The Electricianz — ELZ for short — was founded in 2017 in Switzerland by Laurent Rufenacht, a designer with more than twenty-five years in the watch industry who co-founded SEVENFRIDAY and led global product strategy and design for other houses before setting up studiodivine, a Swiss design agency. The idea behind ELZ is a simple inversion of watchmaking habit: instead of hiding the mechanism, the brand exposes it and treats it as the jewel of the watch. Dials are built as multi-layer landscapes of coloured electrical cables, circuit-board graphics and printed panels, and the house describes its own work as electrifying art and technology into bold designs for people who would rather stand out than blend in. Development happens in what the brand calls the ELZ_Lab, its creative workshop in Switzerland, and the watches are sold on five continents to a community ELZ nicknames the Voltloverz.
The signature of the range is light. Every ELZ collection except the XO carries an in-house patented electric module with LEDs that backlight the dial at night, powered by its own battery system alongside the timekeeping movement — so the watch has a day face and a completely different night face. The number and colour of the LEDs change with the model: four warm white on the nylon originals, five green on the Crypto, eight blue on the Label Noir, eight orange on the Copper X. Some editions push the effect further with UV-reactive printing on the crystal and on the strap, so the dial reacts under black light as well as under its own LEDs.
The ELZ Nylon Originals are the collection that made the brand's name and remain its core, priced at around 425 dollars. They pair a stainless steel case — 42 mm on the Bionic Z, 45 mm on the Crypto and the Nomad Z — with a thermomoulded class-10 nylon sheath injected around it, a material chosen because it resists abrasion and stress cracking while keeping a soft, almost waxy touch. Some versions mix other matter into that sheath: white matt ceramic on the Bionic Z, natural sand on the Nomad Z, water-transfer crypto graphics over black on the Crypto Edition. Inside sits the exclusive in-house electric module driven by a quartz movement, under hardened mineral K1 glass with anti-reflective coating, water resistant to 3 ATM, on rubber or calfskin straps with a steel pin buckle. Current pieces include The Bionic Z, The Crypto Edition, The Crypto Odyssey, The Crypto Techno Camouflage, The Neon Z Black & White arty editions and the Bionic Couture Edition limited to thirty pieces.
The MecaLine is the mechanical half of the catalogue, at around 595 dollars. These watches run a skeletonised mechanical movement with a 42-hour power reserve combined with the brand's latest patented module and eight next-generation LEDs, and they use a wider, hornless case — 46 to 47 mm on paper, closer to 42 or 43 mm on the wrist — with a stone-finished sheath and a 26/22 mm tapered strap. The Red Alert Edition wraps that construction in a red stone sheath with a black natural rubber band and hides the Swiss lab's GPS coordinates in the decoding print on its K1 glass; the Copper X, at 625 dollars, uses a dark grey fibreglass sheath with an integrated aged Nagano leather strap. The Label Noir editions, in black carbon-nylon with a special stone finish and available on rubber or Alcantara leather, come from a collaboration with the Geneva house Label Noir, known for its transformations of watches from brands such as Rebellion, Custos, Armin Strom and Schwartz Etienne, and assemble more than fifty components.
The XO Collection is the exception in the range and the brand's most technical piece. Limited to 333 numbered watches, it drops the LED module entirely in favour of Swiss Super-LumiNova applied by hand across a multi-layered dial shaped like planetary strata, visible under black light. The case is carbon-injected and inspired by the shape ELZ calls its vessel, weighing about 48 grams, measuring 44.5 to 48.25 mm without lugs, capped by a twelve-angled dodecagonal CNC-machined mineral glass with anti-reflective coating and fitted with a PVD-treated steel crown. It runs a Swiss-made Ronda PowerTech three-hand movement with a four-year battery life, is water resistant to 5 ATM and uses a tool-free double quick-release spring bar system on its strap. The Shadow, Lunar and Terra editions make up the collection, at 595 dollars each. The earlier Steel Z family, now out of the active catalogue, took the same idea into a stainless steel retro-look case with an exclusive in-house electric module and five LEDs. Every ELZ watch is sold with a two-year warranty and the brand ships to more than 125 countries.
