Orient Watches

Orient Watch

What once began as a wholesale shop in Ueno, Taito, Tokyo, Japan in 1901 has grown into a powerful luxury watch juggernaut over a century later, with expert watches of the automatic, quartz, star, and mechanical kind. However, it wasn’t until 1934 that the manufacturing of wristwatches began and 1950 that Orient Watch Company was officially founded. However, after the economy in Japan faltered after World War II, affecting trades of all kinds, including the production of watches, and so the company that would later become the Orient Watch Company was shut down in 1949. Fortunately, it only took a year for the watch company to resurrect itself under the name Tama Keiki Company, kick starting the manufacturing of all kinds of watches, from quartz and mechanical, to automatic and star. Then again, in 1951, the company once more changed its name, this time to Orient Watch Company. After a memorandum trade agreement with China went through in 1955, Orient’s visibility overseas expanded greatly, with the releases of the “Dynamic (1956), Royal Orient (1960), Grand Prix 100 (1964), and Tenbeat (1970). In addition, the 1967 release “Fineness” was the world’s thinnest automatic wristwatch with day-and -date calendar. Assembly of luxury watches began in 2003, at the Orient Technical Center in Akita, Japan. In 2004, the Royal Orient watch line Caliber 88700 movement went on sale for the first time and the following year the Orient Star Retro-Future watch collection was launched. Since 2001, Orient has become a subsidiary of the Seiko Epson Corporation, before progressing into a wholly-owned subsidiary in 2009. Despite this, Orient Watch has maintained creative autonomy over its collection, assuring any and all loyalist customers that the attributes that made Orient watch's magical never went away.