In the space of 13 years, Laurent Ferrier has built up a reputation as one of the world’s very best independent watchmakers. That’s an easy sentence to write, but what does it really mean?
Since the turn of the millennium, Switzerland – not to mention Germany, Japan, Britain and several others – has seen an explosion of new watchmaking brands. Low-volume producers focused on making extremely high-quality watches, all with a significant dependence on traditional handcraft (although often merged with modern technology). Ranging from companies making a few thousand watches a year – see H Moser & Cie – to a mere few individual watches, such as Roger W Smith or Philippe Dufour, they represent a watchmaking renaissance that has provided collectors with an enormous variety of alternatives to the big luxury brands.
Typically, such brands position themselves somewhere on a spectrum from ultra-modern (Richard Mille, HYT, Urwerk) to ultra-traditional, and Laurent Ferrier is one of the most traditional, echoing an aesthetic that’s reminiscent of classic Patek Philippe in particular and mid-century watchmaking design traits in general.
