"In hard times you need strong products." This is how Thierry Stern, President of Patek Philippe, explained the decision to launch only - or almost only - grand complications this year.
The latest, in order of time, is the one revealed this week: an elegant watch with Grande and Petite Sonnerie on the passage - and minute repeater on demand - which due to its complexity will necessarily be produced in a few pieces per year, despite the fact that it is not a limited edition. Because Stern's thinking is that in such difficult times as these, the need to dream is strong.
He cashes in without batting an eyelid on a projected turnover loss of 30% in 2020: 'I don't have any other shareholders, so it weighs on me alone. Instead, he worries about not losing his best employees. Because to make exceptional watches you need exceptional people.
Labour is the greatest value of an industry that is built on excellence. This is well known by those who passed almost unscathed through the crisis of the 1970s. When no young person wanted to study to be a watchmaker, a profession considered to have no future in the quartz years. Leaving a generation's gap in all the Swiss factories, when mechanical watchmaking was later resurrected.
The important thing for Stern is not to lose the star players. Those watchmakers who are able to make a Grande Sonnerie with three gongs in a heavy platinum case, simply 'because getting a good sound out of a platinum case is more difficult'. They are the makers of watches that make people dream. And thank goodness that there are entrepreneurs who are able to enhance them.
