Patek Philippe

Patek Philippe began in Geneva in 1839, but not with the two names it carries today. Antoine Norbert de Patek, a Polish émigré, first went into business with the watchmaker François Czapek. The partnership made pocket watches. Jean Adrien Philippe entered the story through a problem that every owner of one could understand: the small, separate key needed to wind it.

At an industrial exhibition in Paris in 1844, Patek encountered Philippe and his system for winding and setting a watch without that key. The controls were incorporated into the watch itself. Patek invited Philippe to Geneva the following year, and the company took the name Patek, Philippe & Cie in 1851. Philippe continued refining the mechanism and obtaining patents. A device now taken for granted—the winding crown—was part of the company's early technical work.

Its later history was not an uninterrupted passage from one watchmaker to his descendants. During the Great Depression, Charles and Jean Stern bought the business in 1932. They already knew it as suppliers: their company made dials. The new owners appointed watchmaker Jean Pfister to lead Patek Philippe and brought movement production further inside the business. The family that had supplied the faces now owned the company that made the watches.

Expansion continued in different forms. Henri Stern established the company's American distribution agency in 1945. Philippe Stern later brought manufacturing operations together at Plan-les-Ouates, opening the new facility in 1996. In 2001 he opened the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva, drawing on decades of collecting. Its collection includes watches by other makers and starts centuries before the partnership in Geneva.