The David Candaux DC1. Page 148.

A book about independent watchmaking should look like one.

The first copies ship at the beginning of May. To reserve yours, write to sergio.galanti@watchdossier.ch.

They are now collected as a single issue: WatchDossier — Special Issue, April 2026

Six essays on brands, capital, and the remaking of modern watchmaking.

Read in sequence, they trace a shift that is already complete: the watch as object, the brand as asset, and the space between them where value now resides.

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Watchdossier Special Issue April 26, 2026

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The question is no longer what a watch is. It is what it has become.

In 2000, a Swiss financial analyst named Pierre Tissot published an article in the Swiss Watchmaking Journal arguing that luxury watch brands should be valued using the same toolkit applied to Coca-Cola and Nestlé. A brand, he wrote, is an intangible capital asset. Its value is a function of the demand stability it generates. The methodology is the same whether you are valuing a tourbillon or a jar of instant coffee.

Twenty-six years later, the industry Tissot described has been transformed beyond recognition. Brands have been acquired, consolidated, narratively engineered, and traded like securities. The in-house movement has replaced brand equity as the dominant theory of value. Heritage has become a product category. And the secondary market has emerged as the arena in which all of these propositions are tested, daily, with real money.

This special issue of WatchDossier asks one question across six essays: what happens when a watch brand stops being merely a maker of objects and becomes something bought, valued, traded, revived, or assembled like capital? The question begins in 2000, with the moment the brand became a balance sheet entry. It passes through the consolidation era’s construction of heritage, the secondary market’s pricing of belief over craft, and the current structural mutations at Richemont and Breitling. It ends with the independent watchmaker — the last figure in the industry whose value cannot be separated from the person who holds the tools.

The six essays are designed to be read in sequence but each stands alone. Together, they trace an arc from the birth of an idea to its current complications — and to the question of what, if anything, exists outside it.

— Sergio

Founder & Editor, WatchDossier

WatchDossier Issue 21 will be published on May 24, 2026.

François-Paul Journe produces approximately one thousand watches a year. Rexhep Rexhepi, working from a small atelier in Geneva’s old town, makes perhaps thirty. Roger W. Smith, on the Isle of Man, makes fewer than ten. Philippe Dufour, widely regarded as the greatest living watchmaker, has effectively ceased production. These are not brands in any sense that Pierre Tissot’s 2000 framework would recognise. They do not generate demand stability. They do not offer predictable cash flows. They cannot be discounted to present value, diversified within a portfolio, or evaluated using Interbrand’s methodology. They exist outside the grammar of brand-as-capital entirely. And yet they are, by almost any measure of collector conviction, the most valued watchmakers alive.

The preceding five essays in this issue have traced the logic of brands as financial assets — from Tissot’s original framework, through the consolidation era’s narrative engineering, to the secondary market’s stress-testing of belief, and into the current mutations of portfolio strategy at Richemont and Breitling. Each essay has operated within the same gravitational field: the assumption that brands exist, ultimately, as instruments of capital. This final essay asks what happens at the edge of that field. What survives outside portfolio logic? What does watchmaking look like when no one owns the story?

The answer, at first glance, appears straightforward. Independent watchmakers survive by doing what groups cannot: producing objects of such singular craft that the work itself becomes the entire value proposition. There is no heritage narrative to engineer because the founder is alive and working at the bench. There is no brand management because the brand is a person. There is no portfolio positioning because there is no portfolio. The independent watchmaker’s authenticity is not constructed after the fact, as Essay II showed Richemont constructing Panerai’s. It is structural. It is the unavoidable consequence of one person, or a very small number of people, making things by hand.

This structural authenticity is what the collector market rewards. The data from Essay III showed that F.P. Journe’s secondary market transactions slightly exceed his annual production capacity. A. Lange & Söhne, a far larger operation but still relatively small, sees secondary volume equivalent to roughly eighty-eight per cent of its output. For Journe, every watch made is, in effect, traded again. This is not the demand stability that Tissot described — it is something more concentrated, more fervent, and more fragile. It is conviction, held by a community small enough to know one another, intense enough to sustain prices that bear no rational relationship to the cost of materials or labour.

The conviction is not irrational. What Journe, Rexhepi, and the handful of watchmakers at this level produce is genuinely extraordinary. Rexhepi apprenticed at Patek Philippe at fifteen, trained at F.P. Journe, founded Akrivia at twenty-five, and by thirty-five had established himself as one of the most accomplished hand-finishers in the history of the craft. His Chronomètre Contemporain, a time-only watch with a grand feu enamel dial, achieved its reputation through nothing more than the quality of its execution — no marketing campaign, no celebrity endorsement, no group infrastructure. The work spoke. Collectors listened. Prices followed. This is the independent model at its purest: value created by craft alone, validated by a community that cares about craft, and sustained by scarcity that is genuinely involuntary rather than strategically managed.

