Patek Philippe

 

Philippe Stern returned to Switzerland in late 1966 and began to learn the rest of the replica watch industry. "Little by little, I just thought this was for me," he says. "I really liked what I did. I was proud of it. After that, I never thought of doing anything else. In 1977, in the midst of the quartz crisis, Philippe Stern succeeded his father as director of the company.
Thierry Stern was seven years old when his father started running the company. (Henri Stern rose to the position of chairman.) "I was very lucky," says his father. Thierry always wanted to come to Patek. Even when he was a little boy, he said, "I want to work at Patek."
"I was never really excited about anything else," said Thierry Stern. "I was always involved. It's like your own family. You feel it is something you have to keep going. There are so many different activities at Patek; there was always something I wanted to do. You never get bored. Patek Philippe was his first job outside of college in 1992. He spent two years in New York at HSWA, where he worked with Hank Edelman, where he got to know the American market, just as his father and grandfather had. Also, in Germany before returning to Patek Philippe's headquarters in Geneva.
Learning the business from the bottom up and the product from the inside out is a secret of the family's success, the Sterns say, and the strength of a family business. "We didn't start with just learning in school and focusing on the financial side," says Thierry Stern. "We all started in the product by learning how to make a beautiful product. For me, it is the biggest difference. "
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Philippe Stern says: "We know about timepieces. We are sometimes surprised to meet a president or a great director of a factory, and they don't really know what a watch is. They know a lot about perfumes, about champagne, maybe they are very good managers, but they really don't know much about watches. "
Stern senior continues: "For me, the most important thing for Patek is the credibility of the brand. Today, people in our company, as well as in other companies, so often talk to customers and retailers and do the exact opposite [of what they say]. I can't go out and tell a great story if it's not right. Some people may need to do that for marketing purposes or to make the brand look more important or fun. But we have to be more discreet. This is something very important: being loyal to your customers and retailers. I believe you can do this quite easily if you believe it is your business in the family. "
A challenge for the Sterns is to maintain the family business approach in a company that has experienced exceptional growth in recent years. "That will be difficult," says Thierry Stern. "There used to be 150 people in the company. Now you have to add another zero. "Patek Philippe employs a total of about 1,600 people, 1,300 of them in Geneva." Today it is a large organization, "says Philippe Stern. The annual production of watches is about 42,000 pieces, says Stern senior," about 30,000 mechanical watches and 12,000 quartz watches, mostly twenty-four pieces. "But Stern notes," We produce many more parts today because we produce more and more complicated pieces. Our normal timepiece has 160 parts. The annual calendar [timepiece] has 300 pieces; our perpetual calendar has 325. So actually we produce maybe four times more parts than we did five years ago. We need more people, more machines, and we produce more parts, but in the end, it's still one watch."
Of course, Patek Philippe tops everyone's list of successful independent watch firms and is thus a lavish takeover target. As to whether the family would ever sell the company, Stern recalls that when he built the new plant in Plan-les-Oates in 1996, there were rumors that he wanted to sell the company. The conversation was that he opened the new factory to increase the asking price. "Every now and then you always have smart people who say, 'Well, Patek will not be a family business, it will be sold because I don't know how many billions.' ('I'm asking for 20,' Thierry whispers aside, teasing his father.) But both Sterns make it clear that a sale is unthinkable. "It's really part of your family," says Philippe Stern, "and if you feel completely alone. "The foolproof best replica watches strategy.