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There are watch brands people write about. And there are watch brands people copy from each other. Squale is the second kind.
That is not a dig at anyone. There is a reason for it, and the reason is the brand itself. For decades Squale did the single most important job you can do in this industry without ever putting its name on the result. It made cases. Waterproof cases, at a time when waterproof was not a given but an unsolved problem that a long list of manufacturers never got right.
If you ever pick up an old dive watch and find a small shark at six o’clock on the dial, or stamped into the caseback, you are holding a Squale case. Even when the name on the dial says something else entirely.
In my shop: All Squale dive watches
I have been selling Squale for a few years now. In that time I noticed something: almost everything you can find about this brand online goes back to a handful of sources that quote one another. Some of it is correct. Some of it is plausible. And a few things are simply not documented anywhere, yet they get passed along so confidently that by now they read like established fact.
This article tries something else. It separates what is documented from what is merely claimed. In places that is unsatisfying, because the honest answer turns out to be “nobody knows” instead of a good story. I still think it is the better version.
Neuchâtel, 1950
The beginning is not a diver and not a depth record. It is a watch factory.
In 1950 Charles and Helene Von Büren founded Von Büren SA in Neuchâtel. That is the starting point, and it matters that you file it correctly. Von Büren SA built watches. Not dive watches. Watches. The name Squale did not exist yet.
And it did not build them only for itself. Squale writes on its own philosophy page that Neuchâtel produced “timepieces for other brands” from the outset. So the business model the company would later become known for is not a later idea. It stands at the very beginning.
Neuchâtel is no accident as a location either. The canton on the lake of the same name has been one of the centres of Swiss watchmaking since the eighteenth century. The density of suppliers, toolmakers and specialists there is something you will not find anywhere else. Open a factory in that valley and everything you need is within reach.
Which brands the Von Bürens worked for during the fifties, and in what numbers, can no longer be reconstructed properly. The company history Squale publishes itself jumps from the 1950 founding straight to 1959. Nine years sit in between, and almost nothing survives about them.
That is typical for this part of the industry at that time. Component suppliers did not issue press releases.
One more line from Squale that I like: the Von Bürens’ interest in underwater watchmaking came out of “a great personal passion for diving and water sports”. So the brand was not drawn up at a desk because a market had been spotted. Two people wanted to build a watch that would survive their own hobby.
1946, 1948, 1950, 1959 – why four founding years are in circulation
Look up when Squale was founded and you will get four different answers, depending on where you look.
| Year | Where you find it |
|---|---|
| 1946 | in reference works and specialist sites |
| 1948 | in several international watch magazines |
| 1950 | on Squale’s own pages, and in further sources |
| 1959 | in the English Wikipedia and at numerous retailers |
And not one of those sources mentions that the other three exist.
This is not a scandal, it is a misunderstanding that hardened over time. What actually happens here is that three separate events get mixed into one, and all three are legitimate.
The founding of the watch factory. Von Büren SA, Neuchâtel, 1950. That is the company.
The registration of the trademark. On 10 July 1959 Charles Von Büren registered the name “Squale”. The same year brought the first patent on a dive watch case. That is the birth of the brand, not of the firm.
The start of the specialisation. Squale states that the company has made “nothing but dive watches since 1959”. Before 1959: watches. From 1959: dive watches.
So anyone writing “Squale, founded 1959” means the brand. Anyone writing “1950” means the company. Both are right, and neither says which one they mean.
Where 1946 and 1948 come from, I could not establish. It is possible they refer to a predecessor workshop for which no publicly accessible source survives. It is equally possible that someone once copied a number incorrectly and it has been travelling ever since. I do not know, and I did not find anyone who does.
A side note that fits the name: squale is French for shark. The shark became the brand’s signature, in a place where very few people would think to look for it.
The supplier years – and what is actually documented
This is where it gets interesting, and where it gets uncomfortable.
From 1960 Von Büren SA produced cases for other brands on a larger scale. That part is not in dispute, Squale says so itself, and it explains a detail collectors still hunt for today. Cases made by Squale often carry the small shark, either on the dial at six o’clock or on the caseback.