But the model is structurally fragile in ways that the independent watchmaking community is often reluctant to examine. The most obvious vulnerability is succession. When the founder retires or dies, the brand faces an existential question that no group brand ever confronts: can the work continue without the person who defined it? Philippe Dufour’s effective cessation of production has already created a category of watches that will never be serviced by their maker again. Roger W. Smith trained under George Daniels and inherited the Daniels method, but the method is inseparable from the practitioner. Some independents are thinking about this — MB&F has accepted investment from Chanel, a move that signals awareness of the succession problem. Journe and Rexhepi have invested in infrastructure, in training teams, in building organisations that can outlast their founders. But dozens of younger independents are producing watches without any documented service plan, spare parts policy, or continuity model. The concept of the orphan watch — a beautifully made piece that cannot be maintained once the maker disappears — is not hypothetical. It has already happened.

The second fragility is economic. Independent watchmaking depends on a collector base that is itself shaped by the marketing apparatus of the groups. The collector who pays six figures for a Rexhepi did not discover independent watchmaking in a vacuum. He arrived at it through a journey that almost certainly began with Rolex or Omega, passed through Patek Philippe or Audemars Piguet, and eventually reached the independents as a form of connoisseurship that transcends brand. The groups, through their marketing and their ubiquity, create the desire for watches in the first place. The independents benefit from that desire while positioning themselves as its negation. This is not hypocrisy. It is a structural dependency that shapes the entire independent ecosystem. If the groups were to contract — if the broader luxury watch market were to shrink significantly — the collector base that sustains independent watchmaking would shrink with it.

The third fragility is the one that matters most for the argument of this issue. Independent watchmaking’s value proposition depends on its refusal of portfolio logic. The independent is valued precisely because it cannot be acquired, consolidated, or narratively managed by a group. Its authenticity is a function of its structural vulnerability. But this means that the independent model is, by definition, non-scalable. It cannot grow without compromising the conditions of its own value. The moment an independent watchmaker begins to produce at volume, to employ marketing executives, to open boutiques in multiple cities, the structural authenticity that justified the premium begins to erode. The collector who valued the work because it was made by one person at a bench will not value it equally when it is made by a team in a manufacture. The independent is caught in a bind: it can remain pure and remain small, or it can grow and become something that increasingly resembles the groups it defined itself against.

This is the tension that runs beneath all six essays in this issue. Pierre Tissot’s 2000 article argued that brands are capital assets whose value derives from demand stability. The consolidation era tested this proposition by assembling portfolios of brands and engineering their heritage narratives. The secondary market revealed that what is actually priced is not quality but belief. Richemont’s disposal of Baume & Mercier showed that portfolio logic has a floor. Breitling’s House of Brands showed that it can be rebuilt from dormant names. And the independents show that it is possible to create extraordinary value outside the system entirely — but only on terms that the system cannot replicate, and only for as long as the maker’s hands hold steady.

There is something irreducibly human about this. The independent watchmaker is the last figure in the industry whose value is inseparable from his or her physical existence. When Rexhep Rexhepi finishes a movement, the finishing is the value. It cannot be separated from the person who performed it, transferred to a balance sheet, or discounted to present value. It is work — in the oldest and most literal sense of the word. And in an industry that has spent a quarter-century converting everything into narrative, into brand equity, into intangible capital, there is something clarifying about an object whose value is simply that someone made it, and made it well.

That may not be enough to sustain a business model. It is almost certainly not enough to sustain an industry. But it is, for now, enough to sustain a practice — and to remind us that before a watch was an asset, before it was a brand, before it was a position in a portfolio, it was a made thing. The ownership of time began there. Whether it ends there is a question this issue can pose but not answer. The answer belongs to the makers, and to time itself.

About the Author

Sergio Galanti is an independent brand strategist and writer in the luxury watch industry. He is the editor of WatchDossier, a publication devoted to the cultural and philosophical undercurrents of modern horology.

No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.

Subscribe watchdossier.ch to receive more insights on luxury, craftsmanship, and collecting.

At the end of 2023, Breitling acquired Universal Genève for sixty-nine million dollars. In the spring of 2025, it acquired Gallet for an undisclosed sum. In November 2025, at Dubai Watch Week, Georges Kern stood before a two-storey pavilion and announced what the two acquisitions were for: a structure called House of Brands, uniting three watchmakers under a single strategic umbrella. Gallet, founded in 1826, would relaunch as Breitling’s entry-level sister brand, priced between three and five thousand Swiss francs, sold through Breitling’s own boutiques. Universal Genève, founded in 1894 and once known as le couturier de la montre, would be positioned above Breitling in the ultra-luxury segment, operating with its own identity and distribution. Breitling itself would remain the core — the middle register of a three-tier architecture that had not existed eighteen months earlier.

This does not fit any established playbook. When LVMH acquired TAG Heuer and Zenith in 1999, it was a conglomerate adding to an existing luxury portfolio. When Richemont bought Jaeger-LeCoultre, IWC, and A. Lange & Söhne in 2000, it was a group with deep infrastructure absorbing brands into a proven distribution architecture. In both cases, the acquirer was already a group. The brands being acquired were active, profitable, and strategically coveted. The transactions were competitive — multiple bidders, premium prices, intensive due diligence. What Breitling has done is categorically different. A single brand, backed by private equity, has purchased two dormant names and is attempting to build a multi-brand group from the ground up. The acquirer is not a conglomerate. It is trying to become one.

