Patek Philippe Bet Everything on Mechanical Watchmaking

This story is from an installment of In the Loupe, our weekly insider newsletter about the best of the watch world. Sign up here. In 1961, when Hank Edelman started his career at Patek Philippe—working in New York City as a messenger at the company’s U.S. distributor, the Henri Stern Watch Agency—the Swiss watch industry looked a lot different than it does today. For starters, simply getting retailers to buy into the brand required effort. “The key element was to go out and visit the retail accounts and convince them to buy a few pieces for their inventory—which was a challenge,” Edelman, who has been chairman of the Henri Stern Watch Agency since 2006, tells Robb Report. In the years leading up to the quartz crisis of the 1970s, when competition from cheap, Japanese-made battery-powered wristwatches ravaged Switzerland’s mechanical industry, the brand’s bread and butter wasn’t sport styles or complications, but simple, straightforward dress watches from the Calatrava line, mostly encased in precious metals. “Convincing a retailer to purchase anything that was complicated was difficult,” Edelman says. “At that time, we had what we called a time zone watch. Essentially, it had two hour hands, and by pushing a button, you could change the hour hand and keep up with your local time. Back then, a typical Calatrava might have been $600 retail. This watch was $950 retail. It took us three years to convince enough retailers to spend the extra money to inventory it before we sold them all.” Two years into Edelman’s tenure at Patek, the owner’s son arrived in New York to work at the agency and learn the ropes of the American market. Philippe Stern, the 25-year-old scion of the family business—his paternal grandfather, Charles Stern, and his great-uncle, Jean Stern, bought Patek Philippe in 1932—was just a few years older than Edelman. Soon, the two men found themselves working alongside each other performing simple tasks such as affixing suede straps to the cases of small ladies’ watches. “It was a major pain because you had to fiddle with a little wire, Edelman recalls. “Philippe and I sat there doing those things together, grumbling about having to do it.” They remained close long after Stern returned to Geneva some two years later. After Stern’s passing in June, I spoke to Edelman—who served as president of the Henri Stern Watch Agency until 2006, when he became chairman—about the impact his longtime friend and boss had on Patek Philippe and the industry in general. “The thing I most want you to understand about him as a person is that he was always humble,” Edelman says. “If you weren’t told that he was the son of the owner of Patek Philippe, you wouldn’t have known it.” Stern’s most consequential decision, according to Edelman and many others I spoke to, was to throw his unequivocal support behind mechanical watchmaking at a time when its future was in doubt. Even as retailers pointedly asked Edelman what the company planned to do once the mechanical trade was vanquished by quartz technology, Stern stayed the course. “The presumption was, this was the end of classic mechanical watchmaking,” Edelman says. “Philippe made gutsy choices at a time when mechanical watches were thought to be finished. He had the wisdom and the guts to continue.” Despite the naysayers, Stern doubled down on mechanical watchmaking in 1980, when he commissioned the Caliber 89. Designed to celebrate Patek Philippe’s 150th anniversary in 1989, the piece, when it debuted, was the world’s most complicated portable timekeeping device, boasting 33 complications (“I’d like to remind people that the complexity of that was done without a single computer,” Edelman notes.) Its introduction, and the fanfare surrounding the brand in general, marked what many people consider to be the birth of the mechanical watchmaking renaissance, in which the trade emerged from the ashes of the quartz crisis to become the high-flying luxury business we know today. “Everything Philippe did was to sustain that tradition,” Edelman says. “We started out in 1839 trying to make the best watch we could. And that never changed. That was always the philosophy. Granted, the ownership changed in the 1930s, when the Stern family, who were the dial makers for the company, took it over, because otherwise it would have died right then and there. Until the explosion in 1989—until that point, it was one sided: We were trying to convince people to buy.” To hear Edelman tell it, the only way the company survived the lean years of the crisis, and its immediate aftermath was by maintaining close ties with its American retailers—there were about 145 of them at the time. “Some of them were very small,” he says. “They might carry an inventory of three watches. But don’t get me wrong—when we went to visit them, if we sold them one, we were happy to make a sale. The direct relationship with end consumers was not as significant.” The beginning of the company’s pivot to becoming a consumer-facing brand began in the mid-80s, and came down, once again, to Stern’s forward-thinking philosophy. “We’ve always been who we are—the workmanship, the dedication to maintaining that has always been the foundation,” Edelman says. “But that’s a message that you have to convey in different ways. Until the mid ’80s, every one of the markets had their own messaging. We had our own ad agency. One of the key decisions that Philippe made was to consolidate the message worldwide. They hired an agency in Geneva that started to create one message. We used to have photos for our advertising which were a watch in all kinds of different situations. And this gentleman named René Bittel, who was the first one that they hired as a worldwide message person, he came up with the idea of showing ads where the watch was not on somebody’s wrist; it was in front of you to be presented so that you could pick it up. It was novel. People weren’t doing that. And that was a great start. ‘Let’s not talk about where the watches could be. Let’s just talk about the relationship between the consumer and the watch.’” The messaging, combined with the hoopla surrounding the Caliber 89, and the debut, in 1996, of the brand’s seminal (and enduring) Generations campaign (“You never truly own a Patek Philippe, you merely look after it for the next generation”) marked a sea change in how Patek Philippe timepieces were perceived, and what mechanical watchmaking in general represented. “The whole perception changed,” Edelman says. In the 1970s and ’80s, “my tagline for selling was always, more or less, ‘You cannot buy another watch that’s going to retain its value any more than a Patek Philippe will.’ I’m not saying that it’ll escalate in value over time. But if you look at it long term, it will always retain its value more than any other watch. That was an acceptable sales argument, if you want to call it that, to the end consumer. And that flipped completely because now, all of a sudden, it was obvious that not only was it retaining its value more than any other watch, it was escalating in value after you bought it.”