When CORUM opened the doors of its historic manufacture in La Chaux-de-Fonds on 1st April 2026 for an exclusive preview, I was not in the room. But the technical sheets, press materials, and imagery that followed told a story compelling enough to write about at length. This was not a routine product launch. This was a declaration of intent from one of Swiss watchmaking’s most singular houses.
A New Chapter, Written from Within
CORUM turns 70 this year. Founded in 1955 by René Bannwart and his uncle Gaston Ries, the brand has always operated on its own terms: no round cases when rectangles served better, no conventional hour markers when nautical pennants told the story, no borrowed movements when in-house baguette calibres could do the job with far greater drama. Then, after years under foreign ownership, the house returned to Swiss hands on 5th May 2025 through a management buyout led by Haso Mehmedovic.
Chairman & CEO
Mehmedovic is 33 years old, born in Srebrenica, raised in Switzerland, trained at CIFOM in Le Locle. He sent exactly one CV (to CORUM) and never left. He rose from bench watchmaker to Head of Quality at 23, then to International Sales Director, before completing the buyout alongside Swiss investors in 2025. The strategy he unveiled at the event is refreshingly direct: concentrate the Admiral range across 11 references in 39 mm and 36 mm, introduce six Golden Bridge Sapphire references, reactivate two Heritage pieces, and reduce distribution from over 300 points of sale to approximately 70 by spring 2026. Designer Emmanuel Gueit, former Head of Design at Audemars Piguet, shaped the initial lines of the new collection, later finalised by the EDGE team of Olivier Leu and Fabrice Gonet.
The Dials: Sea, Stone, and Meteorite
The Admiral‘s visual identity has always lived on its dial, and looking at the new references, CORUM has approached that redesign with evident discipline. The nautical pennants, originally conceived in the 1960s and fully codified in the 1983 model, now read as trapezoidal applied hour markers fusing international maritime signal codes with classical horological indexing. For the first time, the pennant takes on the near-form of a traditional index without surrendering its nautical character.
Dial production comes from Montremo, whose building literally shares a wall with the CORUM manufacture. Their lead execution for the Admiral 39 produces a blue smoked gradient on a brass substrate, pressing a wave texture into the surface before applying a chromatic transition from pale blue at the centre to deep ocean blue at the perimeter. A second variant introduces the first-ever sunburst finish on an Admiral, in stone-grey tones referencing the granite facade of CORUM’s headquarters. A third brings meteorite to the Admiral for the very first time: CORUM pioneered that material in 1986, and this dial preserves the Widmanstätten crystalline pattern in its natural state, with silver-grey metallic inclusions that shift visually under changing light. The Admiral 36 adds smoked blue, deep burgundy sunburst, iridescent blue mother-of-pearl, and natural white mother-of-pearl across its five references.
The Movements: Rare Architecture
The new Admiral runs on Calibre CO231, developed with CORUM‘s neighbour and long-standing partner Concepto. It beats at 4 Hz (28,800 vph), delivers a 72-hour power reserve, and incorporates a stop-seconds mechanism alongside a quick-set date. What stands out on paper, and what will likely stand out even more in person, is the balance wheel at 12 o’clock. This is an exceptionally rare configuration in contemporary watchmaking, chosen deliberately to echo the in-line baguette layout of the Golden Bridge. The finishing specification is serious: satin-brushed bridges, polished bevels, a grained mainplate, and a gold-toned oscillating weight with a tungsten counterweight engraved with the CORUM Key, all visible through a sapphire case back.
For the skeletonised titanium Admiral, Concepto reworked CO231 into Calibre CO232. The openworked construction reveals a large barrel at 6 o’clock, a transverse gear train at centre, and the escapement at 12. The Golden Bridge Sapphire, meanwhile, houses the legendary baguette calibre in two forms: the manually wound Classic in either 5N gold or grey gold finish, and the Automatic with its signature linear oscillating weight visible on both sides of its axis.
The Cases: Integration as Engineering
Emmanuel Gueit retained the 12-sided bezel as the Admiral’s architectural anchor. The 39 mm case spans six executions: full steel, titanium, steel and gold, and full rose gold. Five references in the 36 mm follow. Both share the same key technical development: a fully integrated bracelet, the first in Admiral history, drawing direct inspiration from the 1983 model. A large satin-finished central link is flanked by two vertically polished smaller links and bordered by two slimmer satin-finished outer links. All bracelets interchange without tools via a push-button system built into the case, and the rose gold version features a clasp cover crafted exclusively in rose gold.
For the Golden Bridge, CORUM presents the first-ever 100% translucent sapphire case for this model, machined to frame the baguette movement with absolute optical clarity. The Miss Golden Bridge uses pink sapphire in a slender, gently curved tonneau form. The blue titanium Classic receives a PVD CORUM blue finish drawn from the original Admiral’s Cup colour, pairing physical lightness with titanium’s structural resistance.
Heritage: The Coin and the Golden Bridge
The two Heritage pieces CORUM reintroduces in 2026 are not nostalgia exercises. They are proof that the archive still generates living, wearable ideas. The new Coin reprises a concept born in 1964: split a gold coin through its thickness, insert a movement, pierce it at its centre, and fix two baton hands. The original used a $20 Double Eagle; the 2026 edition upgrades to a $50 gold coin, producing a 36 mm case housing an automatic movement with a 42-hour power reserve. The finely fluted case band returns, as does the full American monetary iconography: eagle and national motto on the front, the allegory of Liberty and face value on the reverse. It is the same audacious idea, executed with even greater conviction.
The Golden Bridge, for its part, takes a leap of its own. First introduced in 1980 with an in-line baguette movement housed between crystal panels, it now receives its first-ever 100% translucent sapphire case, presented in three distinct expressions. The Automatic version introduces a linear oscillating weight visible on both sides of its axis, with applied indices suspended along a peripheral arc in either black-and-gold or black-and-silver. The Classic returns to manual winding in either 5N gold or grey gold movement finish. And the Miss Golden Bridge, shaped in a tonneau form in vivid pink sapphire, reconnects the collection with its most emotional dimension: a watch worn as a piece of jewellery, precise and unapologetically joyful. All three are produced in strictly limited annual quantities, which given the sapphire case construction alone, feels entirely appropriate.
Conviction Has a Price
The new Admiral 36 and 39 start from CHF 6,900, rising to CHF 18,300 for diamond and gold editions. The Golden Bridge Sapphire references, given the complexity of machining a fully translucent sapphire case around the baguette movement, carry pricing in line with the collection’s established positioning above CHF 39,000. Heritage pieces, the Coin and the Golden Book, are produced in strictly limited annual quantities.
Mehmedovic reportedly told attendees plainly: “CORUM’s place is among the leading actors of Haute Horlogerie.” Studying the technical documentation from the outside, the skeletonised Admiral 39, the sapphire Golden Bridge, the integrated bracelet built from first principles, it is genuinely hard to find reason to disagree. I intend to see these watches in the metal very soon. Something tells me that will only strengthen the case.
