LEMO Brand Guidelines: Léon Mouttet’s 1946 Push-Pull Connector Maker on Lake Geneva

Contacts for watchmakers, then a latch of its own.

LEMO takes its name from its founder, the engineer Léon Mouttet, English Wikipedia says. It dates the company to 1946 and says it began by making contacts in noble and rare metals. The company’s own history adds the setting: Mouttet, whom it calls a Swiss precision mechanic, started in a small workshop in Morges, on the shore of Lake Geneva, making electric contacts and devices for the watchmaking industry, with contacts of molybdenum among its first products.

Connectors came next. LEMO says its first connectors for the electronics market were produced from 1954, and that Mouttet, unhappy with the latching systems then available, devised his own: the latch it calls the original push-pull system, which it says became a standard across the electronics industry. The company says the patent application was filed in 1957, and lists the S series as its first range. Its own timeline puts the first factory in Morges in the 1960s, when it had about ten employees, followed by the watertight E series.

The company moved along the lake as it grew. Its timeline places the inauguration of the present headquarters at Ecublens, near Lausanne, in the 1980s, the same decade it introduced the 3P series in synthetic materials, its first fibre-optic connectors and the REDEL name. English Wikipedia places LEMO in Ecublens today, one of three offices in Switzerland, with research and development carried out there in a test laboratory with a climatic chamber.

Push-pull, REDEL and a broadcast standard.

The push-pull latch is what LEMO is known for. Its timeline adds ranges decade by decade: the B series, a second-generation push-pull, and its watertight K version in the 1970s; the F series and the N series, for nuclear applications, in the 1990s; and rectangular plastic and motorsport and military ranges in the 2000s. English Wikipedia notes that the LEMO website gives 1970 as the standardisation date of the LEMO 00 model, and that the “chocolate plate” pattern on the connector’s grip is a registered trademark.

Two lines carry their own names. REDEL, created in the 1980s according to the company, makes plastic connectors that English Wikipedia says are used in medical and aviation settings, including six-pin connectors on most Cirrus aircraft. The second is LEMO’s fibre-optic work. Its 3K.93C hybrid connector, which carries electrical power and optical signals in one camera cable, was adopted for high-definition television links by the American standards body SMPTE (as 304M), by Japan’s ARIB and by the European Broadcasting Union, English Wikipedia says; the company dates its acceptance as a Japanese HDTV standard to the 1990s.

That broadcast work brought the company an honour. In 2020 LEMO received a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award for the standardisation and commercialisation of the hybrid electrical and fibre-optic camera cable and connector, English Wikipedia records. The company also says that it set up LEMO FOUR, a fibre-optic research unit, in the 1990s, and that today its subsidiaries in the United Kingdom and the United States host competence centres for fibre optics and cables respectively.

LEMO now describes a catalogue of some 90,000 off-the-shelf connectors, sold under family names such as ORIGINALS, REDEL and OPTIMA, and a market that runs from medical devices and test equipment to motorsport, broadcast, semiconductors and defence.

Design and documentation.

Wire, cable and connector makers sell parts that disappear once they are installed, so their pictures tend to show the moment before that happens. Yards stacked with wooden cable drums, reels of insulated conductor and coils of copper set the scale of a cable business; close-ups of gold-plated contacts, crimped terminals and push-pull plugs show the precision of a connector maker. Bundles of colour-coded wires, laid out on a harness board, explain more about the trade than any slogan.

The customers shape the imagery. Many of these companies supply aircraft, rail vehicles, cars, factories and communications networks, and their brochures return again and again to the same scenes: a wiring harness threaded through an airframe, a connector on a train bogie, a cabinet of fibre-optic cable in a data centre. The product is rarely the hero on its own; it appears in the machine it serves.

Much of the industry’s public life happens at trade fairs. electronica, the electronics trade fair, is where component makers show connectors, sensors and assemblies to engineers and buyers, and Wire Düsseldorf gathers the makers of wire, cable and the machines that produce them. Stands are often built around cut-away samples, test rigs and walls of plugs in every size.

The names themselves reflect a long history of mergers. Several of the companies in this guide carry coined names, initials or the names of founders whose businesses were later bought and combined, and the same plug may be sold under a brand that has changed owner more than once. This guide sets out who founded each company, who owns it now and what it says about where its products are made, and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Three generations, still independent.

LEMO has stayed in one family. The company says Léon Mouttet stepped down as chief executive in 1978 and was succeeded by his son-in-law, Marcello Pesci, an engineer who had worked for the Italian broadcaster RAI and had founded his own fibre-optic and coaxial business, COELVER. Pesci built the sales network and production capacity before retiring in 2000, when his son Alexandre Pesci, the founder’s grandson, became the third chief executive. The company describes itself as “totally independent,” a family business that reinvests its profit.

Growth came through subsidiaries and one notable purchase. English Wikipedia says LEMO entered China through a distributor in 1994 and set up a Shanghai subsidiary in 2004. In July 2014 it bought Northwire, an American maker of specialty and retractile cables; Electronic Specifier reported the acquisition that month, quoting LEMO as saying the deal would let it offer a complete cable-and-connector solution and that both companies’ existing structures would remain unaltered. LEMO now presents LEMO and NORTHWIRE as the group’s two brands.

On manufacturing, the company says its connectors are still “Made in Switzerland,” that it makes contacts and components at five production sites in Switzerland, and that a factory in Hungary supports assembly, injection moulding, machining and plating. It says it keeps nearly all production in-house, from machining to cable assembly, and that it marked its 75th anniversary with more than 2,000 employees; those are its own figures.

For a design guide, LEMO shows how a single mechanical idea — a latch that locks with a push — can carry a family company for eight decades. Compare Fischer Connectors, another family-run push-pull specialist that also began in Morges, and HARTING, the German family connector maker. For this guide we use a lake teal, deep ink and brushed brass with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep LEMO’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.