Here's something most people don't know about Baron Watch Co.: we didn't start from scratch. The company started in the late 1960s, when our grandfather Ralph and his partner got their hands on Bulova overruns and simply swapped out the dials for Baron Watch dials. That's it. That's the origin story. Simple, scrappy, and kind of brilliant.
The problem is, Grandpa Ralph passed away in early 1983 and took most of the details with him. No ledgers. No production records. No catalog of what was made, when, or how many. What we have are the memories of our father and the watches themselves, scattered out there in the world.
So we started hunting them down. And if you've got one sitting in a drawer somewhere, we want to hear from you. We'll buy it from you as credit toward a Baron StarGazer — in whichever color you want. No expiration. The offer is always open.
"The difficult part of discovering the history of Baron Watch Co. is that we don't have any records, just our father's memories."
The Archaeology
What we love most isn't the acquisition — it's the archaeology. Every watch tells a small story. Is it a Bulova overrun still wearing its original case? Has the movement been swapped? Are the hands from somewhere else entirely?
We recently came across something that genuinely stopped us. A Baron dial sitting in a case made by Roberta Watch Co., with a movement stamped right there on the caseback — West Germany. It's not what you expect to find when you go digging through a watch brand that started in South Florida in the 1960s. And yet, there it was.
Who Was Roberta Watch Co.?
Roberta was the brand of watchmaker Robert Kauderer, founded in Pforzheim, Germany, in 1949 with just five employees. By the 1950s, it had grown to over 100 and became one of the largest manufacturers of mechanical and automatic wristwatches in Germany. Kauderer was first to market in Germany with an analog quartz watch in 1973, and a digital LED watch the following year.
In 1978, he acquired the Benrus brand and founded a New York subsidiary. The company closed in 1981 — leaving behind a small body of watches that collectors have quietly prized ever since.
How a Baron Watch dial ended up in a Roberta case is a mystery we genuinely can't answer yet. Were parts mixed during final assembly? Did a retailer swap components? Did someone repair it decades later with whatever was on hand? We don't know. And honestly, that's part of what makes this whole project so interesting to us. Every find opens more questions than it closes.
We're definitely not trying to build a museum. We're just trying to understand where we came from.
One watch at a time.