Emmanuel Dietrich was born in 1969 in Besançon, the cradle of French watchmaking. His family, partly from Alsace – hence the German name – and partly from the Swiss border, was the encounter of two worlds. On one side artists, and on the other artisans and watchmakers of the Jura mountains (one of his grandfather took another typically Swiss path and became a chocolatier).
Emmanuel began to reinvent his universe as a child and never stopped since. His urge to express his own vision of objects all around us led him to spend all his free time in his small workshop. A mechanical wristwatch he received at the age of seven, a pretty “Cuppillard Rième” mini diver’s watch made him fall in love with watchmaking. His first Master was soon a friend of the family, a prototypist at the LIP watch factory in Besançon, who also introduced him to his other passion: motorcycling.
His study at the Boulle school in Paris opened his eyes to many other fields and to the world, but he remains the child he’s always been; happy at the most when dreaming of his next project and searching for the ideal line or the perfect technical solution.
Coming back to watchmaking was a logical decision when he sought to create his own brand and universe, a long-coveted project.
To allow himself to dedicate more time to creation, Emmanuel partnered in 2019 with Charles de Boissard, another Frenchmen of Zürich with complementary skills and a shared vision.

2010: Emmanuel Dietrich established his eponymous brand DIETRICH, with the objective of sharing his own horological vision after having designed for major brands for 17 years.
2012: First public presentation at the GTE Geneva in January 2012, where a young blogger called Ariel Adam fell in love with the “Snow”, a watch dedicated to Ski. DIETRICH also attended Baselworld for the first time that year.
2013: Creation and development of the Organic Time, a model with a strong image and a singular design language that allows DIETRICH to create its own space within the watch world.
2014: Baselworld 2014 confirmed the market’s interest and made the launch of the collection official. The first Instagram post from our friend @thehorophile
2015: Counterfeits of the OT collection were starting to spread, an undesirable but unavoidable side-effect of the collection’s success.
2016: While on holidays with his family on the seaside of Corsica, Emmanuel Dietrich conceived the first complication of the brand, the Perception. It featured the first-ever “relative seconds” display, conveying the emotional aspect of time.
2017: At Baselworld 2017, DIETRICH presented the Perception and its unique way of displaying the seconds in the way that we feel it, rather than measure it.
2017 also saw the launch of the Time Companion collection, a homage to Gerald Genta and the fascinating category of watches he created: the luxury stainless steel sports watch with an integrated bracelet.
2018: The difficult decision to say goodbye to the Organic Time was taken, in order to pursue the goal of making our watches holistically Swiss Made.
2019: Introduction of the DD-1 (for Dietrich Device Nr. 1), a new chapter in the brand’s organic design approach. The same spirit of the OT but in a very different execution, matured but still playful.