The structural logic is not difficult to discern. Kern himself has been candid about the arithmetic. Breitling’s average sale price has risen considerably over the past eight years. The brand has moved upmarket, which means it has vacated the price segment it once occupied. Customers walk into Breitling boutiques and walk out because the watches are too expensive. Gallet solves this problem from below: an entry-level brand with genuine heritage, manufactured by Breitling, available through existing retail infrastructure. Universal Genève solves it from above: a collector-oriented ultra-luxury proposition that Breitling’s own name could never credibly support. The logic is segmentation — three brands covering a price spectrum that no single brand can stretch across without losing coherence.

This is, on one level, entirely rational. Tudor performs exactly this function for Rolex. The difference is that Tudor was not acquired — it was built, over decades, from within the same corporate family. Breitling is attempting to replicate that architecture through acquisition, and it is doing so with brands that have no existing customer base, no active production, no current retail presence, and no demand stability to speak of. This is where the Tissot framework from 2000 becomes useful as a diagnostic. Tissot argued that brand value is a function of the stability of future demand — the predictability of cash flows over time. By that measure, Universal Genève and Gallet have no brand value at all. They are names with history but without demand. What Breitling is betting on is the opposite of Tissot’s thesis: that heritage, carefully reactivated, can manufacture demand stability where none currently exists. The bet is that the name is enough.

Whether the bet will pay depends on a set of questions that have no precedent in modern watchmaking. Has any single brand successfully built a multi-brand group in this industry before? The answer, as far as the available evidence shows, is no. LVMH, Richemont, and Swatch Group all began as holding structures or conglomerates with diversified interests. They acquired watch brands into pre-existing corporate architectures. Breitling is attempting the reverse — building the architecture around the brands as they are being revived. This is not portfolio diversification in the Richemont sense. It is something closer to a startup thesis applied to heritage watchmaking: acquire undervalued intellectual property, invest in product development and narrative construction, and extract value from the gap between the brand’s historical reputation and its current commercial dormancy.

The private equity dimension is impossible to ignore. Breitling is backed by CVC Capital Partners and Partners Group. These are not patient family offices or luxury-native holding companies. They are financial sponsors with return horizons and exit expectations. The House of Brands, whatever else it is, is also a value-creation narrative for investors — a story about optionality, about multiple revenue streams, about a platform that is worth more than the sum of its individual brands. In the language of private equity, Breitling is building a platform company. In the language of horology, it is building a maison. The two vocabularies describe the same structure, but they imply very different time horizons and very different definitions of success.

The leadership structure announced this month suggests the architecture is being formalised rapidly. Jean-Marc Pontroué, formerly of Roger Dubuis and Montblanc, succeeds Kern as Breitling’s CEO. Grégory Bruttin continues as managing director of Universal Genève. Erwan Rossignol, previously Breitling’s global director of wholesale, takes on Gallet. Kern moves to CEO of the House of Brands, overseeing the strategic umbrella while the three brands develop their own operational autonomy. This is, in miniature, the Richemont model — a holding structure with independent maisons. Except that Richemont built its model over three decades and thirty billion francs’ worth of acquisitions. Breitling is attempting it with two deals totalling perhaps eighty million dollars and a handful of executive appointments.

Read alongside Essay IV, the pattern becomes clear. Richemont is shedding a brand that no longer fits its portfolio logic. Breitling is acquiring brands that fit nothing yet. In both cases, the consolidation model of the 1990s and 2000s — the model Pierre Tissot described with such confidence in the Swiss Watchmaking Journal — is being renegotiated. The old assumption was that bigger portfolios meant more stable demand and more predictable cash flows. The new reality is more selective and more contradictory. Groups are pruning brands that dilute their positioning. Individual brands are assembling groups from dormant names. The direction of travel is no longer uniform. Consolidation is not ending. It is mutating into something the original framework did not anticipate: a landscape in which the most interesting structural moves are being made not by the established conglomerates but by the actors they once would have acquired.

Whether Breitling’s house will stand is a question for the market to answer over the next five years. Universal Genève’s first new production — restored archival movements, grand feu enamel dials, prices well above Breitling’s range — is already in the world. Gallet’s relaunch is scheduled for late August. The products will either find an audience or they will not. But the structural ambition is already legible, and it is significant regardless of commercial outcome. A single watchmaker has looked at the conglomerate model, decided it can be replicated at a fraction of the scale and cost, and placed a bet that heritage, properly narrated, can be converted into demand. It is, in its way, the most radical test of brand theory the industry has produced since the consolidation era began.

About the Author

Sergio Galanti is an independent brand strategist and writer in the luxury watch industry. He is the editor of WatchDossier, a publication devoted to the cultural and philosophical undercurrents of modern horology.

No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.

Subscribe watchdossier.ch to receive more insights on luxury, craftsmanship, and collecting.

On January 22, 2026, Richemont announced that it had signed an agreement to sell Baume & Mercier to the Damiani Group. The financial terms were not disclosed. The transaction would have no material impact on Richemont’s balance sheet. Closing was expected by summer. Richemont would continue to provide operational services for at least twelve months to ensure a smooth transition. The press release was two paragraphs long.

