Philippe Stern, who inherited one of the world’s leading luxury watch brands, Patek Philippe, and overcame an existential threat to Swiss watchmaking from cheaper, more accurate quartz watches in the 1970s, died on June 14. He was 88 years old.
The Geneva-based Patek Philippe, where Mr. Stern was president from 1993 to 2009, announced his death. No details were given about the location or the cause.
As the third generation of his family to lead Patek Philippe, Mr. Stern new models that pushed the technical boundaries of mechanical watchmaking. He also marketed $40,000 handmade watches as a status symbol — a Mercedes-Benz for the wrist — and helped stimulate a market of passionate collectors who stalked their quarry across enthusiast magazines and websites.
Mr. Stern “was the guardian of a vision that helped shape the entire modern watchmaking industry,” according to one of those websites, Italian Watch Spotter, after his death.
In Swiss watchmaking, the 1970s became known for the “quartz crisis”, which followed the Japanese company Seiko’s introduction in 1969 of the first electronic wristwatch that used a quartz crystal oscillator to keep time.
These watches were considerably more accurate than mechanical watches produced by legacy Swiss firms whose products were threatened overnight with obsolescence. As Japanese and American quartz crystal watches dominated the market, employment in Swiss watchmaking declined catastrophically from 1970 to the late 80s.
The brands that survived moved to the luxury end of the business, promoting craftsmanship and an aura of prestige in a mechanical watch costing thousands of dollars. Mr. Stern, who became general manager of Patek Philippe in 1977, was one of the main architects of this reinvention.
That year he oversaw the introduction of the 240 Caliber, a new design for the inner mechanics of a watch. It packed 152 parts into an ultra-thin package that included a self-winding function powered by a 22-karat gold rotor.
The design “repositioned the automatic watch as an object of elegance rather than mere function, competing with quartz not on precision but on sophistication,” according to the SJX Watches website. “It remains one of the most influential movement architectures in postwar urology.”
The company’s identity was embodied in an advertising slogan rolled out in 1996: “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You just look after it for the next generation.”
Mr. Stern also promoted the Nautilus, first sold in 1976 and still Patek Philippe’s most famous model. It is a thick steel sports watch that costs as much as some gold watches. The rounded octagonal shape, resembling the porthole of an ocean liner, was said to be inspired by Mr. Stern’s passion for sailing.
“When the Nautilus was introduced, the watch industry was faced with the quartz crisis,” Nicholas Foulkes, author of “Patek Philippe: The Authorized Biography,” told The New York Times in 2019. “Philippe Stern had an incredible vision that mechanical watches would make a comeback.”
Another milestone – more symbolic rather than commercial – was the nine-year development of Caliber 89 to mark the company’s 150th anniversary in 1989. Caliber 89 is a pocket watch with 24 hands and 33 complications, or functions beyond simple timekeeping. They included a daily display of sunrise and sunset and a star chart whose hands show the path to Altair, a star that Mr. Stern named a number of racing yachts after him.
Only four examples of the Caliber 89 were originally made; one sold at auction for $5 million in 2004. Its accuracy — within a second a day — “cannot be compared to a quartz watch,” Mr. Stern told The New York Times in 1989. “But the value of the piece is that it is mechanical. Precision is not the most important thing. The tradition of watchmaking is.”
Philippe Stern was born in 1938 in Geneva to Henri Félix Stern and Henriette (Delessert) Stern.
Philippe Stern is the namesake of Adrien Philippe, who joined Antoni Patek in the watchmaking business in 1845.
Mr. Stern’s grandfather, Charles Stern, and his great-uncle, Jean Stern, who had a business supplying Patek Philippe with dials, rescued the firm from insolvency in 1932 during the Great Depression and became the new owners. The company has been privately owned ever since, one of the few remaining independent Swiss watchmakers.
In 2014, Forbes estimated that the Stern family had a combined net worth of around $3 billion.
Mr. Stern began his career working for Patek Philippe’s US distributor in 1963. He returned to Geneva three years later and soon became general manager.
In 2009, he left the presidency to his son, Thierry, who survives him, as does a daughter, Christine Shrestha-Stern. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
Philippe Stern was a keen sportsman. As a youth he was a member of the Swiss national ski team. As a sailor, he was a multiple winner of the Bol d’Or du Léman Regatta, a 100-mile race along Lake Geneva and back. After winning the race three times, in 1980, 1982 and 1984, he was allowed to keep the winner’s trophy permanently.
Mr. Stern also supported his wife, Gerdi, in her passion for sled dog racing, a North American sport that the Swiss embraced in the 1980s. Mr. Stern accompanied his wife and her team of “16 or 18” dogs to races, including the world championships.
