The watchmaking history of AUGUSTE REYMOND, also known as ARSA, began in 1898, when a 26-year-old entrepreneur put together a small team of watchmakers to manufacture the pocket watches that today bear his name. He opened his factory on rue du Midi in Tramelan in 1903, and by 1910 the company employed more than a hundred people, becoming one of the main employers in the region.

Two acquisitions shaped the manufacture. In 1906 Reymond bought the Val de Joux Watch Co. in Les Bioux to produce his own movements; sold on in 1910, that business became Reymond Frères SA and, in 1929, Valjoux SA — the maker of the famous Valjoux chronograph movements. Then in 1926 the company acquired the UNITAS Watch Company in Tramelan, going on to develop more than a hundred calibres renowned for their quality and competitive price, and supplying numerous watch companies. Along the way the watches collected awards for quality and reliability, including gold medals at the 1910 Brussels World Exhibition and the 1914 Swiss National Exhibition in Bern, and the brand was among the first to use sealing gaskets and shock absorbers in wristwatches.

From the 1930s the manufacture produced chronometer, chronograph, moon phase and alarm movements, with the moon phase becoming a signature complication its master watchmakers kept returning to. Members of the Swiss Alpine Club wore ARSA automatics on their 1959 expedition in the Peruvian Andes; by the 1960s the company was the largest employer in Tramelan with over 300 staff. The 1970s brought bold quartz geometries impossible in mechanical form, and the 1990s a run of jazz-named pieces — Jazz Age, Cotton Club, Boogie, Rumba. In 2019 Philip W.A. Klingenberg, the new owner and president, moved the brand to his manufacture in Nidau, where AUGUSTE REYMOND continues as an independent Swiss company making automatic, hand-wound and quartz timepieces.