Everything about the announcement was designed to signal insignificance. A small brand, a private transaction, an undisclosed price, an immaterial balance-sheet effect. And yet the sale of Baume & Mercier is one of the most structurally significant events in the Swiss watch industry in years, because it reverses a logic that has governed the sector for three decades. Richemont does not sell watch brands. That is not what Richemont does. It acquires them, holds them, nurtures them over generational time horizons, and allows them to compound value within a distribution architecture that no independent brand could replicate. Johann Rupert built the group on this premise. The entire conglomerate model depends on the assumption that brands are worth more inside a portfolio than outside one. Baume & Mercier’s departure is the first admission that this assumption has a limit.

It is important to be precise about what kind of disposal this is. Richemont has shed assets before. It sold Shanghai Tang to an Italian entrepreneur in 2017 and Lancel to Piquadro in 2018. In late 2024 it agreed to offload Yoox Net-a-Porter to Mytheresa. Each of these was peripheral — a fashion label, a leather goods house, a digital retail venture. They were pruning at the edges of a portfolio whose centre was always hard luxury: watches and jewellery. Analysts understood the moves as strategic clarification, a sharpening of focus. But Baume & Mercier is not peripheral. It is a specialist watchmaker, founded in 1830, held within the Richemont architecture since Cartier acquired it in 1988. It makes mechanical watches at its own factory in Les Brenets. It sits inside the Specialist Watchmakers division alongside Jaeger-LeCoultre, Vacheron Constantin, and A. Lange & Söhne. Selling Baume & Mercier is not housekeeping. It is a statement about what the core actually is.

The statement, stripped to its structural logic, is this: the conglomerate model has a floor. Below a certain threshold of price positioning, brand heat, and margin contribution, a watchmaker cannot be profitably maintained within a group’s architecture. The group’s resources — capital, creative leadership, distribution priority, narrative attention — flow upward, toward the brands that justify the highest margins and attract the most desirable clientele. Brands at the accessible end of the portfolio do not starve overnight. They starve slowly, over years, through a thousand small allocation decisions that are individually rational and cumulatively fatal. Oliver Müller, the founder of LuxeConsult and one of the industry’s sharpest analysts, was blunt in his assessment: Baume & Mercier’s DNA and price positioning were no longer the right fit for Richemont, where the focus is firmly on luxury. Declining sales had destabilised the brand, as had the many changes in CEO and strategy. Kepler Cheuvreux, the equity research house, noted that the brand had struggled for years and that the sale underscored a more aggressive approach with problem units under Richemont’s new chief executive, Nicolas Bos.

The phrasing is worth attending to. “Problem units.” Not failing watchmakers, not underperforming maisons — problem units. The language of portfolio management, not of horology. This is the vocabulary that Pierre Tissot would have recognised in 2000, when he argued in the Swiss Watchmaking Journal that brands are intangible capital assets whose value derives from demand stability and predictable cash flows. By that logic, a brand that generates neither stable demand nor predictable cash flows is not a heritage to be preserved but an asset to be redeployed. Tissot’s framework, applied twenty-six years later, produces exactly this result: disposal.

What makes the transaction analytically interesting, rather than merely sad, is the identity of the buyer. The Damiani Group is a family-run Italian luxury house whose portfolio includes the Damiani, Salvini, Bliss, and Calderoni jewellery brands, the Murano glassmaker Venini, and — crucially — Rocca, a multi-brand watch and jewellery distributor with a significant retail presence in Italy. Damiani’s CEO, Jérôme Favier, described the acquisition as an opportunity to expand into the watch segment by leveraging the group’s wholesale distribution network and opening select mono-brand boutiques in strategic locations. This is a fundamentally different operating model from the one Baume & Mercier inhabited at Richemont. Richemont’s architecture has been moving steadily toward direct-to-consumer retail, vertical control, and ultra-luxury positioning — an environment in which a predominantly wholesale brand at an accessible price point is structurally miscast. At Damiani, Baume & Mercier becomes the centrepiece of a watchmaking ambition rather than the least consequential member of a specialist watchmakers’ division. The operating logic changes completely. The brand does not.

There is a temptation to read this as a failure story — the decline of a once-respected maison, the corporate indifference of a conglomerate, the inevitable gravitational pull of luxury toward the ultra-high end. And there is truth in all of that. But the more important reading is structural. The disposal of Baume & Mercier does not prove that the brand failed. It proves that portfolio logic has limits. A brand can be viable, historically significant, and capable of making good watches, and still be the wrong brand inside the wrong group at the wrong moment. The conglomerate model is not a rising tide that lifts all boats. It is an architecture that concentrates resources at the top, and the brands at the bottom pay the cost of that concentration whether they deserve to or not.

This is the inversion of Pierre Tissot’s 2000 thesis. He argued that brands are capital assets whose value derives from the stability of demand they generate. The implication was that aggregating brands into portfolios would compound that stability — diversification of demand, economies of distribution, shared infrastructure. For most of the past quarter-century, the industry behaved as if this logic were self-evident. The acquisition era assumed that more brands meant more value. Baume & Mercier’s departure suggests the opposite can also be true: a brand inside the wrong portfolio may lose value precisely because the group’s strategic priorities work against it. The conglomerate model does not just aggregate value. It can also quietly destroy it.

