the city's watchmaking school back in 1931, with time served as a technical director at Lip before he struck out alone. The name came from a school competition: Belmont wanted something that sounded vaguely Greek and wasn't already taken, ran a contest to find it, and saved himself an advertising agency. That's the founding myth, and it tells you everything. The man was an engineer, not a marketer. He cared whether the thing worked.

It worked. By 1951 he was fitting his watches with one of the first automatic movements going, a Lorsa caliber he renamed and made his own. By the sixties Yema was the biggest watch manufacturer in France and the country's leading exporter, pushing more than half a million watches a year out into the world. In the US they sold under the name Lejour, because nobody in Ohio was buying a watch called Yema in 1968. The brand's slogan was "Time of Heroes," and unlike most slogans it described something the brand actually did: it equipped the people doing the dangerous, useful, photogenic things. Divers. Rally drivers. Pilots. Eventually astronauts.

The Superman, and the bezel that locks

The watch that anchors all of this is the Superman, launched in 1963. It's a dive watch, and it does the thing a dive watch is supposed to do, which in 1963 was rarer than the marketing of the era would have you believe.

Here's the part worth knowing. The bezel locks. There's a small lever at three o'clock that physically clamps the rotating bezel in place, so a knock underwater can't shift it and lie to you about how long you've been down. Yema patented the mechanism. The watch was rated to 300 metres. A professional dive watch, from France, in the same window the dive-watch canon insists was an exclusively Swiss-and-the-odd-American affair. The Superman is the model I'll keep coming back to, because it's still the spine of the modern brand and it's the one most people meet first.

Then 1966, two more. The Rallygraf, a motorsport chronograph — Mario Andretti wore one through his racing years. The Yachtingraf, a regatta timer for sailors, with the countdown segments you'll recognise from much fancier names. Tool watches for specific jobs, sold by the hundred thousand, worn by people whose lives or finishing times depended on them not failing.

The bit nobody tells you about Richard Mille

In 1981 a French conglomerate called Matra — automotive and aerospace, the people who'd later be folded into the lineage that became Airbus — bought a watch company called Finhor and, for reasons best known to a board that also built rockets, set up a watch division. Yema came under that umbrella in the early eighties. Running international development for Matra's watch brands, including Yema, was a sharp young export man named Richard Mille.

Yes. That Richard Mille.

The patron saint of money-no-object watchmaking, the man whose watches now change hands north of two hundred grand — he learned the business flogging French tool watches to export markets. He was there for the Yema North Pole in 1986, a titanium piece with an anti-magnetic compass bezel built for the explorer Jean-Louis Étienne to wear on a solo trek to the actual North Pole, and you can see his later design language sketched into it if you know what you're looking at. The man who'd go on to charge the price of a house for a single watch started out on a brand you can buy today for around a grand. That should be funnier to more people than it is.

Space, again, and the comparison the hobby refuses to make

Back to the wrist in orbit. Chrétien's 1982 flight made the Yema Spationaute I the first French watch in space, on the first French citizen to get there. Three years later, in June 1985, Patrick Baudry flew aboard the shuttle Discovery on the first Franco-American mission, wearing the Spationaute II. France kept sending people up, and for a stretch it kept sending Yemas with them.

Now hold the two stories next to each other. Same achievement category — watch survives launch, microgravity, re-entry, gets photographed on a national hero. The Speedmaster gets a nickname, a thousand articles, a permanent seat at the top of every "watches that matter" list, and a price that's tripled. The Spationaute gets a footnote on the brand's own website and a shrug from collectors who should know better. The watches did the same job. The reputations went opposite directions. The only variable that moved is the flag on the dial.

Quartz, and the long quiet

Then the floor fell out, the way it did for everyone who made mechanical watches in the seventies and eighties. Quartz arrived, did the one thing a mechanical movement can't — kept better time for less money — and an entire industry got reorganised around survival. Matra held Yema for a while. In December 1986 the Japanese giant Hattori-Seiko bought a controlling stake and ran the brand, through a holding company, until 2004. Yema survived. It also drifted, the way a brand does when it's a line item on a foreign conglomerate's balance sheet rather than somebody's life's work.

And France forgot the bloody brand existed. Worse than forgot — it watched its whole watchmaking base hollow out. Today France has something like three thousand people working in watchmaking across fewer than a hundred companies, while the Swiss industry next door employs more than sixty thousand — a good chunk of them French citizens who cross the border to work every morning. That's the reflex made geographic, drawn on a map in people getting in cars to go and be Swiss for the day.

The €3 million bet

In 2009 a Morteau outfit called Groupe Ambre bought Yema, and the brand went home — back to French hands, in a French watchmaking town, with an ambition that on paper looked insane for a company that size: build its own movement.

This is the part that should change your mind. A microbrand-scale operation spent four years and three million euros developing an in-house caliber, the MBP1000, when it could have kept buying Swiss and Japanese movements off the shelf like everyone else in the bracket. They refined it — partly via crowdfunding, which is its own quiet flex — into the YEMA2000 and 3000. Then, from 2022, they did it properly. The CMM.10, a full-rotor automatic. The CMM.30, a bridged tourbillon they launched for the brand's 75th. And the one that matters most, the CMM.20.

The caliber is the CMM.20. It's a micro-rotor automatic, 3.70mm thick, with a 70-hour power reserve and a rated accuracy of minus-three to plus-seven seconds a day — near-COSC numbers from a movement the Geneva faithful have never heard of. Roughly eighty per cent of its components are made at or around Yema's own workshops in Morteau. It debuted in the Wristmaster micro-rotor, then landed in the Superman Slim. The watch I underrated for years now carries a movement most of the industry can't build.

The honest part

Here's where I concede the ground, because the voice that won't is the one you shouldn't trust.

The "in-house" claim wears an asterisk, and Yema's own copy is fuzzy about it. The CMM.20 was designed by Olivier Mory over the border in La Chaux-de-Fonds. The regulating organ — the part that actually governs accuracy — is Swiss. The earliest calibers leaned on outside manufacturing more than the marketing let on. A CMM.20 is not a Geneva-sealed anything, and Yema is not chasing Patek Philippe. No grand complications, no hand-finishing that'll make a purist weep, no five-figure price to launder the whole thing into respectability.

Fine. That was never the bet.

The bet was a French tool brand that went to space, equipped the men who walked to the poles and won races, accidentally trained the most famous name in modern watchmaking, got flattened by quartz, sold off to Japan, bought back, and then — instead of dying quietly like it was supposed to — spent its own money learning to make most of a movement in a town most collectors can't find on a map. Judged against Patek, it loses. Judged against what a watch under a couple of grand has any right to be, and against the achievements that mint Swiss reverence by the decade, it more than holds.

I keep Yema in stock at CWC — the Superman, the GMT — because it earns the spot on what it's done, not on where it's done it, and because you should be allowed to own a piece of this without spending a relationship-building decade at some AD's counter first. Photos are in the listings.