Patek Philippe

The story of Patek Philippe begins in Geneva in 1839, when the Polish émigré Antoni (Antoine) Norbert de Patek, who had arrived in Switzerland after the failure of the November Uprising against the Russian Empire, founded the manufacture "Patek, Czapek & Cie" together with his compatriot Franciszek Czapek. The partnership, however, dissolved as early as 1845 — Czapek continued on his own, giving rise to a brand that today carries only his name — while Patek, looking for a new partner with stronger technical skills, had met the year before, at the 1844 Paris Industrial Exposition, the French watchmaker Jean Adrien Philippe. It was a decisive encounter: Philippe had just devised an innovative system for winding and setting the hands via the crown, no longer requiring the traditional key, which he patented in 1845 and which would forever change the ergonomics of the pocket watch and, later, the wristwatch. In 1851 the company name took the form "Patek, Philippe & Cie", from which the brand's name today derives.

In the following decades the Geneva manufacture built a reputation founded on a dense series of patents and complications: more than a hundred patents filed over the course of its history and more than twenty base calibers developed in-house. In 1868 Patek Philippe made what is generally considered the first Swiss wristwatch, commissioned by the Hungarian countess Kocewicz; in 1889 it introduced the perpetual calendar in pocket watches; in 1923 it filed the patents for the rattrapante (split-seconds) chronograph. The culmination of this relentless pursuit of complication came in 1933 with the Henry Graves Supercomplication, a pocket watch with 24 complications commissioned by the New York banker Henry Graves Jr. — remaining for over half a century the most complicated mechanical watch ever built, before being surpassed in 1989 by the Calibre 89, made for the brand's 150th anniversary, with 33 complications.

The Great Depression of the 1930s, however, brought the Patek family, with no direct heirs running the company, to the brink of bankruptcy. In 1932 salvation came from Charles and Jean Stern, two Geneva brothers who owned the Fabrique de Cadrans Stern Frères, a long-standing supplier of enamel dials to Patek Philippe itself: the two took over control of the manufacture, put watchmaker Jean Pfister in charge of running it, and progressively brought movement production in-house, making it technically independent as well. Since then Patek Philippe has remained the last great Geneva high-watchmaking manufacture still entirely owned by its founding-acquiring family, today in its fourth generation: after Henri Stern (Charles's son, president from 1958, founder in 1946 of the American agency that would make the brand famous in the United States) came Philippe Stern (president from 1993, architect of the move to the new Plan-les-Ouates manufacture in 1996 and founder of the Patek Philippe Museum in 2001) and finally Thierry Stern, at the helm since 2009, who in 2020 inaugurated the Geneva complex's new "PP6" production building.

It was precisely in 2009, the year Thierry Stern took over as president, that Patek Philippe took a step that disrupted the entire industry: it abandoned the traditional Poinçon de Genève (the "Geneva Seal" hallmark it had held for most of the twentieth century) to introduce its own in-house quality mark, the Patek Philippe Seal. Unlike the Geneva Seal, which focused solely on the finishing of the movement's components, the new seal evaluates the watch as a whole — including functionality, aesthetics and water resistance — requiring, for men's automatic watches, an average accuracy of between -3 and +2 seconds a day once cased, far stricter than COSC standards. It is a gesture that reflects the brand's own philosophy, summed up in the advertising slogan that became famous worldwide: "You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation" — an invitation to regard every example not as a mere consumer good, but as a family heirloom to be passed on. A philosophy the auction markets have repeatedly confirmed with hard numbers: the Henry Graves Supercomplication reached 24 million dollars at Sotheby's in Geneva in 2014, while in November 2019, at the Only Watch charity auction, the unique steel example of the Grandmaster Chime ref. 6300A-010 — the most elaborate complication ever offered in the catalogue, with two dials and no fewer than twenty functions including a minute-repeater chime — sold for 31 million Swiss francs, becoming the most expensive wristwatch ever sold at auction.