Whether Baume & Mercier is an isolated correction or the first signal of a broader deconsolidation is a question the industry has not yet answered. Richemont still holds twelve watchmaking and jewellery maisons. LVMH and Swatch Group show no signs of divesting. But the fact that the question can now be asked at all — that a major group has sold a specialist watchmaker to a family-owned Italian jeweller, and the market treated it as rational — marks a shift in the structural grammar of the industry. For thirty years, the story moved in one direction: acquisition, consolidation, portfolio expansion. In January 2026, it moved, for the first time, in the other.

About the Author

Sergio Galanti is an independent brand strategist and writer in the luxury watch industry. He is the editor of WatchDossier, a publication devoted to the cultural and philosophical undercurrents of modern horology.

No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.

Subscribe watchdossier.ch to receive more insights on luxury, craftsmanship, and collecting.

Consider two watches on a dealer’s desk. The first is a Vacheron Constantin Overseas, made by the oldest continuously operating watchmaker in the world. Its movement carries the Geneva Seal, which certifies that every visible component has been finished to the most exacting standard in Swiss horology. The rotor is hand-engraved in twenty-two-carat gold, a process that takes a single artisan forty-five minutes per piece. The case is fitted with an interchangeable strap system of unusual ingenuity. The second watch is a Rolex Submariner. Its movement is industrially finished and hidden behind a sealed caseback. No one will ever see it. The Submariner costs less than half the price of the Overseas at retail. On the secondary market, the Submariner trades above its retail price. The Overseas trades below. By a considerable margin.

This is not an anomaly. It is the market. According to WatchCharts, the data provider behind the annual Morgan Stanley report on the watch industry, Vacheron Constantin’s average value retention has fallen below minus forty per cent, meaning that a typical Vacheron trades on the secondary market at roughly sixty cents on the retail dollar. Rolex, by contrast, is one of only three high-volume brands whose watches consistently trade at or above retail. The other two are Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet. Together, these three brands account for more than half of all secondary market transactions by value — an estimated ten billion dollars in annual volume. The drop-off from third place to fourth is not gradual. It is a cliff. Audemars Piguet’s secondary sales are more than double those of Omega, which sits in fourth.

The obvious objection is that the secondary market is pricing scarcity, not belief. Rolex restricts supply. Patek Philippe restricts supply. Demand exceeds availability, and the premium follows. This is true but insufficient. It explains why certain brands trade above retail. It does not explain why Vacheron Constantin — a brand with shorter production runs than Rolex, deeper horological credentials than Audemars Piguet, and a heritage that predates both by more than a century — trades at such a steep discount. Something else is at work. The secondary market is pricing not the object but the collective conviction that surrounds it. It is pricing the narrative.

The data becomes even more instructive when you look within brands rather than between them. At Patek Philippe, every model that trades above retail is a sports watch. The Nautilus and the Aquanaut command premiums of forty to fifty-five per cent above retail. The Calatrava and the Complications collections trade at discounts exceeding forty per cent. At Audemars Piguet, the Royal Oak dominates the above-retail list. Not a single CODE 11.59 model — the collection Audemars Piguet has invested most heavily in over the past five years — meets the threshold. At Vacheron Constantin, the Overseas accounts for nearly eighty per cent of the brand’s secondary market index. The Patrimony and the Traditionnelle, arguably the more accomplished collections in horological terms, barely register.

This pattern reveals something the brand-as-capital framework of Pierre Tissot’s 2000 article could not have anticipated. Tissot argued that brand value derives from the stability of demand a name generates. He was right. But the secondary market shows that demand stability does not attach uniformly to a brand. It attaches to specific narratives within a brand — to the story of the steel sports watch as the object of desire, to the mythology of the waitlist, to the social currency of being seen with a particular reference on the wrist. The Nautilus and the Royal Oak are not merely watches. They are consensus objects. The market has agreed, collectively and reinforcingly, that these are the things worth wanting. The Calatrava, for all its technical refinement, has not achieved this consensus. And without consensus, there is no demand stability. Without demand stability, there is no secondary market premium.

The hierarchy is self-reinforcing. When the secondary market corrected sharply in mid-2022, the Big Three were the first to fall. When recovery began in early 2025, they were the first to rise. By the first quarter of 2026, more than seventy per cent of tracked brands were posting positive performance, compared with just one — Rolex — a year earlier. The popular brands move first in both directions. Belief, in this market, is contagious and hierarchical. It flows downward from the top, not upward from the margins.

There are, however, exceptions that complicate the picture. F.P. Journe, a Genevan independent whose annual production is measured in the low hundreds, generates secondary market transaction volume that slightly exceeds his total production capacity. Every watch made is, in effect, traded again. This is not consensus in the Rolex sense. It is conviction — demand driven not by social currency or marketing scale but by a concentrated community of collectors who believe, with the fervour of the converted, in the intrinsic merit of the work. The market signature is distinctive: volume so low that each piece is individually tracked, velocity so high that the secondary market functions less as a resale channel than as a circulation system among collectors who already know one another. This is not to say Journe’s prices were immune to the 2022 correction — they were not, and by some measures the swings were sharper than those of the consensus brands. But the correction’s character was different. In the Big Three market, selling was anonymous and herd-driven. In Journe’s, every transaction has a name attached to it, and the community that drove prices up was largely the same community that absorbed the decline. The market shrank but did not disperse.

