Are you ready to indulge in the world of fine timepieces? We invite you to visit the exclusive Frederique Constant store located in Doha Festival City, where you can experience the beauty and sophistication of our Swiss-made watches. From classic and elegant to bold and modern, our watches are designed to make a statement. Treat yourself or gift someone special with a piece of horological excellence. Visit us today and discover the art of watchmaking at its finest!
Frederique Constant has celebrated its 36th birthday in 2024 confirming Victor Hugo’s conviction that “There is nothing in the world so powerful as an idea whose time has come”.
Since 1988 indeed, Peter C. Stas and Aletta Stas-Bax developed an initial idea, while on a skiing holiday in the Swiss Alps, they noticed a wristwatch in a shop window that they couldn’t forget. Their intellectual discussion about this model rapidly grew into a full-blown passion for timepieces worn on the wrist. It reached the point where the couple had no choice but to sacrifice their promising careers in multinational companies on the altar of their own watch business.
Because quality played a vital role, assembly was carried out in Switzerland, using Swiss Made parts. These babies also thrived splendidly. But logic demanded that they should also have a suitable name. In this situation, Frederique Schreiner, Aletta’s great-grandmother, and Constant Stas, Peter’s great-grandfather, entered the scene. The first names of these two ancestors were combined to make Frederique Constant.
In 1992, Frederique Constant SA, founded with a capital of 60,000 Swiss francs, had over a thousand Swiss Made wristwatches produced by external partners.
In 2001, a clear vision and the urge to set something personal beside the bought-in watch movements gave the starting signal for the development of the first in-house Manufacture caliber.
This ambitious project was successfully achieved with the cooperation of specialists from two watchmaking schools, one in Geneva and the other in Holland. It was in 2004 that Frederique Constant astonished the watchmaking world with its FC-910-1 caliber. The hand-wound movement featured a prominent aperture in the dial at 6 o’clock in which the strikingly large balance wheel was reminiscent of a tourbillon.
In 2007, Frederique Constant became a talking point, not only through the first “Passion Award” in honor of outstanding entrepreneurial performance, but also through its partnerships with Croatian singer Nina Badric, Chinese actress Shu Qi and the legendary English sports-car brand Austin Healey.
The year 2010 saw, among other events, Passion Awards in New York, a “Par Cœur Gala” with American actress Eva Longoria and sponsorship of the spell-binding Oldtimer Rally from Beijing to Paris. In the same year, limited editions highlighted the partnership with Cohiba, as did the 2013 collaboration with the Riva Historical Society and Spanish model Inés Sastre. To mark the 25th anniversary of the company’s foundation, Aletta and Peter Stas also published a superb, large volume book entitled “Live Your Passion”. In abundant detail, it relates the thrilling success story of Frederique Constant and also of its two affiliated watch brands, Alpina and Atelier de Monaco.
In the controversial field of the smart wristwatch, Frederique Constant has been a precursor of Swiss made smartwatches when it introduced the first Horological Smartwatch in 2015, powered by MMT SwissConnect technology and entirely displayed with an analog dial, creating an entirely new watch category in the Swiss watch industry.
In 2018 the brand has launched a brand-new smartwatch generation, the Hybrid Manufacture, combining mechanical horology with an ultra-tech smart module and an integrated caliber analytics, breaking the rules of traditional watchmaking vision.
Today the brand produces up to 160’000 watches per year and is planning to expand even further its production capacity thanks to its new 3’000 square meter manufacture grand opening on June 5th, 2019, honoured by the presence of Toshio Tokura, Chairman of the Citizen Watch Group.
In 2016, Aletta and Peter Stas decided to sell their company in the absence of a family successor and have been integrated into Japanese Citizen Group where they saw the opportunity of Swiss-Japanese partnership to develop and market accessible luxury watches for the years to come.