Stephen Forsey’s departure from the brand he co-founded raises a question independent watchmaking prefers to avoid — what happens to artisanal brand DNA when the artisan walks out the door?
Here is what happened. On February 3, 2026, Stephen Forsey confirmed that the board of Greubel Forsey had terminated his employment contract. The effective date was May 31. He chose to leave immediately. He resigned from every board — Greubel Forsey SA, Greubel Forsey Holding SA, the Timeaeon and Adenium foundations. He kept his 49% shareholding. Robert Greubel, who holds 51% and the chairmanship, said nothing.
The company described this as a “logical consequence” of Forsey’s gradual withdrawal from operations. Forsey described it as being pushed out following “strategic and management changes” and “ongoing divergences.” Both statements were released within days of each other. They do not describe the same event.
The timeline is worth reciting because it reveals a pattern. In 2022, Greubel Forsey bought back Richemont’s 20% stake. Full independence. CEO Antonio Calce announced a roadmap: halve the average retail price to around CHF 250,000, scale production toward 500 pieces, open ten company-owned boutiques, trim the authorized dealer network from sixty approximately twenty. By 2024, Calce was gone. His replacement, Michel Nydegger, shelved the expansion, stabilized output at roughly 200 watches, and began discontinuing legacy calibres. By early 2025, Calce’s shares had been bought out and ownership was consolidated between the two co-founders. One year of consolidated co-founder control. Then one of the co-founders was terminated.
These are the facts. They are interesting enough as industry gossip. But the question that matters is not about governance. It is about what a brand actually is when the person whose name is on the dial is no longer in the room.
In mass luxury, brand identity is institutional. It lives in archives, design codes, documented processes. A creative director departs Bottega Veneta, and the intrecciato weave survives because it has been transferred from person to process. Bottega navigated three creative directors in seven years — Daniel Lee, Matthieu Blazy, Louise Trotter — without losing coherence. The craft is codified. It is bigger than any individual steward. This is the model luxury conglomerates understand. It is also entirely inapplicable to what Greubel Forsey was selling.
Independent haute horlogerie does not work this way. Brand identity in this world is not codified. It is embodied. It lives in the founder’s hands. In their presence at fairs. In the credibility that comes from being the person who conceived the Double Tourbillon 30°, built it, and can explain why it exists. When collectors describe what they were buying at CHF 300,000 and above, they describe a relationship — with the people who made the thing, not merely with the thing itself. Stephen Forsey was the public half of that relationship. He was the one handing you the watch, walking you through the architecture, making the purchase feel less like a transaction and more like admission to a fellowship of shared conviction.
Remove that, and you discover which parts of the brand were institutional and which were personal. The sixty-plus patents survive. The 135 employees survive. The atelier survives. What does not automatically survive is the animating belief that every watch is the expression of a coherent vision held by identifiable human beings who staked their names on it.
Nydegger, in a recent interview, described Greubel Forsey as an adventure rather than a brand. He said the company’s goal is to “contribute something meaningful to the history of watchmaking.” These are fine sentences. They are the kind of sentences a CEO says when the person who actually embodied the adventure is no longer on the premises.
The watch industry has rehearsed this scenario before. The Gérald Genta case is the one to study. Genta founded his brand in 1969. Bulgari acquired it in 2000, along with Daniel Roth, who shared workshop space. CEO Francesco Trapani assured the collector community that Bulgari would “fully respect” the acquired brands’ “stylistic codes and specificities.” By 2010, both dials read “Bulgari for Gérald Genta.” By 2012, the Genta name was gone entirely. The octagonal case became the Bulgari Octo. The technical know-how was absorbed. The soul was not. LVMH is now attempting a Genta revival through La Fabrique du Temps, drawing on the late designer’s extensive archive of unrealized designs. It is a thoughtful effort. It is also, necessarily, a reconstruction — a period-accurate replica of something that was once alive. Daniel Roth followed the same arc. Acquisition, integration, erasure. The pattern is consistent enough to suggest a structural tendency rather than a series of unfortunate coincidences.
F.P. Journe presents the inverse problem. Not a post-departure case study but a pre-departure anxiety. François-Paul Journe is in his late sixties. He has won a record three Aiguilles d’Or. His brand produces fewer than a thousand watches annually and commands the kind of collector loyalty that functions, in secondary-market terms, as a pricing engine. No succession plan has been publicly articulated. The Greubel Forsey split should be studied carefully in Geneva, because it is a live preview of the question every founder-identified brand will eventually face. The watches survive the founder. Whether the meaning survives the watches is a different matter.
Greubel Forsey has, broadly, three paths. The first is the one Nydegger appears to be pursuing: redefine the brand around institutional technical capability. Discontinue legacy calibres, introduce new movements, bet that the patents and the atelier’s skill will carry the identity forward. This is the most defensible strategy on paper. It is also precisely what Bulgari said about Genta. The watches will probably remain extraordinary objects. Whether they continue to mean something specific to the people who buy them is an open question.
The second path is to find a new creative figurehead — someone who can credibly embody what Forsey once embodied. In fashion, this model is routine. In independent watchmaking, it has almost no precedent. The culture resists it. Collectors want founders, not stewards.
The third path is sale. Various names have circulated. The structural logic is not complicated: a brand with world-class IP and finishing capabilities and a recognizable name may be worth more as an asset inside a group than as an independent navigating a leadership vacuum. Whether this constitutes preservation or the beginning of another Genta trajectory is a question the acquirer would presumably prefer not to answer at the time of purchase.
For collectors, the calculus is immediate. Watches from the Forsey era — pieces he was involved in developing, pieces he personally presented — will likely carry a provenance premium. This is the F.P. Journe logic applied in reverse: founder proximity as a pricing variable, now measured in past tense. The emotional contract between maker and owner was part of what justified the price. That contract now has a different counterparty.
Independent watchmaking is an industry constructed almost entirely on founder mythology. The founder’s name is on the dial. The founder’s story is in the marketing copy. The founder’s handshake closes the sale. And yet this industry has built almost no infrastructure for what happens when the founder leaves. No systematic approach to codifying tacit knowledge before it walks out the door. No cultural model for creative succession. No honest conversation — public or private — about the difference between a brand that has a founder and a brand that is its founder.
The name stays on the dial. Whether the thing the name once referred to stays with it is now, for Greubel Forsey, an open question. It will not be open forever.
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.
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