Business Breakdowns
· Matt Reustle
[00:00:00] S0: The Queen being the original influencer was not something that I ever thought of, but there you go. Great history, where history really doesn't change. It just rhymes a little bit. You talked a lot about time-only versus complications and what can actually happen inside these watches and some of the amazing things that they're able to do in such a small mechanical piece. And one key moment in history that I was reading about was Henry Graves and the Supercomplication. So maybe you can walk us through that story of who Henry Graves was and what this watch was that he had designed by Patek.
· John Reardon
[00:00:00] S1: And I'm going to answer that from a modern perspective. Imagine the day that we had a phone that was corded to the wall, then one day, we had a flip phone that was wireless. And then a few years later, we had the iPhone, which had pretty much everything, all the complications you can imagine, it's a computer handheld. Now take that, and go back 100 years and Patek Philippe was doing that with moving parts and mechanical handmade pieces. So first, there was just time-only, so you knew, hours, minutes, sometimes, seconds. And what and Patek Philippe was able to do with this so-called Supercomplication that was commissioned in the 1920s in the heart of the Great Depression and delivered in 1933, was to make a watch that had 24 complications in total, which did everything that could possibly be done with technology that existed during that time period. This watch could calculate time of sunrise, time of sunset. One dial, who was a pocket watch, of course, it had meantime, which is what we have on our watches today and the opposite side had sidereal time or start time. And the list goes on with the type of alarm mechanisms. This watch that you could set. It had a repeater and a Grande et Petite Sonnerie, meaning that you could literally push a button, and it tells you what time it is because that is just one of the most amazing complications out there is when a watch audibly tells you the sound with a series of gongs. And my favorite part of this particular watch is a sky chart with moving stars in enamel, which shows you the sky as seen if you're standing where the Statue of Liberty is, Liberty Island. And that watch was able to do all of these complications and more. And it was a sensation for the media. And for the collector Henry Graves himself, he knew he had the most important watch ever made.
· Matt Reustle, John Reardon
[00:00:00] S0: You mentioned the history was always selling to noblemen. It sounds like Henry himself was a prominent person, someone with wealth. When I think of Rolex, some of those early advertisements were for people climbing mountains, people diving. You very much attached it to activities and professions. Was Patek always the dress watch or something very much driven towards the wealthy and looking for something exclusive? [00:00:00] S1: It's a good question. First, it was. The watches were marketed specifically to noble people of the Western world, but then it expanded. Patek Philippe was selling to pieces to the kings and queens globally. And for the United States, the kings and queens were the Titans of Industry and people like James Ward Packard of automobile fame and Henry Graves Jr., were the Titans of Industry, people like J.P. Morgan were watch collectors, Henry Clay Frick, the Vanderbilts. And one of the fun things is when we find these amazing watches out there today, you could tie down the history very quickly because often they had their initials or names on the back. So here's a sound bite for you. Rolex would ultimately be sold to the people that were climbing the mountains, but Patek Philippe watches were being sold to the people that own the mountain.
· John Reardon, Matt Reustle
[00:00:00] S1: It's a good question. First, it was. The watches were marketed specifically to noble people of the Western world, but then it expanded. Patek Philippe was selling to pieces to the kings and queens globally. And for the United States, the kings and queens were the Titans of Industry and people like James Ward Packard of automobile fame and Henry Graves Jr., were the Titans of Industry, people like J.P. Morgan were watch collectors, Henry Clay Frick, the Vanderbilts. And one of the fun things is when we find these amazing watches out there today, you could tie down the history very quickly because often they had their initials or names on the back. So here's a sound bite for you. Rolex would ultimately be sold to the people that were climbing the mountains, but Patek Philippe watches were being sold to the people that own the mountain. [00:00:00] S0: I like that quite a bit, and there is something associated with their process for keeping track of the watches that are sold and the archives and being able to trace that back. Can you share about what happens there? It's something that I read about, but I didn't fully capture or understand relative to other brands and watches and how they have historically tracked what they produced.
· Matt Reustle, John Reardon
[00:00:00] S0: I like that quite a bit, and there is something associated with their process for keeping track of the watches that are sold and the archives and being able to trace that back. Can you share about what happens there? It's something that I read about, but I didn't fully capture or understand relative to other brands and watches and how they have historically tracked what they produced. [00:00:00] S1: And it does come down to tracking. It's almost a historic blockchain type of thought pattern is that any watch that was made by Patek Philippe from the very beginning is documented in the extracts from the archives, which you could request from Patek Philippe. You have to pay for them for CHF 500 each, but you're able to get a copy of the birth certificate of that watch to find the date that it was made, seeing the movement, the case numbers. They won't tell you who it was sold to, but Patek Philippe very carefully guards that. Can you imagine their client list through history? But at the end of the day, Patek Philippe has records of every single watch they ever made, and they're willing to share that information. And that has made buyers at auction and collectors out in the world, very comfortable to know that they could get these documents and see the blockchain of where that watch came from, when it was made and some details, sometimes, the dial description, case description and that's very comforting for people to have that connection to this little room in Geneva that holds all these secrets from the past.
· John Reardon, Matt Reustle
[00:00:00] S1: And it does come down to tracking. It's almost a historic blockchain type of thought pattern is that any watch that was made by Patek Philippe from the very beginning is documented in the extracts from the archives, which you could request from Patek Philippe. You have to pay for them for CHF 500 each, but you're able to get a copy of the birth certificate of that watch to find the date that it was made, seeing the movement, the case numbers. They won't tell you who it was sold to, but Patek Philippe very carefully guards that. Can you imagine their client list through history? But at the end of the day, Patek Philippe has records of every single watch they ever made, and they're willing to share that information. And that has made buyers at auction and collectors out in the world, very comfortable to know that they could get these documents and see the blockchain of where that watch came from, when it was made and some details, sometimes, the dial description, case description and that's very comforting for people to have that connection to this little room in Geneva that holds all these secrets from the past. [00:00:00] S0: Where is the identifier on the physical watch that allows them to do that? [00:00:00] S1: Ultimately, it comes down to the movement number, and in the early years, the movement number and the case number were identical. Today, there's a movement number and the case number, so each and every watch has these 2 unique identifying numbers to connect to the archives credible.