STEFAN KIENINGER

Born 1968 in Ried im Innkreis/Austria Since 2016 partner of DOPPELGÄNGER GMBH  Production and distribution of mechanical watches. "Doppelgänger for me is like journey.
I see the peak in the distance, my target. I'm fascinated by every single stage on the way to that destination." At heart, I'm a mountaineer. What excites me about my tours in the Alps is that I often don't know in the morning where I'll arrive in the evening, whether I'll effortlessly reach the destination I've set myself or whether I'll be delayed by the unforeseeable. Of course, this also applies to the progress of Doppelgänger. For me, it's a journey into the fascinating world of mechanical watches. To combine traditional watchmaking with a new three-dimensional time display in a new design is what I want to achieve. It was this new way of displaying the time that immediately won me over to join Doppelgänger. Even though the design at that time was still very simple, almost conventional, I saw the potential. I could imagine what a fascinating watch this could become with a good design. As the founder of the Höhenwerkstatt, a safety and training company for professional climbers, I am used to paying attention to detail in order to anticipate possible dangers in advance and to teach how to avoid them. With Höhenwerkstatt, we were the first to turn our attention to the safety of industrial climbing, to safety for workplaces with a risk of falling. Techniques from the climbing sector had to be adapted for the working world, new products had to be invented. It was the start-up time for the mobile phone industry and inexperienced technicians were sent up masts. A work environment had to be created so that these people could be properly trained and sent into fall-prone areas. It was a close collaboration with the industry, we contributed our ideas, and the industry implemented these ideas. With the NGC-42, it's also the details and the application of different technologies to a new idea in watchmaking that fascinate me. For example, the compressed display at the deflection points, without which there would be an inaccuracy in the circulation - and thus in the time display.