Contact
Four watchmakers, one email address and one telephone number between them. Below the form is every policy we have, written out in full: what delivery costs, what a service costs, what happens if you change your mind, and what this website stores. Nothing is filed behind a help centre.
Enquiries
Answer as much or as little as you like. All we really need is a name, an address to write back to, and one sentence about what you are trying to decide. A watchmaker reads it, not a queue.
The atelier
The whole house is one room in Plainpalais, over a locksmith, with four benches along the window. There is no boutique, no counter and no sign on the street door. You ring the middle bell and one of us comes down.
Four people build every watch we sell. If two of them are downstairs talking, the day's work stops, so we keep visits to three afternoons a week and book them one at a time. Ask in the form above, or telephone and speak to whoever picks up. We usually have something inside ten days.
Two references out of the safe and onto a cloth, in daylight, on your wrist. A movement out of its case under a loupe so you can see what 312 parts looks like. Ten minutes at whichever bench is free, watching one being regulated. Then coffee, and the honest conversation about which case makes sense for you, including the one where we tell you to keep your money.
Nobody will ask you to decide anything on the day. We do not take orders in the room, because a 44 mm watch you have just held for the first time is not a decision to make in front of the person who made it.
Window, over Rue de Carouge
Ways to reach us
There is no ticket system and no chat robot. Email and the telephone both land with the same four people, and once you own a watch you get one of them by name.
Read by a watchmaker, answered by the one who knows the reference you are asking about. Same morning if you write before eleven, and inside one working day otherwise. Attach photographs if it is about a mark on a case, it saves a round trip.
atelier@example.com
Write to usTuesday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:30 Geneva time, which is UTC plus one in winter and plus two in summer. It rings on the bench, so it may take six or seven rings. There is no menu and no hold music. If nobody answers we are all under a loupe, and we call back the same day.
+41 00 000 00 00
Call the atelierOne of the four is assigned to your reference the day it is cased, and stays with it for as long as you own the watch. You get the name and a direct number on the certificate. Two working days for a written answer, the same day for anything that has stopped the watch.
Given with the certificate
Ask who it would beSupport and policies
Eight subjects, each one opened by its heading. These are the same words we would read back to you on the telephone, and the numbers in them are the numbers printed on the certificate.
Last revised 12 March 2026
Delivery is free everywhere we ship, fully insured door to door, with duties and taxes already inside the price. $18,500 is what leaves your account and $18,500 is what the watch costs you. Nothing is added at the door, and if a customs authority ever invoices you directly, send it to us and we pay it.
Every watch is made to order, so the wait is the wait: about five months for titanium and rose gold, about seven for king gold, counted from the day we confirm your bench slot rather than the day you enquire. We write at three points during it, with photographs from the bench.
You can change the delivery address up to ten working days before dispatch. After that the courier paperwork is filed and the address is fixed, so a late change means the watch waits in our safe until the next booking.
We cannot ship to a country under a Swiss export restriction, and we will tell you that on the first email rather than after you have committed anything. Two countries on our enquiry list are in that position today. If yours is one of them we will say so plainly and refund any deposit the same day.
Thirty days from the day the watch arrives, not from the day you ordered. Full refund, no restocking fee, and no explanation required. We pay the return shipping and the insurance both ways, and we book the courier for you.
Wear it while you decide. That is the point of thirty days. A watch that comes back with a wear mark on the clasp or a scuff on the case is still a full refund, because every case that goes back on the bench gets refinished anyway.
Exchanges work the same way inside the thirty days. If the reference you want is in stock you will have it in about three weeks. If it is not, you keep your original order date, so you rejoin the queue where you were rather than at the back of it. The price difference is settled at the prices on the day you first ordered, in both directions.
When a refund clears we update the register that day and the piece number is freed for the next owner, with your name removed. A returned watch is sold as new only if it has been fully refinished and re-regulated, and the register says so either way.
