patek philippe horology program of new york

This skill shortage means Patek Philippe is constantly looking for new experts, but they are hard to find. Given the exacting standards the brand demands its watchmakers meet, the workload is unsustainable. Currently, the US-based service team for Patek Philippe is less than 20 strong and deals with almost 10,000 repairs a year. The country was reliant on a few schools nationwide, churning out about 40 or 50 graduates per year, and of those, only maybe 10% would have made the grade that Patek Philippe requires of all its staff. Brands like Hamilton and Elgin timed the early cross-continental rail-road system, but these companies laid down their tools long before watchmaking was reborn.Īs the industry recovered, North America was left without the neccessery specialists. In the past, America had its own reputation as a watchmaking country. The appeal of these evermore luxurious and complicated products is universal, but their production incredibly localised to central Europe. The watch industry has been growing steadily since 1989. Patek Philippe have underlined their understanding of this fact by investing in an on-site school at their New York service centre.īy running a two-year course, dubbed the Patek Philippe Horology Programme Of New York, focused on equipping new students with the skills needed to service and repair an in-house movement, they are doing their bit to fill the yawning gap of trained horologists in North America. To find out more about the school, the motivations for its foundation, and the hopes Patek Philippe have for its development, I spoke to Larry Pettinelli, president at The Henri Stern Watch Agency (HSWA), a Patek Philippe subsidiary distributing and repairing Patek watches in the U.S. And it isn’t about intricacy, per se, it’s about experience it’s about all the silly little things that don’t make rational sense simply put, it’s all about time. The mechanics of haute horlogerie are not quite the same as anything else. But you needn’t spend much time at the knee of an old watchmaker to understand why. These days, I’m so ingrained in the watchmaking industry, it stuns me when people express amazement that assembly and after-sales processes are performed by real humans, not super-accurate machines. Before we know it, we’re off to college or straight into the world of work without so much as acknowledging the continued existence of horology. A career path in watchmaking is not something very often offered to kids leaving school.

Patek philippe horology program of new york