Parmigiani Fleurier was founded in 1996 in the village of Fleurier, in Switzerland’s Val-de-Travers, by the master restorer Michel Parmigiani and the Fondation de Famille Sandoz, which put up the money and never asked for it back in any hurry. For a quarter century the result was one of the strangest objects in the watch business: a genuine manufacture with its own movements, cases, dials, and escapements, making watches that were objectively excellent and commercially almost invisible. Then in January 2021 a new CEO named Guido Terreni threw out most of the catalog, rebuilt the round watch line as the Tonda PF, and sales tripled while waiting lists stretched past a year. This is the story of how a brand with unlimited money spent twenty-five years learning what to do with it.
The restorer and the billionaires
Fleurier, in the Val-de-Travers, seen from the Chapeau de Napoléon. Vaucher Manufacture sits at the foot of the hill. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Michel Parmigiani was born in 1950 in Couvet, a village a few miles from Fleurier, which even by Swiss standards is watch country the way the Midwest is corn country. He studied watchmaking at the school in Fleurier and the Technicum in La Chaux-de-Fonds, then did something in 1976 that took either nerve or a loose grip on economics: he opened his own restoration workshop right in the middle of the quartz crisis, when the Swiss industry was laying off tens of thousands of people and the mechanical watch was widely considered finished. His timing was, in retrospect, perfect, which is the kind of thing that only becomes obvious later.
Restoration was Michel’s whole education. He spent the late 1970s and 1980s taking apart the finest clocks, pocket watches, and automata ever made, fixing them, and putting them back together, including pieces for the Patek Philippe museum. In 1980 he became the official restorer for the Sandoz Family Foundation’s collection, a staggering hoard of antique watches and automata assembled by the family behind the chemicals fortune that became Novartis. He restored a 19th-century pocket watch from the collection, La Cueillette des Cerises, in 1986, the family noticed the talent, and the relationship deepened. When the Sandoz family decided in the mid-1990s that it wanted to own a watch company, it did not go shopping. It backed its restorer. Parmigiani Fleurier was born in 1996, built around his workshop, Parmigiani Mesure et Art du Temps.
Charles-Édouard Guillaume, the Fleurier-born physicist whose invention of Invar and Elinvar won him the 1920 Nobel Prize and made the modern watch hairspring possible. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
The money that never ran out
The ownership story of Parmigiani Fleurier is the shortest chapter in Swiss watchmaking, and also the whole point. The Fondation de Famille Sandoz has owned the brand since day one and still does. There has been no sale, no private equity, no desperate rebranding to attract a buyer. The foundation spent the late 1990s and early 2000s building a small empire around the brand: Les Artisans Boîtiers for cases in 1999, Atokalpa for escapement components in 2000, Vaucher Manufacture Fleurier for movements (spun off as its own company in 2003), Quadrant et Habillage for dials in 2005, Elwin for screws and pinions. Hermès bought into Vaucher in 2006 and now gets its movements there, and so does Richard Mille, among others. On paper it is one of the most vertically integrated small operations in Switzerland.
Here is the honest part. Having one of Europe’s richest families as your permanent backer is a superpower, and it is also the reason Parmigiani spent twenty-five years drifting. A normal brand that cannot sell watches has to change or die. Parmigiani could afford not to. The money bought world-class manufacturing, and it also meant nobody ever had to ask the uncomfortable question about why the watches were not selling. Every independent founder in the world would kill for that kind of safety net, and most of them would probably waste the first decade of it too. I am not sure I would do any better with a billionaire’s checkbook and no deadline.
The revolving door
Michel Parmigiani ran the company in the early years and remains its founder and president of the board. Jean-Marc Jacot was CEO through the early 2010s and left in late 2015, and 2016 was ugly: Vaucher cut a third of its workforce, about fifty jobs, as orders dried up across the industry, and the brand was run by an executive committee under Michel’s supervision. Davide Traxler was in the CEO seat by 2019, when he and Bugatti’s president announced the end of that long partnership. Then in January 2021 the foundation hired Guido Terreni, who had spent two decades running Bulgari’s watch division, and the whole story changed.
