It’s my opinion that Patek Philippe approached the process in the best way possible. Watchmaking is a strange profession. It takes almost preternatural patience, a tireless eye for detail, and comfort with doing very similar tasks day in, day out. But it also takes a kind of intelligence – not necessarily an academic intelligence, but a logical and thorough mind. It also helps to have a good memory – your time at the bench will be the most useful textbook you could ever possess. One of the significant focuses of the interview process was to understand the motivations of the applicants.
By running a two-year course, dubbed the Patek Philippe Horology Program 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. As the industry recovered, North America was left without the necessarily. To find out more about the school, the motivations for its foundation, and the hopes replica 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 replica watches in the U.S. The appeal of these evermore luxurious and complicated products is universal, but their production incredibly localized to central Europe.
The country was reliant on a few schools nationwide, churning out about 40 or 50 graduates per year, and of those, merely 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.Currently, the US-based service team for Patek Philippe is less than 20 strong and deals with almost 10,000 repairs a year. Given the exacting standards the brand demands its watchmakers meet, the workload is unsustainable. The watch industry has been growing steadily since 1989. In the past, America had its own reputation as a watchmaking country. This skill shortage means replica Patek Philippe is constantly looking for new experts, but they are hard to find.
That’s because Patek Philippe’s reputation for quality is inherent to the brand’s success. One Of the 13 watchmakers that made it as far as a bench test last year, merely two were deemed good enough to earn a post within the company, irrespective of their desperation for increased manpower. As much as Larry Pettinelli needs watchmakers, nothing could have forced him to risk the brand’s 176-year history. Perpetuating that kind of reputation is not not difficult when your customers frequently pass your product beneath the loupe. Handing their students that kind of agency takes guts, but students respect that kind of trust and, I think, are more likely to repay it with hard work and loyalty.Excellence is imperative. But excellence does not grow on trees (it grows in workshops under the patient and passionate tuition of master horologists). They are confident that after learning from their experts, being part of the workshop team, and immersing themselves in the culture and history of the brand that they will choose to stay. And so Pettinelli set-about planting the seed that would grow into the Patek Philippe Horology Program of New York.
The mechanics of haute horlogerie are not quite the same as anything else. Acareer path in watchmaking is not something very usually offered to kids leaving school. 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. But you needn’t spend much time at the knee of an old watchmaker to understand why. 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. Patek Philippe replica watches have underlined their understanding of this fact by investing in an on-site school at their New York service centre. 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.