Five years from the day the watch is delivered, and it moves with the watch. If you sell it, the new owner has whatever is left, and changing the name in the register costs nothing. We are one of very few houses that will do that without an inspection fee.
The warranty covers the movement, the case, the dial, the hands and the crystal against anything that is our fault: a part that fails, a finish that lifts, a rate that drifts outside the tolerance we printed on your certificate.
Service interval is about six to eight years, not five. If the watch keeps time inside its tolerance and still runs past sixty hours off a full wind, leave it alone. Opening a healthy movement on a calendar is a service industry habit, not watchmaking.
A full service is $980. That figure is printed on your certificate on the day you buy and it is fixed for the life of the watch, so a service in 2044 costs what the paper says, not what inflation says. A crystal is $310 and a strap change while you wait is free. Every service, in or out of warranty, includes a full case refinish at no charge.
Turnaround is about six weeks, because the same four people who assemble watches also service them and assembly comes first in the queue. We will lend you a Frost from the house stock while yours is on the bench, at no charge, insured, for as long as we have it.
We keep Calibre 312 parts in the building rather than in a distributor's warehouse, and the tooling for every part stays with us after a reference closes. There is no scenario in which your watch becomes unrepairable because a supplier moved on.
There are 312 Chronographe 312 in the world and there will never be a 313. Every watch is numbered on the caseback in the form 041/312 and recorded in the house register, which we publish rather than keep. You can read it at the register.
For each piece the register carries the serial, the reference, the case metal, the date of assembly, the name of the watchmaker who assembled and signed it, and every service it has had since. Owner names appear only where the owner has asked us in writing to include them. Otherwise the line reads "owner withheld", which is the default.
What we will not do: we do not authenticate a watch from photographs, because the things worth faking are not visible in a photograph. We do not value watches, for insurance or for anything else, because we are not a valuer and a number from us would be treated as more than a guess. And if anybody offers to certify an Aeterna for a fee, it is not us. We charge nothing for this, ever.
Send a watch to Geneva and we will open it, compare it to the register and write you a one page letter either way. That is free too. It takes about two weeks and you pay the courier.
It collects nothing. There is no analytics, no tag manager, no advertising pixel, no session recorder and no A/B testing tool. No request leaves your browser carrying anything about you, because there is nowhere for it to go.
One request does go to another company. The two typefaces come from Google Fonts, which means Google's servers see your IP address and your browser's user agent when a page loads. We would rather self host them and we have not yet. Everything else, the film, the photographs, the stylesheets and the scripts, is served from this domain.
The forms on this site do not send anything anywhere. The enquiry form above checks your answers in your browser and then stops. There is no endpoint behind it.
Two entries in your browser's local storage, both created only if you use the feature:
aeterna.cart.v1 holds the reference names in your bag and how many of each. Nothing else.aeterna.wishlist.v1 holds the reference names you have saved.Both stay on your device. Neither is ever transmitted, and we cannot read them. Clearing site data for this domain in your browser settings removes both, and the site works perfectly with neither.
We would hold your name, your address, your telephone number, your email address and the serial number of your watch, because a delivery and a five year warranty are impossible without them. We would keep them for as long as you own the watch and for ten years after, which is what Swiss commercial bookkeeping requires. Card numbers never reach us: they go from your browser to the payment provider, who tell us only that the money arrived.
We would not sell your details, rent them, share them with a marketing company or use them to advertise at you elsewhere. The four of us are the only people who see them, plus the courier, who gets a name and an address and nothing else.
You could ask us at any time for a copy of everything we hold, a correction, or deletion of anything we are not legally required to keep. Write to atelier@example.com and a person, not a portal, answers inside five working days. Under Swiss data protection law and the GDPR those are your rights, not our favours.
Aeterna SA, Rue de Carouge 14, 1205 Geneva, Switzerland, sells the Chronographe 312 directly and only directly. There are no dealers, no authorised retailers and no online marketplace listings from us. Anybody claiming to be an Aeterna agent is not one.