A firm building cases for the competition was nothing shady back then, it was the norm. The Swiss watch industry of the fifties and sixties was a network of highly specialised suppliers. One made movements, the next dials, the third cases. Anyone who could do waterproof was in demand. Waterproof is not a condition you explain, it is one you have to prove.
And now the question nobody asks: for whom, exactly?
Search for it and you will find a list quickly enough. Twenty names, sometimes more. Big brands among them, small ones, some long gone. The list appears in reference works, in magazine features, on retailer pages. It looks extremely solid.
I tried to get to the bottom of it. This is where I ended up.
Tier 1 – best supported: Blancpain and Doxa
These two names appear in practically every source, independently of one another, across decades.
With Blancpain there is even something physical. When a project some years ago revived old, never-used cases from old stock, those cases carried a stamp: “Rayville SA”. That was the company behind Blancpain. This is not a newspaper article, it is a mark struck into metal.
Two qualifications belong with it, otherwise a good piece of evidence turns into a bad legend. These were not Fifty Fathoms cases, but cases intended for civilian Bathyscaphe models. And a stamped case proves in the first instance that it was destined for Blancpain. It does not automatically prove that Squale made it.
With Doxa the evidence is thinner. But the agreement across many sources that do not depend on one another is consistent enough that I consider it solid.
Tier 2 – frequently named, nowhere documented
These names appear in several serious sources. Not one of them says where the information came from. No archive document, no register entry, no case stamp, no reference literature.
Heuer · Sinn · Auricoste · Zeno · La Spirotechnique
One detail makes me particularly careful here. A lot of texts write “TAG Heuer”. The name TAG Heuer has only existed since 1985. In the sixties and seventies, which is the period under discussion, the brand was simply called Heuer. Anyone researching from original material would have tripped over that. The fact that almost everybody has it wrong in exactly the same way tells me something about the route this list has travelled.
Tier 3 – the full list, expressly unconfirmed
In the first draft of this article I left these names out, because I could not verify a single one of them. I now think that was the wrong call. Anyone searching for them should at least find one text that says how thin the ground is.
So: these names circulate, some in a single source only, some in variants that contradict each other. For not one of them did I find evidence.
Altanus Genève · Airin · Arlon · Berio · Carlson Tavernier Geneva · Deman Watch · Dodane · Eagle Star Genève · Jean Perret Geneva · Margi · Ocean Diver / Blandford · Potens Prima · Prima Flic · Velester · Wertex
The only name in that row that anyone outside collector circles would recognise is Dodane. The French manufacturer from Besançon built military chronographs, among them the Type 21 for the French air force, and exists again today as Dodane 1857. If there is anything to this list at all, Dodane is the name where serious digging would most likely pay off.
What that means for you
If you own an old watch with a shark signature: that is a genuine indication and a lovely thing to have. If somebody is selling you a vintage piece with the words “Squale case” and there is no shark anywhere, ask how they know.
And if you know better than I do, write to me. If you have a document, an invoice, a stamped case, a passage in the literature, I will add it and name the source. I have asked Squale directly. If anything comes back from there, it goes in here.
The records: 67 metres, 76 metres, one breath
In 1959 Squale had its own name. In 1962 came the first models sold exclusively under that name, among them the prototype of the SUB-39, which is still in the collection today. 1965 brought the Master.
And then two men turned a watch brand into a story.
Enzo Maiorca, 1967, 67 metres
In 1967 the Italian freediver Enzo Maiorca set a world record: 67 metres. On his wrist, a Squale Master.
It is worth taking a moment to understand what that means. Freediving means one breath. No equipment, no tank, no second chance. At 67 metres the pressure is nearly eight times what it is at the surface. The ribcage is compressed, the lungs shrink to a fraction of their volume. At the time, doctors considered dives to that depth lethal.
For a watch it is a stress test no laboratory rig reproduces. It is not only the pressure that counts, but the speed at which it arrives and leaves again.
The surrounding context is interesting too. A Squale advertisement from that period lists, alongside the Master, the Cuban team of the 1967 world championship and the French champion Tony Salvatori. Squale was not equipping one exceptional athlete. It was equipping a scene.
