Historically, Nivrel originated from the brand Marvin. Marvin was founded in 1850 by Marc and Emmanuel Didisheim in St. Imier, part of the Swiss Jura region. In 1936, the company introduced a new brand, NIVREL. NIVREL featured men’s watches with chronographs and calendars, as well as small ladies watches. Movements were either provided by existing suppliers, or produced in-house. In the 1970’s, with the so-called “quartz crisis,” came big changes to the Swiss watch industry. Many big brand companies changed hands or died out completely. Unfortuantely, Marvin and NIVREL also vanished from the market; lying dormant for nearly 20 years until Gerd and Gitta Hofer from Saarbrucken revived NIVREL in 1993.
NIVREL has found excited customers for individual watches from Saarbrücken all over the world. That’s why the company is able to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the watch production in Germany today. A wonderful occasion to dedicate a watch model to the Saar region and its people: The new Coeur de la Sarre!
Anniversay model Coeur de la Sarre
The anniversary model for the 20th anniversary of being in the German Saarland region bears the name Coeur de la Sarre (heart of the Saar). This slogan has been an integral part of the NIVREL brand logo for many years. It expresses our close relation to our personal roots in the Saar region.
At NIVREL we like to interprete the ticking of our watches being a little bit like the heart beat of the region in which we live and work. The Coeur de la Sarre is the new model within our so-called Replique edition. It comes in four different, limited dial executions. The executions are named after four cities in the Saar region, two on the German ’Saarland‘ side, two on the French ‘Lorraine’ side. The four cities all bear the Saar river in their names: Sarrebruck (Saarbrücken), Sarrelouis (Saarlouis), Sarreguemines (Saargemünd) and Sarrebourg (Saarburg). On the watch dials, the names are spelled in French as reminiscence to our closeness to the French neighbors and to our joint, laid-back lifestyle, the ‘Savoir Vivre’ as we call it. Even more, 2013 is not only an anniversary year for NIVREL. It also marks the 50th anniversary of the Franco-German Friendship Treaty (Élysée-Treaty) on 22nd January 1963, that has had such a positive effect on our Franco-German region.
As all watches within NIVREL’s Replique Edition, the Coeur de la Sarre engages with the history of the brand. Since 1994, watches in the Replique edition have always picked up the design of an older NIVREL model from the 1940ies and 1950ies. While the first models have always been chronographs, the new model Coeur de la Sarre is the first one to be reminiscence to a classical three-handed watch. The Coeur de la Sarre picks up a design that could be found on most NIVREL models from the older, Swiss era of the brand. A round case with a domed crystal (Plexiglass on older models) and a dial which shows the time by Arabic numbers in the positions 2, 4, 6, 10 and 12 o‘clock. The positions in between are marked with applied indexes.
