![]() ![]() ![]() The company, now, is coming back to life as a modern brand, albeit one which looks squarely at the glorious past for design inspiration, which in this instance, does not seem like a bad thing at all. It also has the added attraction that prices for Nivada watches have not gone as absolutely bananas as they have for a lot of others. The upheavals in the industry made Nivada under any name a thing of (mostly) the past, but like many defunct brands, it has gone on to have something of a second life, or at least an afterlife, as an enthusiast-favorite collectible vintage brand. Vintage Nivada Chronomaster advertisement source, Europastar. Whether the suit had any merit or not (as far as I can see, any consumer who confuses one firm for another because each has three syllables to its name, which starts with a consonant and ends with a vowel, deserves whatever he or she gets), the point seems to have carried in court, and so Nivada, which was based in Grenchen, Switzerland, became known as Nivada Grenchen, with watches from the firm also sometimes using the name of the distribution company formed for the brand in the USA: Croton. The company is better known under the name Nivada Grenchen in the USA, or under the name Croton – there was apparently a kerfuffle with the Movado watch company in the 1960s over a perceived (by Movado) similarity in names, and the claim was made by Movado that this might lead to consumer confusion over which company was which. This was true of Nivada – a company which, under that name, was a reliable if not internationally renowned part of the pre-Quartz watch scene. Many worthy and historically interesting companies simply ceased to exist, or live on now only as vassal states (sometimes without even their proud original names preserved) of larger international empires. Anyhow, in such battles, there are always many sad losses to make victory bittersweet, and so it was with the Quartz Crisis and subsequent Mechanical Renaissance. The next piece of indoctrination is to the legendarium of the Quartz Crisis, which takes on in the minds of watch enthusiasts something of the same importance that the Battle of the Pelennor Fields does for fans of The Lord Of The Rings – unquestionable good pitted against utter evil, a dark outcome guaranteed for the good guys, and victory unlooked-for at the last minute when an ally despaired of appears in the nick of time (and by ally despaired of, I mean, the Swatch). ![]() As every watch enthusiast learns when they are but a wee watch enthusiast, there are two kinds of watches: quartz and "real" watches. ![]()
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