Jacques Mayol, 1970, 76 metres
Three years later the Frenchman Jacques Mayol went to 76 metres in Japan, wearing the model 2002 that Squale had introduced in 1968.
Mayol is the better known of the two, not least because Luc Besson’s film The Big Blue turned his rivalry with Maiorca into cinema. Squale itself calls his dive a “historic record” and expressly not a world record. I keep that distinction, because that is how it reads in the source.
What is remarkable is what became of these two records online: almost nothing. The English Wikipedia mentions Mayol in a subordinate clause, without a year and without a depth. Maiorca does not appear there at all. And yet this is the moment a case factory from Neuchâtel turned into a brand with a history of its own.
Issued watches: navy, paratroopers, state police
There is a difference between a watch made for divers and a watch an institution orders. The first has to convince a buyer. The second has to convince a procurement office, and procurement offices do not care about design.
Squale has both. Three deployments are documented.
The Italian Navy
Squale became an official supplier to the Marina Militare. Its own timeline places this in the years after the 1521 arrived, so the seventies and after. The cooperation page is more specific and says the collaboration began in the 1980s. It also names the place: La Spezia, the large naval base on the Ligurian coast.
I deliberately write the eighties rather than the seventies. Squale itself speaks of “more than forty years” of collaboration. From 1970 that would be more than fifty. The number fits the eighties.
The Folgore
In the same stretch Squale became a supplier to the Folgore parachute brigade. This is the one entry where I would like to have more. The Folgore does not appear on the cooperation page at all. It exists only in the timeline, with no year, no model and no quantity.
That is all I found, and I am not writing more here than I can support.
The Polizia di Stato
In 2017 Squale became the official supplier to the diving unit of the Italian state police. A special edition of the model 2002 was made for it.
This is the most recent of the three and the best documented. It is also the most interesting, because it does not come from the past. An authority putting a dive watch out to tender in 2017 has every alternative in the world available to it.
What you can take from the three entries: Squale is not a dive watch brand because the marketing says so. People who work underwater made a decision and then stuck with it.
I reviewed the Master in the version built for the Palombari del COMSUBIN, the divers of the Italian Navy. The report is here: Squale Master x Palombari del COMSUBIN Review.
1982 to 2005: the years nobody writes about
This is the point where most texts put in a paragraph break and resume at 2005. Which is a shame, because what happens right here is what shapes the brand to this day.
1982: Charles Von Büren sells
In 1982 Charles Von Büren sold the Squale brand to the Italian Maggi family and retired.
This did not come out of nowhere. The Maggis had been Squale’s Italian distributor for years, and the timeline notes for 1980 that the collaboration between the two families was becoming closer. Two years later the brand belonged to them.
That explains something a lot of people wonder about: why a Swiss brand feels so Italian. The customer base, the deployments with the navy and the police, the distribution, the collector scene. Since 1982 Squale has belonged to an Italian family. The company headquarters would later sit in Milan for decades. More on that shortly.
1984 and 1988: two models almost nobody knows
1984 brought the Rambo. A professional watch with an integrated compass. The name clearly comes from the cinema of the period. The idea behind it was not silly, it was consistent: a watch that does more than show the time, for people who have to find a direction underwater.
1988 brought the Tiger.
After that the timeline stops. The next entry is 2005.
Seventeen years of nothing
Between 1988 and 2005, Squale’s own timeline records not a single entry. No model, no cooperation, no anniversary.
I cannot tell you what happened in those years, because there is no reliable source for it. What I can tell you is what the industry looked like. The quartz crisis had taken the Swiss watch industry apart. Of the brands that survived the seventies, a large share disappeared during the eighties and nineties. If you owned a small, specialised brand with no group behind it, your options were to shut it down or to license the name out.
Squale was not wound up. The brand stayed in family hands and went into storage. That is the decisive difference to the many names that vanished for good in those years.
2005: the restart
In 2005 the Maggi family decided to bring Squale back and to reissue its best known models.
That is one sentence, and it deserves more attention than it gets. Restarting a brand after seventeen years of standstill is not a given. It only works if two things are true. There have to be people who still remember. And there has to be something you can reissue without inventing it.
