![]() ![]() It’s easy to assume that an entire age group blanketed as the ADHD generation wouldn’t be interested in this sort of craft. ![]() The easiest way to explain away why no one is enrolling in watch school is that this generation just isn’t hardwired for a job that requires people to sit and polish something for half a workday. “You see all the brainwashing we did?”īut the truth is that all these students came in with a full cup of Kool-Aid. “I truly believe, and I think everyone here shares the same sentiment, that anything worth doing is worth doing right and that's really what Patek is about,” Mark says. They’re flashing their tools in my direction-explaining how it required four hours of polishing alone on the lever used to remove a dial’s hands, or how the curve of a hammer took them six hours to get just right. “How are they responding when they can't answer the question?” Pettinelli says about what he’s looking for.įor all the spirit-breaking done in this little classroom, the students are still as excited as kids on Christmas morning. There are impossible math problems put in a three-hour written test just to see whether or not someone will break a pencil in half out of frustration. Patience is so essential to a watchmaker’s success that Junod and Pettinelli test for it throughout the interview process. The first quarter of coursework was centered around these excruciating exercises in patience that trained the students to focus. “It’s just to break your spirit a little bit.” “You cannot mess it up or else you'll have to start all over again after a week of work,” Ricardo, another one of the students, says. Junod repeats this process 20 to 30 times. Then the students go through a list of defects until they find out what’s wrong with the piece. A large portion of the class is comprised of Junod messing the watch up in some way-by breaking a part, cutting the gear out of the movement, or removing screws. The day I visit, the students are working on a generic movement from “a little ladies watch,” Junod says. (“And that was a big screw,” he brags later.) I watch Laurent Junod, who’s been with Patek for over 30 years and heads the school, use a pair of tweezers to pluck a screw off the table like he’s using chopsticks to grab a bulging California roll. The screws are so microscopic you might mistake them for flecks of dust. Everything is shrunken down, including tiny, adorable versions of screwdrivers, hammers, and screws so small and delicate they bend at small amounts of pressure. Walking through the door into Patek Philippe’s workshop makes you feel a little like Alice stepping into Wonderland. The precious watches are kept away from dust as much as possible. “Eventually, say I'm not paying $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 for a timepiece when it takes two years to get it serviced,” Pettinelli says. You merely look after it for the next generation.” But in order to keep that vow, Patek needs to train the next generation of watchmakers. Ad campaigns promise, “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. Every watch comes with the guarantee Patek will make it new again. Patek will have to service every single one of these pieces at one point-it’s staked its entire brand on doing just that. (The pieces start at just above 10 grand and go all the way up to $110,000, or, scarier: "price upon request"). The brand recently upped its production to 60,000 watches a year, from a number closer to 50,000. The $67.9 million global watch market is growing-particularly the hunger for incredibly expensive watches-and Patek wants to match as much of the new demand as it can. So the brand is running something close to an endangered species program for watchmakers.įurther complicating Patek’s business is that it wants to make more of its stupidly complicated watches. It hardly had a choice: the customer base for extremely fancy watches is growing, but the number of people who can actually make them is cratering. They comprise the entire current class of Patek Philippe’s watchmaking program, which the brand built and offers to students for free. Through a door in the back is a smaller room with a projector at the front of it and six sweet-faced, enthusiastic men mostly in their early 20s. ![]() 31 pairs of the sanitary ur-ugly shoe are tucked away underneath desks where Patek Philippe’s platoon of watchmakers are hunched over, toiling away on one of the 10,000 pieces that pass through the workshop annually-either for routine servicing or because it was taken to another repair shop that used a paper clip in place of an actual part. Inside the Manhattan workshop where the most complicated, expensive, and shouted-out-in-rap-songs watches in the world are serviced, everyone is wearing white Crocs.
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