Prices are in US dollars, delivered, duties and taxes paid: $18,500 for titanium, $34,000 for rose gold, $41,000 for king gold. The price is fixed on the day we confirm your bench slot and we will never revise it upward afterwards, whatever gold does in the five months that follow. If the price falls before your watch ships, you pay the lower one.
Submitting a form is not a purchase. An order exists when we have written to you confirming a bench slot and a delivery window, and you have confirmed it back. Until then nothing is owed in either direction.
A deposit of twenty percent holds the slot. It is refundable in full, on request, at any point until we cut the case. After the case is cut it covers the metal, which we cannot re-use, and the remainder is still refundable.
About five months, about seven for king gold, and "about" is doing real work in that sentence. If we slip by more than six weeks we telephone you rather than email you, and you may cancel with everything refunded, deposit included. That has happened three times since 2019, twice because of a dial supplier and once because a watchmaker broke a wrist.
312 pieces: nine titanium references of 26, two rose gold references of 34, one king gold reference of 10. The edition is closed. We will not add a piece, extend a reference or make a one off, and we will decline politely however the question is asked. When a reference sells out you can join a waitlist for a cancelled slot, which moves more often than you would expect.
Dial colours shift with light, and no screen is a colour match. Lagoon in particular reads green indoors and blue outside, which is deliberate. We will send you photographs of your actual watch before it is dispatched, and if the colour is not what you expected, the thirty day return stands.
Swiss law governs these terms and the courts of Geneva have jurisdiction. Where consumer protection in your own country gives you more than we have written here, you keep the more generous of the two. Nothing in these terms limits liability for death, personal injury or fraud.
One more thing, and it is the important one on this page: this website is a design demonstration. Aeterna is not a real company, no watch on it can be bought, and none of the above is a contract with anybody.
This site sets no cookies. Not a necessary one, not a functional one, not an analytics one. If you open your browser's storage inspector on this page, the cookie list is empty.
That is also why you did not get a consent banner. There is nothing to consent to. A banner asking permission to do nothing would be theatre, and it would be one more thing between you and the watches.
Two entries in local storage do exist, and they are not cookies: they are never sent with a request, so no server ever sees them. They are aeterna.cart.v1 and aeterna.wishlist.v1, they hold reference names, and they are described in full under Privacy above. Clearing site data removes them.
If we ever did want to measure something, we would ask first, in a sentence rather than a modal, and the site would behave identically if you said no. Nothing on this site is gated behind agreeing to be counted.
We are aiming at WCAG 2.2 level AA and we are not claiming to have reached it. Below is what this site actually does, and then what we know is still wrong. The second list is the honest part.
prefers-reduced-motion set to reduce, the scroll driven film on the home page is replaced by a still photograph, entrance transitions do not run, and no element is left invisible or part way through a movement. Nothing on the site autoplays with sound.Write to atelier@example.com with "Accessibility" at the front of the subject line, or telephone +41 00 000 00 00 and say so. It reaches the same four people, not a ticket queue. We answer inside two working days and we will tell you either when it is fixed or why it is not going to be.
If any part of this site stops you doing something, we will do that part for you by email or on the telephone in the meantime. That includes reading you the whole of the policies above.
Questions
These are the questions that arrive before an order, in roughly the order they arrive. Two of the answers argue against buying the more expensive watch, and one of them is us admitting we do not know.
Yes. 18k gold is softer than steel and softer again than the titanium references, and the first mark usually arrives inside the first month, generally on the left side of the case from a door frame or a desk edge. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling you something.
What we do about it: every service includes a full case refinish at no charge, for the life of the watch, and we will refinish a case on its own for nothing if you are passing Geneva. A rose gold case can be brought back to the day it shipped perhaps six or seven times before the chamfers start to soften, which is more lifetimes than most watches get.