Squale had both. The 1521 from the seventies is still the brand’s best selling model today.
The models: what exists and what it stands for
Squale does not run a broad catalogue. That is deliberate. There are essentially a handful of families, and almost every one of them has its origin somewhere in the brand’s own history.
In my shop: All Squale dive watches
1521 – the backbone
Introduced in the seventies, still the model most people think of. Classic dive watch shape, 500m, rotating bezel. The 1521 is by far the largest family on my shelves. It comes in steel, in bronze, on mesh, on rubber, in special editions.
If you want a Squale and do not know which one, the 1521 is the answer until you find a reason not to take it. I have reviewed the 1521 Ocean Mesh, and I have covered the 1521 Sea Shepherd as well.
2002 and 2001 – the record watch and its sister
The 2002 arrived in 1968 and is the model Jacques Mayol took to 76 metres in 1970. It is also the model the Italian state police received in 2017. If any Squale has a story, it is this one.
The 2001 is the associated line with the strongest navy connection. I covered the 2001 Marina Militare when it launched.
Master – the watch from 1965
The Master arrived in 1965 and carried Enzo Maiorca to 67 metres in 1967. Today it is the most uncompromising line in the range, including a titanium version. The Master Titanium is the most expensive Squale I stock.
SUB-39 – the oldest design
The prototype of the SUB-39 dates from 1962, which makes it one of the very first watches to carry the Squale name at all. For the brand’s sixtieth anniversary in 2019 Squale reissued the collection in a run limited to 150 pieces. I reviewed the SUB-39 GMT Vintage.
Matic – the modern reading
The Matic arrived in 2015 and is the line that looks least like vintage. The Matic S collection joined it more recently, with a 39.5mm case and the crown moved to three o’clock. I have reviewed the Matic Satin Black Mesh.
T-183 – fibreglass and carbon
2020 brought the T-183, Squale’s first model in fibreglass and carbon. It is the outlier in the range and the opposite of vintage.
1545 and Super Squale – the way in
The 1545 is the most affordable family I stock. I reviewed the 1545 GG.AC. The Super Squale picks up the skin diver shape of the sixties and sits just above it in price.
Galeazzi and DRASS – the partnership since 2021
2021 saw the first Squale Galeazzi model and the start of the partnership with Drass Galeazzi. Galeazzi is not a watch name. It is one of the oldest names in Italian diving technology, and DRASS today builds diving systems, pressure chambers and submarine rescue equipment.
The most recent result of that partnership is the Galeazzi Artiglio, limited to 500 pieces, with a wet indicator on the dial.
Which Squale fits you
On my shelves the Squale models currently sit between roughly 900 and 2,750 euros. That is a snapshot and not a price list. It does show the span, though: Squale is neither an entry level brand nor a luxury brand. It is the class in between, where your money buys substance rather than a name.
To help you find your way around, here is the sorting I use in conversation. Not by price, but by who you are.
The first one. First proper Swiss dive watch, does not want to get it wrong.
→ 1545, 890 to 1,010 euros. Ten models, the cheapest way in, still a full Squale.
The one. Wants the Squale, the model people mean when they say Squale.
→ 1521, 31 variants from 1,145 to 1,745 euros. The widest choice in the whole range. From here it is only colour and bracelet.
The one in a jacket. A dive watch that goes under a shirt cuff.
→ Super Squale or SUB-37 Legend, 1,160 to 1,650 euros. Skin diver line, flatter, more reserved.
The daily wearer. One watch for everything, modern rather than vintage.
→ Matic, 17 variants, 1,490 to 1,820 euros.
The traveller. Second time zone.
→ SUB-39 GMT Vintage, 1,890 to 2,080 euros. The only model in the range that answers this question.
The collector. Wants the history on the wrist.
→ 2001 or 2002, 1,770 to 1,990 euros. The shape Mayol took to 76 metres in 1970. Or the Galeazzi Artiglio, 500 pieces.
The uncompromising one.
→ Master Titanium, 2,450 to 2,750 euros, 1,200 metres. Or T-183 Forged Carbon, 2,010 euros, if weight is the issue.
