Jacques Lemans is an Austrian family company founded in 1974 by Alfred Riedl in St. Veit an der Glan, in Carinthia, where it still has its headquarters on a street that now carries its name. "My goal was to build an international watch brand and at the same time contribute to the regional economic success", is how Riedl describes the start, and the two halves of that sentence still hold: the watches reach some 120 countries, while research and development, marketing, logistics, quality control and distribution all stay in St. Veit, which the company credits for short decision paths and a business able to turn quickly. The firm has since passed to the next generation — Alfred Riedl as CEO, Michaela Riedl as head of marketing and Andreas Riedl as chief commercial officer.
The catalogue is deliberately broad rather than deep: around 800 watch models, split between men's and women's lines and organised into Classic, Sport, Elegance, Diamond, High-Tech Ceramic and Hybromatic collections, with individual series named after cities and places — Milano, Antwerpen, Dublin, London, Liverpool, Derby. Two of those collections carry the brand's own engineering. The Hybromatic is built around a movement that is wound by the wearer's arm like an automatic but keeps the rate of a quartz watch, so it needs neither winding nor a battery change; the High-Tech Ceramic line is cased in a ceramic the brand describes as several times harder than steel, chosen for scratch resistance rather than for looks alone. Prices run from roughly €179 to €1,445, which is where the brand has always chosen to sit: accessible watches made to a fixed quality standard rather than exercises in haute horlogerie.
Alongside the watches sit some 900 jewellery models and a line of licensed pieces, among them a Borussia Dortmund collection made with the club and watches tied to the UEFA club competitions, while the actor Tobias Moretti and the double Olympic snowboarding champion Anna Gasser wear the brand. Its most unusual undertaking has nothing to do with timekeeping at all: the Riedl family spent years restoring Burg Taggenbrunn, the hilltop castle above St. Veit, and opened it to the public in November 2019. The castle and its Taggenbrunner Festspiele are run as part of the Jacques Lemans Group, and have made a watch company into something of a cultural fixture in Carinthia.