If a mark on a case would genuinely bother you, buy the titanium. It is $15,500 less, it marks less readily, and the movement inside it is identical. We have talked more people into titanium than out of it.
Solid, all the way through, cast in our own foundry and hallmarked inside the caseback where you can see it with the movement out. The rose gold is 18k. The king gold is an 18k alloy with about five percent platinum, which holds a deeper red and dulls more slowly. Nothing on the outside of any Aeterna is plated, coated or filled.
The titanium references are Grade 5 throughout, including the crown, the pushers and the clasp. No steel parts, no coated steel pretending to be titanium.
One honest exception. Inside Sovereign the movement bridges are gilded rather than rhodium plated, so the gold runs through the watch instead of around it. Gilding is a plated finish, it is on a part you look at through the crystal, and it is the only plating in the collection. We would rather write that here than have you find it in a forum.
Because the two materials do different jobs. The strap is alligator on the outside over vulcanised rubber underneath. The rubber takes the sweat, the sun cream and the sea water. The alligator takes the looking at. Neither one would survive doing the other's work.
A lined leather strap on a 44 mm gold watch, worn in summer by somebody with warm wrists, is a strap you replace twice a year and a watch that smells of it in between. We tried it for the first two years of the reference and stopped.
Replacements are $420 and take about a week, or nothing at all if you are in Geneva and can wait twenty minutes. Straps are the one part of this watch we treat as a consumable, and we say so in the warranty rather than in the small print.
$980 for a full service. That number is printed on your certificate on the day you buy the watch and it does not move for the life of the watch, so a service in 2044 costs $980 whatever has happened to the franc in between. A crystal is $310. A strap change while you wait is free. A case refinish is included in every service, always.
The interval is about six to eight years rather than the five you may be used to hearing. If the watch is inside its rate tolerance and still runs past sixty hours from a full wind, leave it alone. We will tell you to come back later if you bring it in early, and we will not charge you for the conversation.
Turnaround is about six weeks, and we will lend you a Frost while yours is with us so there is nothing on your wrist that you have to think about.
We do not know, and we are not going to pretend to. We have been making watches since 1948 and we cannot tell you what a Chronographe 312 will fetch in 2040. Anyone who can is guessing with more confidence than we have.
What is true and checkable: there are 312 of them and there will never be more, the register is public so provenance is never in doubt, and service costs are fixed in writing, which removes the usual reason a small house watch becomes unsellable. Those things tend to help.
What is also true: we are a small house with four employees and a thin secondary market. A thin market moves in both directions and it moves further than a big one. If the resale number is central to your decision, this is the wrong watch, and there is no version of this answer where we tell you otherwise.
Buy it because you want to wear it for thirty years. That is the only case for it we are willing to make.
About five months for titanium and rose gold. About seven for king gold, because there are ten Sovereign in the whole edition and they come from one foundry pour a year. The clock starts when we confirm your bench slot, not when you first write.
You hear from us three times while you wait, with photographs: when the case comes off the mill, when the movement is cased, and when the watch is regulated and ready to leave. Then a telephone call the day before it ships.
If we are going to slip by more than six weeks we telephone you rather than email you, and you can cancel with everything refunded including the deposit. Since 2019 that has happened three times.
Yes, and we would much rather you did. A 44 mm skeleton chronograph is a large watch and photographs flatter it. Some people put one on and change reference on the spot. A few put one on and decide it is not for them, which is a far better outcome for everybody than a return five months later.
Rue de Carouge 14 in Geneva, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday afternoon, by appointment. Forty five minutes. Two references on the cloth, a movement out of its case under a loupe, ten minutes watching one being regulated, and nobody will ask you to decide anything before you leave.
If Geneva is not realistic, we will do the same thing on a video call with a watchmaker and a bench camera, which is better than it sounds and takes about half an hour. Ask above and say which you would prefer.
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