And now the part nobody else writes
From around 1,500 euros upwards, what decides a Squale is no longer the budget. It is your wrist and your taste. A Matic is not superior to a 1521, it is different. Anyone looking for the “better” model in that middle ground is looking for something that does not exist.
Which is why at this point I do not ask customers about the price. I ask them when they intend to wear the watch.
Run from Ticino – and the move hardly anyone mentions
Here is the find that made me stop for a moment while researching.
Until 2020 Squale sat in Milan.
Squale writes it into its own timeline: in 2020 the company moved its headquarters to Ticino and closed its head office in Milan. That is not a footnote. It is the answer to a question retailers get asked constantly and which nobody else answers cleanly.
Since then the full company details appear in the footer of every Squale page:
Squale SA · C.so San Gottardo 54/A · Chiasso (Switzerland) · CHE-100829625
Squale SA, company footer
Chiasso is in the canton of Ticino, right on the Italian border. From there to the edge of Milan is about fifty kilometres. So the move was a small step geographically and a large one formally. A Swiss brand with an Italian head office became a Swiss brand with a Swiss head office.
Assembly, according to Squale, takes place “in our laboratories in Ticino”. Lugano and Mendrisio appear nowhere; Chiasso appears only in the company details.
One aside: Squale runs a museum. It is entirely virtual. No address, no opening hours. If you read somewhere that you can visit the Squale museum in Chiasso, that is not correct.
Swiss Made at Squale
The hard facts first. Squale SA is a Swiss company with its seat in Chiasso and the commercial register number CHE-100829625. The movements come from Sellita and ETA, so from Switzerland. Assembly is described by Squale as work in its own laboratories in Ticino.
And then Squale has something no other brand in this class can show. The case is the discipline this company was built on. The first patent on a dive watch case dates from 1959. From 1960 Von Büren built cases for other brands, and built them well enough that they ended up across half the industry. That is precisely why the shark on a caseback became a signature.
This is where the circle back to the beginning of the article closes. When you pick up a Squale, you are holding the component this company made its name with.
What matters for you I can tell you straight away: the watches on my shelves come from the official distribution. Not from the grey market, not from a collection being broken up, not from a platform.
Vincenzo Ferri – the depth claim of today
Maiorca and Mayol are great stories. They are also fifty years old, and any brand can pin a past to its lapel.
Squale has something current.
Since 2020 the Italian freediver Vincenzo Ferri has been an official Squale ambassador. What he has achieved in that time:
| Year | Achievement |
|---|---|
| 2021 | Italian record, 104m constant weight with bi-fins, Bahamas |
| 2022 | World record monofin, 101m |
| 2023 | World record bi-fins, 91m |
On top of that, four European championships and five world championships.
His line on it is: “Technique before depth, always.” That is remarkably unmarketing for somebody who makes a living from depth records, and that is exactly why it carries.
For scale, so the numbers mean something: in 1967 Maiorca set a world record at 67 metres that doctors thought impossible. Ferri goes past a hundred metres today. In both cases there is a Squale on the wrist.
The models Squale associates with him are the Master Grand Bleu and Grand Vert, the 1521 Classic, the 2001 Sand and the 1521 Ocean Rubber.
Warranty and service: what happens if something goes wrong
This is the chapter that appears in no Squale article anywhere online. I went looking for it. Service cost, service interval, spare parts supply: no results. Not in the magazines, not at the retailers, not on the collector sites.
And yet this is the question that becomes important after the purchase.
The warranty
Every Squale you buy from me comes with a two year warranty. That is the brand standard and it applies internationally from the date of purchase.
Two years sounds short if you know brands advertising five. In practice the difference is smaller than it looks. What fails within two years is almost always a material or assembly fault, and that shows up early. What comes due after five years is not a warranty matter, it is a service.
Who deals with it
And here is the point that actually matters.
If something is wrong, you send the watch to me. I sort it out with Squale, follow the case and come back to you. You do not call a hotline in Switzerland. You do not fill in a form in a language you would rather not. You do not explain the same thing three times.
One person handles it, and you know who.