Michel’s role today is the part I like best. He no longer runs the company. He lives about twenty meters from Terreni’s office and, in Terreni’s words, pops in like a grandpa. He advises on restoration projects, on aesthetics, and on the brand’s philosophy, and the younger watchmakers treat him as a living legend. Most founders either cling to power until it gets embarrassing or leave and spend their retirement criticizing the successors. Michel found the third option, which is to become the wise neighbor who drops by. Good for him.
Twenty-five quiet years
The watches from the first era were good. That is both the tragedy and the defense. The Toric was the brand’s first wristwatch, launched in 1996, with a stepped bezel and proportions drawn from classical architecture, exactly what you would expect from a watchmaker who spent his youth torn between architecture and horology. The Kalpa arrived in 2001 with a tonneau case shaped around the golden ratio and a shaped movement, the hand-wound calibre PF110 from 1998, instead of a round movement squeezed into a curved case the way everyone else did it. From 2004 to 2019 Parmigiani partnered with Bugatti, producing the Type 370 in 2005 with a transverse movement arranged like a car engine block and a ten-day power reserve, followed by the Type 390 in 2016. The Tonda line grew up through the 2000s as the round-watch range and even won a GPHG prize in 2020 for a Hijri perpetual calendar.
None of it moved the needle commercially. The criticism, repeated for two decades, was always the same: too classical, too quiet, too anonymous, too expensive for a name nobody recognized. And outside the hobby nobody recognized it at all, which is true of nearly every watch brand if we are being honest, but it stung more for one that was making everything itself. By the time Terreni arrived, the brand was, in the trade press’s polite phrase, commercially lukewarm, which is the kind of euphemism people use when the alternative would be rude.
The Terreni turnaround
Terreni spent his first months studying the brand’s design codes and discovered, to his horror, that most of the design department could not name them. He distilled the entire catalog down to essentially one line, shelved the Kalpa for the time being, kept the Toric as the heritage reference, and relaunched the Tonda as the Tonda PF in September 2021, timed to the brand’s 25th anniversary. The formula was ruthless simplification: integrated bracelet, slim case, a dial in fine Grain d’Orge guilloché that looks plain from across the room and intricate up close, a knurled bezel in platinum even on the steel models, and a tiny oval PF logo where the full name used to be. Terreni called it private luxury, meaning the watch is for the wearer, not the audience.
It worked beyond anyone’s expectations. Sales tripled, production doubled, and by 2023 waiting lists stretched past a year, with the steel time-only models starting around 22,000 francs and the platinum tourbillons climbing past 160,000. The follow-ups have been genuinely clever: the Tonda PF GMT Rattrapante of 2022, whose second time-zone hand hides behind the hour hand until you summon it with a pusher; the Minute Rattrapante; and a series of cultural calendar watches in Hijri, Chinese Xiali, and Gregorian annual versions. The brand is no longer invisible. In 2026 the Toric turns thirty, with three limited editions to mark it, which suggests the old lines are not dead, just waiting their turn.
One honest caveat. The Tonda PF arrived exactly as the integrated steel sports watch boom was peaking, and it is hard to separate the brand’s genius from its timing. Parmigiani did not invent the genre; it walked in late, did it beautifully, and took the seat nobody was saving. Credit where it is due: plenty of brands tried the same trick and failed. Parmigiani succeeded because the watches are genuinely well made, and because Terreni understood something that twenty-five years of previous management missed, which is that a watch nobody has heard of should at least be a watch people want to talk about.
Why it matters
Parmigiani Fleurier matters because it is the closest thing the watch industry has to an experiment with unlimited resources. Give a brilliant restorer a billionaire family, a full manufacture, and no deadline, and you get twenty-five years of beautiful obscurity followed by a sudden, total reinvention. The lesson is not that money solves everything. The money was there the whole time. The lesson is that the money was never the missing ingredient, which is worth remembering the next time someone tells you a struggling brand just needs investment.
The other reason it matters is simpler. Michel Parmigiani started out fixing other people’s masterpieces, and the brand he built makes watches designed to be restorable in 150 years, which is either the noblest or the most gloriously pointless ambition in an industry that runs on fashion. I find it hard not to root for that. The Tonda PF may be a trend play wearing a philosopher’s clothes, but the clothes fit, and the philosophy is real.
Official site: parmigiani.com
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