TrackingAngle Visits darTZeel Audio, Geneva Switzerland

a move into a much larger manufacturing facility in the heart of watchmaking heaven

Last summer, while visiting Geneva to attend the Montreux Jazz Festival and produce a Nagra factory tour I also visited darTZeel Audio's brand new manufacturing facility. The company had just moved from its old funky loft location into this brand new, modern cooperative facility and CEO Hervé Delétraz was anxious to show it to me. The Lake Geneva photo was taken from the air as my plane approached the airport.

Delétraz had arranged with his friends at Nagra to pick me up at the airport and take me to the new factory before dropping me off at the Montreux hotel. The cooperative spirit among the Swiss audio companies is unique in my experience.

As you'll see in the video, when I visited, darTZeel had just moved in and was in the process of setting up the new spacious manufacturing facility, which is itself a cooperative venture built by the Hans Wildorf Foundation. Wildorf founded Rolex, the watch company and today the foundation has its hands in many other projects beyond watchmaking. This building and its unique cooperative structure is among them.

All of the companies located in the large new building share a lower level inventory storage space where "on demand" access is available as needed so the companies need not waste upstairs space on inventory. In addition, Delétraz showed me a shared space on his floor where a team of engineers on staff for all can be called upon as needed to do assembly and other manufacturing tasks on an "as needed" basis, in an arrangement that is also unique in my experience.