Take a look around you right now. You might be at home, in an office, in a car or on a plane. Consider very carefully the objects in the space around you, even the clothes on your back. Now try to answer this question: how many of these objects are likely to outlive you? The answer, unless perhaps you are indulging this exercise in a museum, is likely a low number. It is an invariable truth of the lives we live. Things are made, they work and (if fortunate) look good for a while. Over time, they spoil or malfunction and then they are discarded.
In the world of luxury, the meaning of the word itself is constantly being contested and redefined. But what is perhaps truest and rarest is the simple idea of something artfully designed, beautifully crafted and made to last.
A sense of how rare that combination is simmered in early January, when Patek Philippe reopened, after a month of renovations and expansion, its service centre in Singapore. It’s located in the office block of Wheelock Place, occupying an entire floor above the brand’s corporate office. To mark the reopening, Patek Philippe invited a host of Southeast Asian journalists to tour and view the facility, and its international customer service director François Bauder flew in from Switzerland to share his insights.
I will admit, in full honesty, that the idea of such fanfare for a service centre of all things perplexed me at first. It seemed—if you compare it to the brand’s superlatively fine timepieces that start from five, and sell for up to six, even seven figures; creations that exemplify stratospheric finesse and craft—a touch unimpressive. A facility whose raison d’être are the mundane-sounding words ‘maintenance’ and ‘repair’ inspire less a picture of beauty and luxury, and invoke more the tedium of appliances and vehicles that need endless looking after. Not, in other words, very sexy.
“In the past you could eventually send everything to Switzerland to be serviced. Now, it’s impossible.” François Bauder, Patek Philippe international customer service director
When I interviewed Bauder, he answered my questions simply and directly. And as we toured the Singapore service centre, I took dutiful notes in the hopes that facts and numbers would coalesce into something meaningful. Here is a summary.
Six or seven years ago, Patek Philippe had over 60 service centres internationally. It has since consolidated and streamlined them to just 13 in total—12 located across Europe, North and South America, the Far East and Southeast Asia.
The most historical is, of course, still in Geneva, which receives some of the oldest, most interesting watches. Bauder recalled a piece sent to the Geneva workshop: an Aquanaut lost in a dive off Mallorca, found more than a year later after its owner commissioned a diver to search for it. Miraculously, it had retained its water resistance and was fully working when it resurfaced at last. “We were all very excited because this watch came on the news and we were excited to have it serviced in Geneva—and that watch did survive such an experience!”
To work for the brand as a watchmaker or technician, there is an in-house training programme known as the Patek Philippe Institute. “At Patek, we have been investing very heavily in watchmaker training,” explained Bauder. Only four of these exist in the world: in Shanghai, New York, Geneva and Singapore. Since Shanghai, the first, opened in 2013, “we were able to train more than 100 watchmakers worldwide”.
Apprenticeships last for two years. Watchmakers are certified against seven levels of horological complexity. The baseline is, oddly, not level one but two. This covers up to time, date and moonphase watches. Level three entails complications like annual calendars and world timers. Level four involves fancy grand complications. It gets increasingly complex from there. New York’s service centre has the highest number of level seven watchmakers.
Worldwide, Patek Philippe has about 260 points of sale. It has in its employ around 262 watchmakers, 52 casing technicians and 24 quality controllers, who collectively perform around 33,000 services and maintenance 31,000 times a year.
In the Singapore service centre, around 4,500 watches were serviced in 2025. Thirty-five percent of these involved complete servicing, another 30 percent were battery replacements, 31 percent were essential maintenance, two percent were partial services, and a mere two percent were repairs under warranty. That last figure is important: it means that only a small percentage of watches that leave Patek Philippe run into issues within the two- or five-year warranty period offered.
The Singapore outpost has grown from 600 square metres to its present 828 square metres. It employs 33 people, 16 of whom are watchmakers. The highest level of service offered here is Advanced Module C—generally, manual-winding chronographs.
The longest-serving member of staff has been here 36 years. The newest joiner works in the casing department and joined in September 2025. If longevity of this sort sounds extraordinary, rest assured, it took Bauder, with his 29 years of experience in the watch industry, by surprise too when he joined Patek Philippe in 2016. “When you work here, you’re surrounded by colleagues who have 20, 30 or 40 years of seniority in the same company. That’s something I’ve never experienced in other companies and that makes a big difference. It speaks to our tradition of repairing our watches and having the people who have the experience and knowledge for it.”
By a casual count, I saw nine Singaporean, one South Korean and two Malaysian watchmakers. Two new machines and stations—a jeweller’s bench and a laser-filling machine— were delivered just this January. The latter is so new that only one person on the team has a licence to operate it, and at the time of my tour the sole operator was still waiting for an official laser safety permit from the National Environment Agency to start putting the machine to work.