Narrative-driven repricing events make the mechanism visible in real time. When the independent watchmaker Urban Jürgensen relaunched successfully in the summer of 2025, auction results for the brand’s earlier production improved immediately — the relaunch, by renewing the narrative, retroactively increased the value of objects that had not changed at all. Cartier’s resale trajectory tells the same story at larger scale. In the second quarter of 2024, Cartier’s average resale value rose by more than six per cent while Rolex declined by nearly two per cent over the same period. The shift reflected a broader reassessment of Cartier as a serious horological proposition rather than a jeweller that happened to make watches. The objects did not change. The Santos remained the Santos. What changed was the story the market told itself about what the Santos meant. The price followed the story.

If Journe represents conviction in its purest form, A. Lange & Söhne complicates the picture from a different angle. The brand produces around five thousand watches a year and sees secondary transactions equivalent to roughly eighty-eight per cent of its annual output — a figure that reflects genuine collector commitment to some of the finest movement finishing in the industry. But Lange is also a Richemont maison whose identity was sharpened and strategically differentiated after it came under group ownership in 2000. Its secondary market performance owes something to both the craft and the narrative. Separating the two is not difficult. It is impossible. Lange’s eighty-eight per cent is a number that belongs equally to the bench and the boardroom, and neither can claim it.

This is the point at which Tissot’s 2000 framework proves both prescient and inadequate. He was right that brand value is a function of demand stability. He was right that demand stability can be measured, analysed, and discounted to present value. What he could not have foreseen is that the secondary market would become the arena in which these propositions are tested daily, with real money, by participants who have no obligation to be polite about the results. The secondary market does not care about Geneva Seals, hand-engraved rotors, or two hundred and sixty years of continuous operation. It cares about consensus — about the shared conviction that a particular object will hold or increase in value over time. This conviction is not irrational. But it is not a measure of quality. It is a measure of belief.

And belief, unlike a movement, cannot be finished by hand.

About the Author

Sergio Galanti is an independent brand strategist and writer in the luxury watch industry. He is the editor of WatchDossier, a publication devoted to the cultural and philosophical undercurrents of modern horology.

No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.

Subscribe watchdossier.ch to receive more insights on luxury, craftsmanship, and collecting.

In 1997, the Vendôme Group — the luxury arm of what is now Richemont — acquired a small Florentine company called Officine Panerai for approximately one million dollars. The purchase price alone tells you everything you need to know about what Panerai was at the moment of acquisition. It was not a luxury brand. It was not, in any meaningful commercial sense, a watchmaker. It was a former military instrument supplier whose entire historical output amounted to roughly sixteen hundred watches, nearly all of them manufactured by Rolex using Cortébert pocket watch movements, delivered to the Italian Navy between the mid-1930s and the late 1950s. After 1970, Panerai ceased producing watches for the navy entirely. For the next two decades, the company made depth gauges and compasses. A brief civilian revival in 1993 produced small batches of reissued Luminor and Radiomir models that caught the attention of Sylvester Stallone, who wore one in a film. That was, in essence, the asset Richemont acquired: a name, a Florentine address, a handful of military patents, and a movie star’s endorsement.

Today, Panerai is a global luxury brand producing tens of thousands of watches annually at its own manufacture in Neuchâtel, fitted with proprietary in-house calibres across the 2000, 3000, 5000, and 9000 series. It operates boutiques on four continents. Its heritage narrative — Italian Navy frogmen, secret underwater missions, combat-diving instruments built for elite special forces — is among the most potent in the industry. Collectors refer to pre-1997 models as “Pre-Vendôme” pieces, a designation that functions simultaneously as a provenance marker and a mythological boundary: the watches from before the corporate era, touched by the aura of the original.

Every element of this narrative is factually grounded. Panerai did supply the Italian Navy. The watches were designed for combat divers. The Luminor’s crown-protecting bridge was engineered for water resistance under operational conditions. None of this is fabricated. But the narrative as it now exists — the heritage as a consumer proposition, the history as a brand asset — was constructed almost entirely after acquisition. Before 1997, Panerai’s military past was not a story told to customers. It was not told at all. There were no customers. The company had produced sixteen hundred watches over thirty years for a single client and then stopped. What Richemont acquired was not a heritage brand. It was the raw material from which a heritage brand could be built.

The construction was meticulous. Angelo Bonati, a Cartier executive appointed to run the new acquisition, orchestrated the transformation on a minimal budget. The Florence boutique near the Duomo was renovated and repositioned as a pilgrimage site for collectors. A community of enthusiasts, the self-named Paneristi, was cultivated through early internet forums — Panerai was among the first watch brands to benefit from the promotional power of user-generated content. The PAM reference numbering system turned each watch into a collectible with a serial identity. Limited editions in runs of five hundred or a thousand created artificial scarcity. And beneath all of this, the military backstory — real but previously unnarrated — was amplified, refined, and delivered to a market that received it as organic heritage rather than corporate positioning.

