The Ownership of Time.
Six essays on brands, capital, and the remaking of modern horology.
Editor’s Note
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
The Day a Maison Became a Balance Sheet.
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” — a…
Collectors Call It Heritage. Bankers Call It Roll-Up.
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 tell…
The Market Price of Belief.
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 ce…
The Unbundling of a Maison.
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 i…
Breitling Builds a House.
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, George…
Watches Without Parents.
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, m…
WatchDossier Issue 21 will be published on May 24, 2026.