Danièla Dufour grew up in her father’s one-room workshop in the Vallée de Joux, a Swiss valley about an hour north of Geneva, watching master watchmaker Philippe Dufour painstakingly build watches from start to finish. Now 24, she is carrying on a tradition practiced by a man who, at 77, has made only a few hundred watches over a long career. “You see the heart of the watch beating for the first time and you understand that he just created life,” she said.
Dufour trained at a local watchmaking school and worked for major brands before going independent more than 30 years ago. He lights his pipe, sips coffee and plays classical music at his bench. His first watch took more than two years; today he can spend roughly 2,000 hours on a single piece — about a year of full-time work. His Simplicity model contains 153 individual components. Pieces are custom-made and priced in the hundreds of thousands of dollars; one of his watches later sold at auction for $7 million, a sale he called recognition rather than profit.
The Vallée de Joux has been a watchmaking hub since the 17th century, when farmers turned to small mechanical work during long winters. Swiss watchmaking survived a near-collapse in the 1970s and ’80s during the quartz crisis — when inexpensive, battery-powered watches from Japan displaced mechanical watches — by launching the Swatch and doubling down on the high-end mechanical market. Today Swiss watches represent fewer than 2% of units sold worldwide but account for more than half the market’s value. Rolex remains the largest single brand, producing over a million units a year.
Desirability is cultivated through scarcity and long waitlists; buyers often endure years, sometimes a decade, to receive certain models. Earlier this year U.S. tariffs briefly raised the cost of Swiss watches by as much as 39% before being reduced to 15% following meetings between Swiss industry leaders and the presidential administration.
Work at larger houses can be highly specialized. Jaeger-LeCoultre operates where Antoine LeCoultre converted a barn into a watchmaking studio in 1833. There, production is divided into roughly 180 crafts: adjusting springs, finishing tiny parts, and even unusual tasks like preparing adhesives from organic sources for jewel bearings. Some artisans spend hundreds of hours decorating case backs, using a single-thread brush to reproduce miniature paintings. Workers assembling a first Reverso — a model originally made for polo players who flipped their watches during matches — described the pressure of working on such valuable, fully mechanical objects.
Independent brands also play a defining role. Max Büsser, founder of MB&F, began his company in 2005 and now produces about 400 watches a year. He resists scaling up despite high demand and recently sold a 25% stake to Chanel. Büsser still interviews clients before selling them watches that can fetch around $250,000. He describes mechanical watchmaking as art: “A mechanical watch is totally pointless today…except for emotional art and artisanship.”
Whether in tiny, one-man workshops or century-old manufactories, the labor is meticulous and time-consuming. Components can be no larger than poppy seeds; assembly, decoration and finishing are manual and exacting. For collectors, a high-end mechanical watch is less about timekeeping than about craftsmanship, history and the emotional value of owning a rare, hand-made object.