Tourby, a brief profile of the German watchmaking company

Company profile:

One thing that sets German watchmaking company Tourby apart from many other brands is that the people there are obsessed not so much with the final watch, but above all with the movement. Sometimes you see a watch that looks good, you turn it over and see a caseback with a small porthole in the middle, because the movement is much smaller than the case. This doesn’t happen at Tourby. The movement always takes up virtually the entire width of the caseback.

This reflects the brand’s origins. In 1999, Erdal Yildiz was given his grandfather’s pocket watch, and he took it to a watchmaker to have it serviced. That was how he met watchmaking and the Unitas movement. From then on, watches, and above all pocket watches, became a hobby, and about five years later, a profession. Yildiz began developing contacts with German and Swiss suppliers and designing an internet marketing platform. The brand Tourby was launched in 2007. The Tourby approach is to build watches on request, so while the company has many available models, you don’t buy off the shelf. This gives everyone the chance to order their own perfect timepiece. You can specify the degree of engraved decoration on the movement and dial, and all the other characteristics of the watch.

For the first few years, Tourby made watches principally using the hand-wound Unitas movement. Automatic watches arrived in 2010. There are now many watch types available at the company, but in all you appreciate the appreciation for mechanical movements that ensure that what you see through the caseback has the same fascination of antique watches, with hand-crafted Glashütte sunburst engraving to screwed gold chatons.