Yema is one of the few French watch brands to have lived through the full arc of the twentieth-century industry: a confident postwar start in Besançon, a golden age built on tool watches, the quartz crisis, a period under industrial ownership, and a patient revival rooted in the Jura mountains. Today it stands among the most visible names in French watchmaking, and one of the clearest examples of how a heritage brand can rebuild itself around its own archive.
Yema was founded in 1948 by Henry Louis Belmont, a graduate of the National Watchmaking School of Besançon, the city that was then the beating heart of French horology. Belmont started with accessible, solidly built watches and soon recognised that the brand’s future lay in robust instruments made for people who actually depended on them. Through the 1950s and 1960s Yema expanded quickly, and its catalogue came to be defined by watches designed for diving, aviation, sailing and motor racing, often at prices well below those of Swiss competitors.
That identity was shaped by the role of the French armed forces and professional users, who contributed to the brand’s early reputation for durability. Yema’s designs of this period combined clear, legible dials with inventive mechanical solutions, and many of them have since become sought-after references on the vintage market.
The model that defines the brand is the Superman, introduced in 1963 as a diver’s watch rated to 300 metres. Its signature is a patented bezel lock, a small bracket with a window at three o’clock that clamps the rotating bezel in place so it cannot be moved accidentally underwater. The idea was both practical and instantly recognisable, and the Superman remains the visual shorthand for Yema more than sixty years later. It has been reissued in many forms, from faithful tributes to modern versions with GMT functions and larger water resistance.
Alongside it sits the Rallygraf, a motorsport chronograph whose name and character belong to the racing culture of the late 1960s. Yema is closely tied in collectors’ minds to the American driver Mario Andretti, who is said to have worn a Rallygraf when he won the Indianapolis 500 in 1969, and the model has since returned as a contemporary chronograph with a clear vintage motorsport spirit. The Yachtingraf, conceived for regatta timing, completes the picture of a brand that looked to the sea and to racing for its inspiration.
Yema’s place in the history of exploration is secured by the Spationaute I, worn in 1982 by Jean-Loup Chrétien, the first Frenchman in space, which made it the first French watch to travel beyond the atmosphere. That legacy lives on in the Spacegraf line, which revived the story in collaboration with the French space agency CNES. The Wristmaster, a dressier and more classical family, rounds out the historical range and has become the home of the brand’s in-house movements.
Like most European makers, Yema was hit hard by the arrival of Japanese quartz watches in the 1970s. In 1982 the Belmont family sold the company to Matra, part of the Lagardère group, which ran the watch business in partnership with the electronics firm Thomson. The brand’s visibility did not disappear, but its independence and its mechanical focus gradually faded as it passed through successive corporate hands, and production shifted away from its original workshops.
The turning point came in 2009, when Yema was acquired by Montres Ambre, a French watch company based in Morteau and run by the Bôle family. With the brand now anchored in the Jura watchmaking region, a short drive from Besançon, the new owners set about reviving the archive, relaunching the Superman and other classics at accessible prices and rebuilding the brand’s credibility among enthusiasts. Crowdfunded and limited releases helped bring a new generation of collectors into the fold, and the watches were received by the community as honest, well-priced and unusually faithful to their roots.
In recent years Yema has moved decisively toward vertical integration. Its Manufacture Morteau calibres, known as CMM, include micro-rotor movements that now power the Wristmaster collection and other models, giving the brand a genuine French-made mechanical identity rather than a reliance on off-the-shelf movements. The same ambition shows in its more experimental pieces, with the Spacegraf line expanding to include high-complication limited editions such as a flying tourbillon with a sidereal-time display, reflecting a willingness to move well beyond the entry-level segment that brought the brand back.
The Navygraf, developed with the French Navy, has become another pillar of the modern range, with variants using materials such as meteorite dials and forged carbon, and with special editions marking the four hundredth anniversary of the Marine Nationale. Yema has also strengthened its public presence through partnerships and appearances at automotive and horological events such as Rétromobile, while continuing to work with independent movement specialists such as Olivier Mory. The result is a brand that honours a distinctly French tool-watch tradition while steadily climbing in technical ambition.
