Why Basel, not Geneva.

There is a joke among watch collectors that Swiss watchmaking happens in a corridor. It starts in Geneva, runs through Le Locle and La Chaux-de-Fonds, passes Biel, and ends somewhere around Schaffhausen. Basel is not on the corridor.

Basel makes medicines. It makes chemicals. It makes the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, employing tens of thousands of people, and it has done so for over a century. If you asked ten Swiss people to name what Basel produces, "watches" would not appear on the list. It is not a watchmaking city.

I am starting a watch brand here anyway.

The obvious question is why. Geneva has the heritage. La Chaux-de-Fonds has the workshops. Biel has the movements. Even Zurich has more watch culture than Basel does, thanks to a few important dealers and a handful of independents. Why plant a flag in a city whose name is more associated with Novartis than with Patek Philippe?

The honest answer is that I was born here.

That would be a small reason if it were the only one. It is not.

Basel is where Baselworld was held for eighty years — the fair that, at its peak, defined how the entire watch industry introduced itself to the world every spring. Rolex debuted references here. Patek unveiled complications here. The city built a purpose-designed hall to accommodate the industry's appetite for spectacle, and for decades it worked. Baselworld is gone now, but the address remains. The Messeplatz still stands. The city still remembers.

More importantly, Basel is what you get when you take the watchmaking corridor and remove the reverence. Geneva treats horlogerie as a heritage industry, which is beautiful but also paralysing. La Chaux-de-Fonds treats it as a livelihood. Biel treats it as engineering. Basel treats it as neither its own problem nor its own tradition — which turns out to be exactly the right posture for someone starting a brand from scratch.

I do not have to inherit anything to work here. Nobody in Basel is going to tell me that watches are done a certain way because that is how they have been done in Basel for two hundred years. The city has no opinion on the matter. It leaves me alone.

That is a gift, and it is also a discipline.

Basel forces you to define yourself against nothing. If you make a watch here and it is not good, no local heritage will excuse it. No village workshop lineage will lend it weight. It has to stand up on its own terms — which means the work has to be better than the story, not the other way around.

That is the position I want INFINI to occupy.

I also think the industry has more room for cities like Basel than it currently admits. Not every good idea in watchmaking has to come from within the corridor. Independent makers have started appearing in Zurich, in Vienna, in Berlin, in Copenhagen. The question of where a good watch can be made has been quietly reopening for a decade now. Basel is one legitimate answer.

There is also the aesthetic argument, which matters more than it sounds. Basel sits on the Rhine. It borders France and Germany. It has one of the oldest universities in Switzerland, a museum culture disproportionate to its size, and an architectural tradition that includes Herzog & de Meuron. It is a city that understands proportion, restraint, and the value of a good material. Those are the same qualities I want the watches to have.

Geneva is what Swiss watchmaking looks like when it looks backward. Basel is what it might look like when it does not.

None of this is a criticism of the Vallée de Joux, or of La Chaux-de-Fonds, or of the extraordinary makers who have spent generations perfecting movements in those valleys. I am grateful they exist. INFINI would not be possible without the industry they built.

But I am nineteen years old. I did not grow up watching my grandfather regulate escapements. I grew up in a city that makes medicines and hosted a watch fair. I speak German and English better than I speak French. My reference points are Swiss but they are not the ones the Vallée uses.

If I moved to Geneva to start INFINI, I would be starting someone else's brand. Here, the brand I am starting is my own.

That is the reason.

— D.S.