Stowa General Manager Kevin Müller Continues the Brand’s Long Enthusiast Legacy

Stowa General Manager Kevin Müller Continues the Brand’s Long Enthusiast Legacy

Change is a scary thing. Change at a small, enthusiast-favorite brand is downright terrifying. As watch collectors and enthusiasts, we’re constantly on the lookout for the next thing — the new exciting brand, the unexpected novelty, the rising watchmaker yet to be truly discovered. But that search for the ‘new’ is only possible thanks to the reliable backstop certain brands have built for enthusiasts since the modern enthusiast market developed in the latter part of the 20th century.

Stowa is absolutely one of these backstop brands. A reliable step on the ladder for developing enthusiasts, Stowa — which was founded in 1927 but has existed in its modern form since 1996 — has sat squarely at the heart of the watch community as long as I’ve been interested in watches. As long as I’ve been aware of them, Stowa has been the place to go for high-quality, affordable pilots’ and marine watches, and has paired those standards with elegant Bauhaus-inspired dress watches and chronographs (among other things).

That much is absolutely still true, but you’d be forgiven for expressing concern when, in 2021, Jörg Schauer (who had owned and operated the brand since 1996) sold Stowa to Tempus Arte, the German watch group best known for their ownership of Dresden-based Lang & Heyne (who in turn are best known for their highly finished tri-lugged case architecture). Since then, there has been a tremendous amount of hemming and hawing over the existential question of Stowa’s identity and future.

It’s an entirely valid concern. Jörg Schauer has been an exceptional custodian of the brand and has earned the trust of customers over a quarter-century at the helm. His departure was inevitably going to invite apprehension, so it’s worth saying: Stowa is still very much Stowa, and a big part of that is thanks to Kevin Müller, Stowa’s General Manager, who has been leading the brand in Schauer’s stead. I was lucky enough to sit down with Müller earlier this year to talk about his history with the company, the transition, and the future of Stowa, which, suffice to say, looks bright.

That’s not to say that change isn’t in the air. Tempus Arte has given Stowa the backing necessary to move the nearly century-old brand into its next era. “Tempus Arte gives us a free hand on everything we do,” Müller told me. “So we do everything like before, and it was Jörg before who had made the decision, in the end. And now I’m happy to have the responsibility and decide what we are going to do. And I’m happy that I [didn’t] start in 2022, without knowing Stowa. I had six years before, and that’s why I know [what] the Stowa way is, and what we have to do. And Tempus Arte is not saying, ‘You have to do this or this.’ They’re just saying, ‘Okay, do it your own way, and [we’ll] give you financial support, or contacts in the industry…’ We can learn from other things, but for me it’s always important to be independent in the group.”

The new Stowa Prodiver

This commitment to doing things the “Stowa Way” is directly born out of a long-standing relationship between Müller and Schauer. “So I started at Stowa in 2017 with Jörg Schauer. I was responsible, at first, for e-commerce, social media, newsletter marketing, and I started to professionalize all that, because — back in the day — Mr. Schauer did all this on his own. And then he realized, okay, I can do all this stuff, but you have to do it regularly, and not only at eight o’clock in the evening. [He’d go], ‘Oh, there was no newsletter the past four weeks.’”

Coming on board initially to help ease the digital burden that exists for any modern watch brand, Müller was pulled deeper into the business over the next several years, learning the watch industry at the feet of Mr. Schauer, and sticking with the brand through the days of COVID. Looking back, it’s weird to call 2020 a boom time for watches, considering the broader state of the world five years ago, but Stowa — like so many enthusiast brands across industries — saw an explosion in demand. That’s not to say the year didn’t come with its own host of challenges, but the brand came out of 2020 strong but tired.

Per Müller, it was in 2021, after an exhausting year of growth and grappling with arguably the most singular challenge of the 21st century, that Shauer looked around and said, “Okay, I guess I should sell the company.” This thought eventually materialized in a sale of the brand to the Tempus Arte group, which, in addition to Lange & Heyne, also owns movement manufacturer Uhren-Werke-Dresden. It was a fundamental change at the brand, and one that came with a lot of risk for all involved. It was the first time in the brand’s modern history that decision-making power would rest with someone other than Jörg Schauer (you can see just how involved he was here), and leadership at Tempus Arte knew finding the right successor would be critical.

The classic Stowa Flieger

“[Tempus Arte] asked [Schauer] if he knew someone from Stowa who could be responsible for the brand, or if they had to search outside,” Müller explained. “And then he said, ‘Let’s talk to Mr. Müller, maybe he’s interested?’ That’s why I’m in this position. I started [as General Manager] on January 1, 2022. It was the first time we had to replace Mr. Schauer — which was not easy — because he was in every single step: designing watches or the advertising, the online shop, everything. Everything that had to do with design, he was into. Watchmaking: how to mount watches. He was in quality control; he was in every single step.”

In the end, 2022 was all about the brand finding its footing without Schauer and reorganizing the brand to function as a part of the Tempus Arte group, while still maintaining as much independence as made sense — all while setting itself up for more visible change. The clearest sign of this change came in 2023, with the launch of a refreshed online identity and a new logo, which revived the vintage swooping ‘S,’ as well as an entirely new backend digital system and new offices — which, in a stunning literalization of the concept of vertical integration, moved the entire company into an office on a single floor, bringing the watchmakers closer to the rest of the team. All these were changes that had previously been considered, but put on the back burner until the financial support of Tempus Arte made them possible.

In the end, a bend without breaking approach has become a key strategy in the latest era for Stowa. And the last few years have seen the fruits of that strategy bear out. A revitalization of the Prodiver line, new models in the Marine, Antea, and Chronograph lines have all been a boon to the old brand, and continue to be made to the same high level of quality that made the brand a favorite to collectors in the aughts. Still, with Stowa, you can’t ignore the Flieger, and Müller knows this (he cited Stowa’s various Flieger models as making up about 50 or 60% of Stowa’s sales).

Stowa today is one of the few extant brands with a tangible historical connection to the original Flieger watches who still produce the model (alongside, notably, Laco and IWC — A. Lange & Söhne and many of the other names most associated with the infamous pilot’s watch of… complicated… heritage have either reinvented themselves, gone extinct, or simply dropped the model). If you want a true-to-history Flieger for around a thousand euros, Stowa remains hard to beat. But in recent years the brand has begun to expand their lineup of Flieger watches, introducing a modern aesthetic (the Flieger Verus Black Forest Lagoon), new material options (the Flieger Olympus models released ahead of last year’s summer games in Gold, Silver, and Bronze), and, now, a move towards in-house movements with the STOWA-M1 (a movement based on the Unitas 6498-1).

Put another way, things are happening at Stowa. As a collector, I understand the impulse to worry, especially about a brand you love. But I don’t know that that’s a bad thing. Sure, the brand is evolving, the catalog is changing, and some of the names we all got to know in the early days of micro brands and forum darlings have moved on, but if you take one thing away from this piece, let it be this: Stowa is still very much Stowa.

“I know that our customers and a lot of people love Stowa,” said Müller. “It’s important for them that Stowa is not — and I know when I read sometimes they are afraid that it’s now in a big company — that it’s not the same again. You know, the thing that changed is that it’s not ‘Jörg Schauer is Stowa’ [anymore]. Stowa is Stowa. We are not putting one person out to say, ‘Okay, this is Stowa.’ We say, ‘Okay, Stowa is the brand and the watches stand for the brand.’” Stowa

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