Panerai

Panerai (Officine Panerai) began in Florence, Italy, where Giovanni Panerai opened a watch shop in 1860. It is now a Swiss company headquartered in Geneva, with watches made in Neuchâtel, and a wholly owned subsidiary of Richemont.

The firm supplied instruments to the Royal Italian Navy, and between 1935 and 1970 it delivered around 1,600 wrist-worn diving instruments, most of them to the Italian navy. Rolex made nearly all of those watches, while Panerai produced the dials. The names of today's two main case families come from Panerai's luminous compounds: Radiomir, a radium-based paint, and Luminor, a tritium-based replacement introduced around 1965. Panerai began selling to the civilian market in 1993, and after the Richemont acquisition it was repositioned as a luxury brand with higher prices.