Panerai is the clearest case, but it is not the only one. The consolidation era of the 1990s and 2000s produced a pattern that can be observed across multiple acquisitions: a brand enters a group with one self-understanding and exits with another. Richemont’s acquisition of Les Manufactures Horlogères in 2000 brought Jaeger-LeCoultre, IWC, and A. Lange & Söhne into the portfolio. Each of these brands had genuine horological depth. But the narratives that now surround them — Jaeger-LeCoultre as the watchmaker’s watchmaker, IWC as the engineer’s timepiece, Lange as the apotheosis of Glashütte hand-finishing — were sharpened, codified, and strategically differentiated after they came under common ownership. The group’s task was not merely to distribute these brands but to ensure that each occupied a distinct narrative position within the portfolio, minimising cannibalisation and maximising the addressable market. Heritage, in this context, is not something a brand inherits. It is something a group assigns.

This is what the consolidation era actually accomplished. The standard account describes it as industrial strategy — economies of scale, distribution synergies, supply chain integration. Pierre Tissot’s 2000 article in the Swiss Watchmaking Journal exemplified this view: brands were capital assets, valued for demand stability and portfolio diversification. But the deeper operation was narrative. Groups did not merely acquire production capacity. They acquired the right to author a brand’s past. And in authoring that past, they manufactured the “heritage” that now functions as the industry’s primary pricing justification.

The distinction matters because heritage, once established, acquires an authority that resists scrutiny. When a collector pays a premium for a Panerai Luminor, part of what is being purchased is the story of the Italian Navy frogmen — the sense that this watch descends from instruments forged in combat. The story is true. But the story as a consumer-facing brand proposition did not exist before 1997. It was constructed by a luxury conglomerate that recognised, correctly, that a military backstory could be converted into a pricing architecture. The heritage is real. The narrative is engineered. And in luxury watchmaking, the narrative is what you pay for.

This is not a criticism. It is a description of how the industry works. Every luxury brand engages in some version of this process — the selective curation of history in service of a commercial proposition. What the consolidation era did was industrialise it. By concentrating dozens of brands under a small number of corporate owners, each with sophisticated marketing operations and global distribution, the groups were able to perform heritage construction at scale. The result is the landscape we now inhabit: an industry in which the past is not merely remembered but actively managed, in which provenance is a product category, and in which the line between what a brand was and what a group has decided it should have been is no longer visible to the consumer.

The consumer does not need to see it. That is, in a sense, the entire point. The heritage narrative works precisely because it presents itself as discovered rather than constructed — as something the group found in the archive and brought to light, rather than something it manufactured in the boardroom. The Pre-Vendôme Panerai is cherished for its authenticity, for its distance from corporate influence. But the category “Pre-Vendôme” was itself created by the post-Vendôme era. The boundary that marks authenticity is a product of the system it claims to precede.

Collectors call it heritage. Bankers call it roll-up. Both are describing the same acquisition. They are simply telling different stories about what was bought.

About the Author

Sergio Galanti is an independent brand strategist and writer in the luxury watch industry. He is the editor of WatchDossier, a publication devoted to the cultural and philosophical undercurrents of modern horology.

No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.

Subscribe watchdossier.ch to receive more insights on luxury, craftsmanship, and collecting.

The article appeared in the Swiss Watchmaking Journal in 2000, tucked between trade advertisements and export figures. Its title was plain enough — “Evaluating a Brand: The Investor’s Standpoint” — and its author, Pierre Tissot, proceeded with the unhurried confidence of someone stating the obvious. The obvious, in this case, was that a watch brand is a financial asset, and that its value can be determined using the same analytical tools one would apply to any other intangible in the consumer goods universe. Coca-Cola, Nescafé, Omega, Breguet — the methodology is the same. What varies is the price.

This is worth pausing over. In 2000, a financially literate Swiss observer could look at the Swatch Group’s portfolio — Omega, Longines, Rado, Blancpain, Breguet — and see not a collection of horological traditions but a portfolio of intangible capital assets, each one valued by its capacity to generate stable future demand. The framework was Interbrand’s: financial analysis, market analysis, brand strength scoring, legal protection. The same framework that ranked Coca-Cola as the world’s most valuable brand that year, followed by Microsoft, IBM, Intel, and Nokia. No watch brand appeared on the list. But the analytical grammar was identical. A brand, Tissot explained, is “a lasting relationship between the brand-name owner and the consumer.” It provides “a level of medium-term stability of demand.” This stability generates predictable revenues. Predictable revenues can be discounted to present value. A brand is therefore capital.

The year the article appeared was a good one for the Swiss watch industry. Exports hit a new record. The United States absorbed nearly two billion francs’ worth of Swiss watches. The average export price had climbed sharply, from 261 to 312 francs, driven by rising demand for steel and eighteen-carat gold. The industry was mid-stride in a recovery that had been building since the mid-1990s, when Swiss watchmakers completed their repositioning at the high end of the market after the devastation of the quartz crisis. China did not yet rank among the top twenty export destinations. The great Asian boom was still years away.

It was also a moment of extraordinary consolidation. The previous September, LVMH had acquired TAG Heuer for 1.2 billion Swiss francs — a figure Tissot treats not as news but as data, a benchmark against which to test the valuations of other companies. That same year, Richemont paid 3.08 billion francs to acquire Les Manufactures Horlogères from Mannesmann, bringing Jaeger-LeCoultre, IWC, and A. Lange & Söhne into its portfolio in a single stroke. The two largest watch transactions in history had occurred within twelve months of each other. The modern map of Swiss watchmaking — the duopoly of Richemont and LVMH that still governs the industry — was being drawn in real time.

