La scuderia - experience, passion and fun.

Fabian
Goldsmith, designer
and gemmologist

After his apprenticeship as a goldsmith, Fabian Blaser worked mainly in Switzerland and South America. In 1999 he opened his Boutique in the heart of Biel Bienne.

He creates all kind of beautiful rings, necklaces and other gems in his own workshop, his Atelier as we say here in Biel Bienne. He has a lot of very faithful customers for whom he makes his bijoux.

Fabian won several design awards in the field of the «Stiftung der angewandten Kunst und Gestaltung» as well as various prices of the foundation of applied art and design. Since 2000 he is active in apprenticeship training and teaches at the School of Design Bern.

He is an all-rounder who loves the combination of different techniques and the processing of different materials.

His particular passion is the world of gemstones. He is a certified first class gemmologist and really knows about all kinds of precious stones, and he also makes expert’s reports about them.

Fabian is a mountain addict – every free minute he passes either on his snowboard or climbing a rock. Even a heavy ski accident a couple of years ago couldn’t stop him. If there is snow in the air, he gets nervous. When he is not on the board, he can be found rebuilding his rather primitive but extremely charming mountain chalet in the Vaud Alps, celebrating the simple life.

And ladies tend to get a bit nervous when they hear Fabian’s deep voice when he gets off his old, loud motorcycle.

Claude
Master in watchmaking wizardry

Claude Greisler is a real master watchmaker. After his apprenticeship he added the famous „Wostep“ school, home of many great watchmakers and creators of a newer generation.

His career had several steps then, among others he used to work for the famous company of Christophe Claret, known among watch insiders and enthusiasts as the makers of movements with very sophisticated complications.

Since several years, Claude is managing director of a rather small, independent successful watch company in Biel Bienne, a real Boutique Brand. Google him, you will find out.

He is also responsible for all the creations and the design and construction of their in-house movements. Brilliant and freaking complicated ones, which got a lot of wows and respect in the industry. He creates and constructs things that we other guys in the team admire, but only he can really understand them.

Claude is a maker, not a talker.

As Heiko and Fabian, Claude has to move. When the pleasure boats on the Lac de Bienne reach the safe harbour because the strong evening winds called le Joran start, Claude takes his surfboard and fights the winds. The wind usually gives up first.

Claude lives half of his time in the mountains. On saturdays you can meet him sometimes helping his wife out in her cheese store (no kidding, Switzerland is about watches, cheese and mountains. We serve all the clichés here at Blasta). He is a first class skier and couldn’t live without his excursions in the mountains.

And Claude loves cars, fast ones. That fast that he even participated at the famous Gumball 3000 in a hell of a tuned Porsche. And he just bought a brilliant black Defender which makes all of us a bit jealous.

Heiko
Senior automotive / industrial designer and design professor

Heiko Stahl is a very experienced senior industrial designer. Born german, grown up in Switzerland, his passion for cars started early.

An Art Center College of Design alumnus in transportation design, after working in international car design-studios (Porsche, Audi, Saab), he joins a young Swiss team of inventors, which is aiming to change the world with sustainable electro mobility, as a design manager. Unfortunately the world was not ready yet for that kind of vehicle.

He has over 20 years of experience in leading transportation design and product design projects.

2003 he founds his own design studio in Biel Bienne with the idea of a small and flexible, highly specialized team, offering integral high-end design-solutions.

Heiko is a hands-on designer with a knack for complex 3D freeform modeling on CAD. He is a form-fanatic, an expert on ergonomics and inspired by technology. His customers are numerous, and there is almost nothing he did not design in his carreer. Be it cars, mountain bikes, ski poles, garden appliance, housings, watches….

Since 2001 he is teaching future designers about the métier at the University of Applied Sciences in Zurich and Basel. He can draw free hand incredibly well and thus prefers to do things the old school way, which means to do all the first steps by hand and then, only if the designs are perfect, construct them on the computer.

Heiko is passionate for cars and has an extreme focus for details. He can seem a bit rough sometimes, but that’s just because he prefers to draw and create and deliver instead of talking all the time.

As Fabian, Heiko must move everyday. He climbs the Chasseral with his mountain bike as if it was a Dijk in the Netherlands. He is a real wild pig on skis and loves his self-custom made BMW R60/5.

Hans
Communicator, navigator, ideaholic

Hans Erb is a  Jack of all trades. He started his professional carreer as a press photographer and journalist. Later on he founded one of the first web agencies in Switzerland when no one knew what the internet should be good for.

As he gets bored after a couple of years doing the same thing, he sold his shares and then managed his own watch store in Berne, working with the younger and wilder independent high-end watch brands, giving them exposure and a platform in his own watch magazine „Tick different“.

He is well known in the industry as someone who really does his own thing and doesn’t care too much about conventions. He sold that store after ten years, as it was running fine and he got bored again. Hans also had a decisive part in making the success of the meanwhile famous word clock Qlocktwo come true.

Today he compensates overtime of the last 30 years, often on his boat on the wonderful lakes of Biel and Neuchâtel, travels a lot and works in a nomadic way. He is involved in several watch projects and helps people in the watch industry with sorting ideas out and bringing new ones in.

And he loves cars. Always did. When he was eleven and on family holidays, he extorted his parents to take the detour via the Lamborghini factory in San Agata to see and touch a Miura in real. He owns and drives several classic cars (among them a Ghandini-designed Alfa Romeo Montreal, the poor-mans Miura). But he promised his wife not to make a business out of it.

And, no kidding, he sees Nick Hayek, the president of Swatch group, flying by his living room window in his helicopter in the morning before landing in front of his office, just meters away.