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. “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.

School of horology nyc