Philippe Dufour’s disappointment with today’s watchmakers is rooted less in a dislike of modern styles than in what he has seen in watch servicing: recurring faults that were not taken seriously, weak after-sales organisation, and a shortage of people prepared to do demanding craft work. His comments describe his own experience, not a verdict on every contemporary maker or brand.
Why Dufour’s service experience shaped his view
Dufour’s career gave him a close view of watches after they left the workbench. His official career account says he studied watchmaking in the Vallée de Joux and learned to make tools by hand. He later held after-sales roles at Jaeger-LeCoultre and Favre-Leuba, where he trained watchmakers and reorganised service, before returning to Switzerland to work for Gérald Genta and Audemars Piguet.
In a March 2, 2018 interview with A Collected Man, Dufour recalled that, after six months in service, he showed managers five examples of the same worn pin. He said they considered that number insignificant at the company level. His response was: “Five watches for you is not much, but for a market like Germany, it’s a lot.” The point was not that five cases proved a widespread defect; it was that a small percentage in a large production run could still affect many owners, and that repeated failures merited attention.
Dufour said his deeper frustration was “more the lack of organisation in after-sales for these brands.” In his account, good watchmaking therefore extends beyond the initial build. It also involves diagnosing faults, making parts and trained repairers available, noticing recurring problems, and taking responsibility for the owner’s experience.
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What he says has not improved
Asked whether after-sales organisation had improved, Dufour answered: “I don’t actually think it’s better even today [Laughs].” He cited Rolex as an example of a brand with a consistent service network, shared equipment and trained watchmakers, while observing that its slower product cadence makes consistency easier. That is Dufour’s assessment in the 2018 interview, not an independent comparison or audit of brands’ service quality.
His criticism is best understood through four practical questions rather than a ranking of watchmakers or brands:
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- Consistency: Can an owner expect a dependable service process across locations?
- Repair capacity: Are trained watchmakers, appropriate equipment and parts available?
- Attention to patterns: Does the organisation investigate a fault when similar cases recur, even if they are a small share of total production?
- Craft: Has the work been done with the time and hand skill that the maker considers essential?
The available accounts do not establish how common the failures Dufour encountered were across the industry. They show why he regarded service organisation and accountability as part of watchmaking quality.
Why hand skills and transmission matter to him
Dufour has described his aim as preserving an established craft rather than claiming to invent its principles: “I never invented anything. My goal is to try and perpetuate a nice way of making watches, especially here in the Vallée de Joux.” In that view, quality depends on skilled hands, patience, training and the transmission of knowledge—not only on a novel complication or a striking design.
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How the Grande Sonnerie, Duality and Simplicity express that approach
Grande Sonnerie
Dufour’s Grande Sonnerie is one expression of his demanding approach to watchmaking. The sources cited here do not provide a technical specification or production figure for it, so it is better treated as an example of his work than as evidence for a particular performance claim.
Duality
For the Duality, Dufour drew on historical school watches with two balance wheels. He used a differential to connect the balances so their rates could be averaged when they operate together. The mechanism shows his interest in working through a problem with mechanical reasoning while building on earlier watchmaking rather than claiming a wholly new principle. His official account says nine Duality watches were made.
Simplicity
The Simplicity began with a request from a group of Dufour enthusiasts in Tokyo. It is a three-hand watch with a restrained design and a movement inspired by watches he restored from the 1950s and 1960s. Dufour’s official career account gives the movement diameter as 30 mm and says that 120 of the planned 200 watches had found buyers in Japan when he wrote the account. Those are historical figures from his account, not current sales totals.
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Dufour also recalled making five watches to order for Audemars Piguet, two of which he said broke while in the brand’s possession. He said he had not been allowed to claim authorship publicly at the time and felt his work had not been respected. This is his personal recollection in the 2018 A Collected Man interview, not an independently adjudicated account or an industry-wide reliability statistic.
Taken together, these stories help explain the force of his disappointment: he connects mechanical quality with the willingness to investigate failures, support owners and value skilled work. They do not establish that all contemporary watchmakers or brands fall short of those standards.
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