Stowa

The name comes from the opening letters of STOrz and WAlter. In 1935 the company moved from the Black Forest to Pforzheim, and in 1938 it put up its own building on Bismarckstraße. Alongside its everyday watches it made plain designs in the Bauhaus manner from 1937, which its Antea series still follows.^1, 5

In the Second World War Stowa was one of five firms that built the observation watch, the B-Uhr, for navigators of the German air force; the others were A. Lange & Söhne, Laco, Wempe and IWC Schaffhausen. Stowa’s were 55 mm wristwatches with the Swiss Unitas 2812 pocket-watch movement, made from 1940 with a conventional hour ring (Baumuster A) and later with a large outer minute ring around a small hour ring (Baumuster B). Stowa says probably no more than 42 of the Baumuster B were made.^{2, 3, 4, 5}

The Bismarckstraße building was destroyed in the bombing of Pforzheim on February 23, 1945, and that year production moved to Rheinfelden on the Swiss border, where a new factory was finished in 1951. The Pforzheim headquarters was rebuilt alongside it, and in 1954 Stowa founded RUFA to make shock absorbers for PUW and Durowe movements.^1, 5

Werner Storz, the founder’s son, joined in 1960 and ran the company until 1996, when, with no successor, he sold it to the watchmaker Jörg Schauer. The next year Stowa reissued its wartime pilot’s watch in the Baumuster A form; the Baumuster B followed in 2010 and a pilot’s chronograph in 2012. From 2009 it worked from a new building with a museum in Engelsbrand, near Pforzheim.^1, 2, 5

Since July 2021 Stowa has belonged to Tempus Arte. It moved back into Pforzheim in 2023 and in 2024 introduced a movement of its own, the M1. It also took part in drafting DIN 8330, the German standard for pilot’s watches created in 2016, as Stowa describes it.^1, 2, 5