Robert Henzi was a watch entrepreneur who, together with Robert Pfaff, founded the watch company Henzi & Pfaff in Pforzheim, Germany, in 1946. Pforzheim, nicknamed the “Gold City”, was one of Europe’s main centres of watch and jewellery production, and the two partners set up their business there in the years immediately after the Second World War. The company’s watches were sold under the name Hercules, and the brand is still known today by that name.

The best-known moment in the early history of the brand came in 1953, when the Austrian mountaineer Hermann Buhl wore a Hercules timepiece during the first successful solo ascent of Nanga Parbat. That story has since become the foundation of the brand’s identity.

Like many traditional German and Swiss watch companies, Henzi & Pfaff became dormant during the quartz crisis of the 1970s. The brand was revived in 2022 by watchmaker Adriaan Trampe, who relaunched Hercules in Switzerland around the concept of “Luxury Alpinism”. Its current HP1 and HP2 models carry on the mountaineering heritage that Henzi and Pfaff established.