In Europe, there are two ways I know of to attain the WOSTEP qualification: You either find a company to sponsor you through the course, or you fund it yourself. I was amazed at how much the course structure favors the student. Attaining this certificate would be a great achievement after two years and perhaps signal that a long and rewarding career with one of the Swiss powerhouses beckons. The course lasts for two years (3,100 hours), and will culminate with the students traveling to Switzerland to sit the Patek Philippe level-two examination. The training school, which is set within the workshop space of Patek Philippe’s Rockefeller base, was set-up this year and has just opened its doors to the first six students. And so Pettinelli set-about planting the seed that would grow into the Patek Philippe Horology Programme of New York. But excellence does not grow on trees (it grows in workshops under the patient and passionate tuition of master horologists). Perpetuating that kind of reputation is not easy when your customers frequently pass your product beneath the loupe. As much as Larry Pettinelli needs watchmakers, nothing could have forced him to risk the brand’s 176-year history. That’s because Patek Philippe’s reputation for quality is inherent to the brand’s success. Of the 13 watchmakers that made it as far as a bench test last year, only two were deemed good enough to earn a post within the company, irrespective of their desperation for increased manpower. This skill shortage means Patek Philippe is constantly looking for new experts, but they are hard to find. Given the exacting standards the brand demands its watchmakers meet, the workload is unsustainable. Currently, the US-based service team for Patek Philippe is less than 20 strong and deals with almost 10,000 repairs a year. The country was reliant on a few schools nationwide, churning out about 40 or 50 graduates per year, and of those, only maybe 10% would have made the grade that Patek Philippe requires of all its staff. Brands like Hamilton and Elgin timed the early cross-continental rail-road system, but these companies laid down their tools long before watchmaking was reborn.Īs the industry recovered, North America was left without the neccessery specialists. In the past, America had its own reputation as a watchmaking country. The appeal of these evermore luxurious and complicated products is universal, but their production incredibly localised to central Europe. The watch industry has been growing steadily since 1989. Patek Philippe have underlined their understanding of this fact by investing in an on-site school at their New York service centre.īy running a two-year course, dubbed the Patek Philippe Horology Programme Of New York, focused on equipping new students with the skills needed to service and repair an in-house movement, they are doing their bit to fill the yawning gap of trained horologists in North America. To find out more about the school, the motivations for its foundation, and the hopes Patek Philippe have for its development, I spoke to Larry Pettinelli, president at The Henri Stern Watch Agency (HSWA), a Patek Philippe subsidiary distributing and repairing Patek watches in the U.S. And it isn’t about intricacy, per se, it’s about experience it’s about all the silly little things that don’t make rational sense simply put, it’s all about time. The mechanics of haute horlogerie are not quite the same as anything else. But you needn’t spend much time at the knee of an old watchmaker to understand why. These days, I’m so ingrained in the watchmaking industry, it stuns me when people express amazement that assembly and after-sales processes are performed by real humans, not super-accurate machines. Before we know it, we’re off to college or straight into the world of work without so much as acknowledging the continued existence of horology. A career path in watchmaking is not something very often offered to kids leaving school.
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