Tissot’s article registers the LVMH–TAG Heuer deal and uses it as a valuation benchmark. Applying the same revenue and operating-profit multiples to the Swatch Group, he arrives at a theoretical value of 5.2 billion francs for the group as a whole — and then asks, with the quiet provocation of a man who knows his arithmetic, whether that implies the Swatch Group’s entire brand portfolio is really worth only 4.3 times the TAG Heuer brand. The stock market, he notes, appeared to agree that the answer was no. In the weeks following the TAG Heuer announcement, companies holding watch brands repriced upward, the market having absorbed the transaction multiples as a new benchmark for the sector.

But the article’s significance is not in its calculations. Financial analysts do this work every day, and the specific numbers are now a quarter-century old. What matters is the intellectual architecture — the assumptions so deeply embedded that Tissot does not think to justify them.

The first is that a watch brand and a food brand are analytically equivalent. The article moves between Swatch Group and Nestlé, between TAG Heuer and Amora mustard, without transition or apology. The Unilever acquisition of Amora and Maille, announced in November 1999, is treated as a directly comparable transaction: apply the same revenue and operating-profit multiples to Nestlé, and the food giant’s market capitalisation appears twelve to thirty per cent below its theoretical value. The same logic, the same toolkit, the same conclusion. The gap between a tourbillon and a jar of Dijon mustard is, from this vantage point, irrelevant. Both are branded consumer goods. Both generate demand stability. Both can be discounted to present value.

The second assumption is more revealing still. In the entire article — across its discussion of costs techniques, financial value methods, discounted cash flows, and market comparables — there is no mention of movements. No mention of complications, of manufacture status, of vertical integration, of the hand of the watchmaker. The word “manufacture” does not appear. The value of a watch brand resides entirely in its relationship with the consumer: trust, differentiation, the probability that future profits will materialise. Horological content is not part of the equation. It is not dismissed. It simply does not arise.

And here is where the juxtaposition with the Richemont deal becomes striking. When Richemont announced the LMH acquisition in July 2000, it described the purchase in language that would have been alien to Tissot’s article. LMH was “a vertically integrated group and a leader in Haute Horlogerie.” Its strategic value lay in “expertise in manufacturing high value movements.” Jaeger-LeCoultre’s “unique manufacturing expertise” was cited as a major attraction. In other words, Richemont was already paying three billion francs for something Tissot’s framework did not register: the capacity to make things. Two theories of value — brand as demand stability, and brand as manufacturing legitimacy — coexisted in the same year, in the same country, in the same industry, and no one appears to have noticed the contradiction.

Reading the article now, one has the sensation of looking at a photograph taken just before a landscape changed. Within a few years of its publication, the Swiss watch industry would complete the pivot toward the second theory. The in-house movement — designed, manufactured, assembled, and regulated under one roof — would become the central claim of horological legitimacy. Brands would invest hundreds of millions in proprietary calibres, and the ability to say “manufacture” would become a pricing argument, a marketing narrative, and eventually a near-doctrinal requirement for any brand seeking to position itself in the upper registers of the market. Heritage would cease to be a soft reputational attribute and become an engineered asset, curated and narrated with the precision of a financial instrument.

Which raises a question the article could not have anticipated: if the financial logic was sufficient, why did the industry need a different story? Why did the subsequent two decades produce such an elaborate architecture of artisanal mythology — the in-house doctrine, the heritage narrative, the cult of the watchmaker’s hand — if the brand-as-capital framework already explained where value lived?

One possible answer is that the financial framework was too transparent. It made watchmaking legible as a consumer goods business, which is precisely what luxury cannot afford to be. The entire pricing architecture of high-end watchmaking depends on the perception that what is being sold is not merely a branded consumer product but something categorically different — something whose value is grounded in craft, in time, in the irreducible singularity of the handmade. The mythology of the movement solved a problem that brand economics alone could not: it provided a justification for margins that demand stability, however real, could never fully explain.

Tissot closed with an observation that now reads as an inadvertent prophecy. Brands, he wrote, must prove capable of influencing stock market outperformance for long periods, and the methods for capturing this value were “still in their teething stage.” He was right on both counts. But the teething that followed produced something he had not imagined — not a better financial model, but an entirely different language of value. The industry did not refine the analyst’s toolkit. It replaced it with a story.

About the Author

Sergio Galanti is an independent brand strategist and writer in the luxury watch industry. He is the editor of WatchDossier, a publication devoted to the cultural and philosophical undercurrents of modern horology.

No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.

Subscribe watchdossier.ch to receive more insights on luxury, craftsmanship, and collecting.

Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Independent Watchmaking traces the independent movement from the quartz crisis to the present day, using auteur theory from cinema as a critical framework. Eleven chapters. Close-reading “Cards” of individual watches treated as cultural artefacts. The book I wanted to read and could not find.

The first copies will ship at the beginning of May.

If you would like to reserve a copy, send me an email at sergio.galanti@watchdossier.ch.

SG

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