The service centre is pristine and evenly lit. The lights are warmer in the reception area out front and a cooler white in the workshop, which is more of a clean-room environment. All who enter the workshop must wear white antistatic coats and, if they are not employees, don shoe covers. Sticky pads on the floors of doorways pick up and trap dust. Employees wear standard issue white Crocs clogs. Patek Philippe’s antistatic coats are utilitarian chic, with a thin grey windowpane check pattern, ribbed elastic sleeve cuffs, one inside pocket, the brand logo embroidered on the left breast, and each employee’s name embroidered in a script font on the right.
It’s a picture of Swiss order and precision, and as we move around the Singapore facility, it feels startling at first to hear voices in our accent explaining and describing the work of fine, high-end Swiss watchmaking for perhaps the most quintessential brand there is. That is the point. Bauder told me that “the ability to service locally has become very important”. The larger volumes of watches produced, sold and out there in the world has changed the field. “In the past you could eventually send everything to Switzerland to be serviced. Now, it’s impossible.”
The upshot of a service network this closely controlled and overseen by a brand is, of course, the assurance that assiduous care is given to the quality of the work even if it never leaves the country or sees the Swiss Alps. Patek Philippe stakes its reputation thanks to this maximum order of control over its service centres. “We have been servicing watches since 1839,” Bauder explained, “so our true promise is to be able to do this forever.”
Owning a high-end watch always comes with a hidden cost. However well-made a piece may be, it will require maintenance and service. No ifs, no buts. Lubricating oils and rubber gaskets dry over time, dirt finds its way in, cases and bracelets get scratched, and even the most perfectly engineered tiny metal parts wear out. The point of difference is the experience of extending such an object’s life. Patek Philippe seems to have identified that luxury equates to as clear, direct and unhazy an experience as possible.
To that end, one of the vital initiatives to be rolled out recently is the immediate estimate. Modern watches (from 1980 onwards) with no damage and that only require standard service get a quote at the service centre within minutes. That includes the cost of the service and the estimated time it will take before you get your watch back. Patek Philippe does all this without even opening the watch. The cost of minor parts replacements on top of the immediate estimate is, I was told by a member of the workshop, absorbed by the brand. Ensuring the immortality of your watch is essentially as fuss-free as possible.
“I think we have many nice brands today. What’s important for a customer is to be reassured that a brand will continue to support and be able to service the watch,” described Bauder of this department’s working philosophy. “In fact, I would say that in the past [servicing] used to be a necessary constraint—something you had to do. Now, servicing has become a key element to differentiate a brand.”
One more development that now underpins all the brand’s watches is the Patek Philippe Seal, introduced in 2009 and last updated in 2024. You’ll find it, physically, engraved in gold on Patek Philippe watch movements, a double ‘P’ framed by a shield shape not dissimilar to the brand’s classic pin buckle clasps. The Seal defines 65 discrete internal quality standards across four categories that the brand holds itself to. They cover workmanship, precision, reliability and a promise, as Bauder said, to continue servicing watches it has made. Rather like the service centre stats, it can be overwhelming enough to become an abstract collection of numbers and figures. When I pressed Bauder for a qualitative meaning, he offered this: “The Seal gives an expectation, and a requirement, to also service the watch with the same standards as it was manufactured.”
It took precisely two weeks from the day of the tour and interview with Bauder for a newfound appreciation to form. There is a particular strain of despair one feels when things in your life start to break. A glass shelf in my bathroom shattered. My electric toothbrush gave out. My air conditioner started, uncompromisingly, to leak just a month past when it ought to have received maintenance. The first two were irredeemable, so replacements were bought. The latter was fixable, but as I did so I had the dim awareness that this appliance, like everything else in my home, was probably halfway through its shelf life. Faced with these broken-down things that their makers would not take responsibility for, the light of a brand that can promise longevity seemed especially bright.
It’s not a cheap promise by any means. Thierry Stern, Patek Philippe’s president, once said in an interview that he doesn’t see the servicing part of his business as a profit driver. Yet this service centre occupies more square footage than the corporate office that markets and distributes the watches. If it had little relation to profit making, as most professions do, how did Bauder envision the value of his métier? “The value of our work is measured through our performance, the lead times we achieve and the quality of the service that we deliver. Our prices are fair, but they are not excessive. Our mission is, really, to ensure the same level of excellence for every customer worldwide and for all watches manufactured since 1839.”
Precise and unromantic on the surface. But Bauder’s reply spoke to one precept about Patek Philippe that supersedes any of the multifarious ways we think about ‘luxury’ today. It’s easier to understand. Here is a watchmaker that does everything it can to produce the finest watches in the world. Plain and simple, and with enough faith and conviction in its work to stand by what it puts out into the world—even after a century and a lifetime or two. Or, in the beloved verbiage of the brand, for a next generation.
The Vogue Man Singapore 2026 ‘Pursuit’ edition is available online and on newsstands.