I deliberately do not claim to be the service centre. That would be untrue. The watch is not opened here, not serviced here and not pressure tested here. Squale does that. What I do is the handling – and anyone who has ever tried to organise a repair with a small foreign brand on their own knows that the handling is the work.
Service
A dive watch that gets used belongs in for a service every few years. Gaskets age even when the watch sits in a drawer. If you genuinely dive, have the water resistance checked regularly.
What that costs I asked Squale directly: around 100 to 200 euros, depending on model and movement.
As far as I can see, that figure does not appear anywhere else online. I searched for it specifically while researching this article – no magazine, no retailer, no collector site names a service price for Squale. So it is here now.
And because the next question usually follows: to this day not one of my Squale customers has needed a service or even asked for one. The watches run.
New or pre-owned
I get this question often, and I am answering it here in more detail than would fit into a conversation.
The honest part first: for discontinued references, pre-owned is the only route. If you want a Rambo from 1984, or an early 1521 with a particular dial, you will not find it new. No retailer can help with that, myself included. Then it is the second hand market, and that is perfectly fine.
For anything currently in the range, the maths looks different. There are four reasons.
Authenticity
Squale is a brand with a lot of vintage, a lot of special editions and an active collector scene. That attracts redials, meaning dials reprinted after the fact. It attracts parts watches, where case, movement and dial come from three different watches.
And it attracts the claim “NOS”. NOS stands for New Old Stock. It means an old watch that was never sold and never worn and has sat in a dealer’s storeroom in its original packaging for decades. It genuinely exists, and it is rare. It is claimed far more often than it occurs, and you can almost never verify it.
Here is the finding that surprised me while researching this article: there is not a single piece online that explains how to check a Squale for authenticity. Not in the magazines, not on the collector sites. For a brand with this much vintage, that is remarkable.
That does not mean every pre-owned Squale is a problem. It means that when buying pre-owned you are thrown back on your own judgement, and there is no guide out there to sharpen it on.
Service
A used watch from an unknown source has no history. Nobody knows whether it has been opened, whether the gaskets were replaced, whether it was ever pressure tested. And nobody is responsible when something goes wrong.
A service run through Switzerland is not something you handle on the side. That is exactly what the previous chapter is about.
Warranty
The two years run from the date of purchase. On a used watch, depending on its age, there is little or nothing left of that.
The condition you cannot see
A dive watch gets used. Salt water, sun, knocks. What you see in photographs is the case. What you do not see is everything else.
And then there is a third route here: review watches
For every review I photograph and film the watch. Extensively. It gets worn, held into water, shot from every angle. After that it is no longer new, but it is also not a used watch in the usual sense.
I call these review watches, and I sell them as exactly what they are.
Each one exists only once. The condition is normally very good to excellent, and if there is a flaw it is listed on that individual watch. There are two years of warranty from your date of purchase, so the same as on a new one. And for almost every one of these watches there is a review of mine, on the blog or as a video or both.
This is the point where the calculation above flips. All four arguments against a used watch from an unknown source do not apply here. Authenticity is not in question, because the watch came from the official distribution and has been with me ever since. You know the history, because you can watch it. The service runs through me. And the warranty starts on your purchase date, not on somebody else’s.
Squale review watches come up regularly. All current review watches are here – they are not always available, and a particular one in that configuration usually does not come back.
Why Squale is in my shop
I do not carry many brands, and I do not take one on just because it sells.
Squale is here for three reasons.
First, the substance. 500m and more, Swiss movements from Sellita and ETA, bezels and cases that hold up to the number printed on the dial. There is plenty in this price class that looks like a dive watch. There is not much that has the history to go with it.
Second, the size. Squale is small enough that the models are not arbitrary, and large enough that the brand will still be there in five years. That combination is rarer than you would think.
Third, the customers. People who buy a Squale from me usually know what they are buying. These are not impulse purchases. And anyone who owns a Squale comes back for the next one.
Why buy from me
You can get a Squale in more than one place. What comes with it here is this.
Everything is original. The watches come from the official distribution. No grey market, no collection being broken up, no platform where in the end nobody is liable.
Everything runs through me. Purchase, warranty, service, questions. One contact who knows the brand and whom you can actually reach. No call centre, no ticket system, no form.
