![]() ![]() 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. That.is the mark of someone who I know is going to become an excellent jewelry appraiser.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. Perhaps the more important issue is that almost every ISG Registered Gemologist Appraiser student who has completed our Introduction to Watches course has come out of it asking for more. So, the answer is.Yes, you do have to study watches if you are ever going to be worth your salt as an appraiser. It is not just the mechanical history or value it is also the personal history and value that can be found in every watch. It takes a lab created ruby, which is what this rectangular gizmo is made from.īeyond the need for jewelry appraisers to know and understand the value of a watch, there is also the need to understand the artistry and history that goes with every watch they appraise. Takes something with a lot of tenacity to withstand that. ![]() All through your New Year's Celebration, your summer vacation and right into those cold winter nights. This gizmo moves back and forth to stop and start a wheel that moves forward one click each second. However, based on the gemological work of August Verneuil to create the world's first lab created ruby, the cost of the jeweled movement was made affordable to far more consumers. Prior to the early 1900s these would have had to be high quality natural rubies that were very costly and sometimes difficult to find. Below right is a 17 jewel Omega® watch movement with lab created rubies at the friction or pivot points. At left is an old Westclox pin lever watch movement with metal pins at the points of friction. Perhaps most important to our study of watches is how gemology has played a major role in some of the most important developments in the watch industry. The artistry that goes into creating a fine timepiece rivals even the finest jewelry design artistry, with intricacies that go far beyond what many students understand in the beginning. Watches have been an important part of the jewelry industry since watches were invented. In truth, these two "ology's" have been an integral part of each other for centuries. ![]()
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