I know the watches I sell. For most Squale models in my shop there is a review of mine, on the blog or as a video. I do not copy out what the manufacturer sends. I have had the watch on my wrist before it reaches you.
I write what I know and say what I do not know. This article is the example. In several places it says “I could not establish this”. I could have left those out. I think they are the more important part.
In my shop: All Squale dive watches
Conclusion
Squale is the brand whose most important work ran for decades under somebody else’s name. It built cases when that was an unsolved problem. It accompanied two freedivers to depths doctors considered lethal. It survived the quartz crisis by shutting itself down for seventeen years, and it came back in 2005 because somebody was still there who remembered.
What interests me about this brand, though, is not only the history. It is that it never pretended to be something else. Squale builds dive watches. Nothing but dive watches since 1959. No dress watch excursions, no smartwatch phase, no reinvention every five years.
And I think you can tell when you handle them.
Two things remain open: evidence for the list of case customers, and where the years 1946 and 1948 come from. I have asked Squale. Whatever comes back gets added here, with a date.
If you know any of it, write to me.
Frequently asked questions
Where are Squale watches made?
Squale SA is based in Chiasso in the canton of Ticino, commercial register number CHE-100829625. Assembly takes place, according to the manufacturer, in its own laboratories in Ticino. Until 2020 the head office was in Milan; since then the company is entirely in Switzerland.
What does a Squale service cost?
Around 100 to 200 euros, depending on model and movement. I obtained that figure directly from Squale. You can have it handled through me.
Is Squale a microbrand?
No. The company has existed since 1950, the brand since 1959, and it has run its own production throughout. Microbrands are as a rule distribution brands without a manufacturing history of their own.
Which movements does Squale use?
Swiss automatic movements, predominantly from Sellita and ETA. Quartz plays no part in the current range.
Did Squale build cases for Blancpain?
It is the best supported attribution, but it is not conclusively proven. There are cases from old stock carrying the stamp “Rayville SA”, the company behind Blancpain, and they were cases for civilian Bathyscaphe models rather than for the Fifty Fathoms. More on this in the chapter on the supplier years.
What warranty is there?
Two years from the date of purchase. Bought from me means the handling runs through me.
Are Squale watches suitable for professional diving?
The models are rated from 300 to 1,200 metres, and the Italian Navy as well as the diving unit of the Italian state police use them. Whether and to which standard individual models are certified, Squale does not state. I looked for that too and did not find it.
Are Squale watches collectible?
The limited editions and the historic models are collected. There are no reliable public figures on the second hand market, and I am not going to invent any here.
Who owns Squale?
Since 1982 the Italian Maggi family, who were the brand’s Italian distributor before that. Charles Von Büren sold the brand when he retired.
Automatic or quartz?
The current models are automatics.
Sources and further reading
Everything marked as documented in this article comes from these sources. Retrieved in September 2026.
Manufacturer
- Squale – company history and timeline:
squale.ch/en/squale-history - Squale – philosophy:
squale.ch/en/squale-philosophy - Squale – cooperations
- Squale – warranty conditions
- Squale – company details, legal name and commercial register number
Further sources
For the list of case customers I additionally evaluated the English Wikipedia, several international watch magazines, retailer FAQ sections and collector forums. The quality of that evidence is described in the chapter on the supplier years. I deliberately do not list those sources here as proof, because that is not what they are.
My Squale reviews
- Squale Master x Palombari del COMSUBIN Review
- Squale Sub-39 GMT Vintage SUB-39GMGR Review
- Squale Matic Satin Black Mesh MATICXSG.ME2 Review
- Squale 1521 Ocean Mesh 1521OCN.ME20 Review
- Squale 1545 GG.AC Grey Dive Watch Review
- Squale MASTER TITANIUM Grand Bleu / Vert
- The new Squale 2001 Marina Militare
- Squale Galeazzi Artiglio: 500 pieces, a wet indicator and 100 years of deep water
- Squale 1521 Sea Shepherd
- The new Squale MATIC S Collection
As of October 2026. This article will be kept up to date. Anything I add later gets a date.
