The Patek Philippe Cubitus, The Enthusiast Press, And Patek's Formula For Success

"That's another fine mess you've gotten us into!" – Laurel and Hardy

On a certain level the Patek Philippe Cubitus is pretty straightforward. Patek felt that it needed a new sports watch in its catalog and based on the designs of the Cubitus watches, which were were released almost a month ago on October 17th, the brand wanted something close but not too close to the Nautilus; something instantly recognizable (as are the Nautilus and Aquanaut) and which represented, supposedly, a new point of entry into Patek for younger and presumably slightly less affluent customers. (The latter rationale – which to be fair, was never specifically articulated as a goal by Patek, which did say younger but did not actually say “more affordable” – seems to be dead in the water inasmuch as, while the designs may be intended to appeal to a younger audience the prices require just as much disposable income as ever; the starting price is $41,243 for the 5821.) Despite the fact that the design seemed odd enough at first to make some folks wonder whether it was the real thing (the first images of Cubitus were leaked online from an advertisement that ran in the US edition of Fortune magazine before the launch) it seems clear now and with the benefit of hindsight that Cubitus was less a new product or entirely new design, than an evolution of the design language established in the 1970s by the Nautilus.

The reactions to the Cubitus were varied but somewhat predictable depending on the sources, and ranged from wait-and-see, basic factual reportage, initial reactions with personal opinions, naked outrage, and everything in between. The funny thing is that the watch enthusiast press mostly seemed to go for straight reporting at launch, with follow up opinion pieces. Now the professional watch press I think struck some people as generally a little anodyne, although Thierry Stern’s remarks to the biweekly Zurich based business news site, Bilanze, sparked some acrimonious remarks, some even from the generally restrained enthusiast press; for those three people in the watch world who might not have seen the quote, Stern said, “Haters sind grösstenteils Leute, die nie eine Patek hatten,” – “Haters are mostly people who have never had a Patek.” From this we learn a couple of things; first of all, apparently the Swiss-German for “haters” is “haters” and secondly, Thierry Stern is uninterested in the court of public opinion, or at the very least wishes to appear to be.

This latter stance reminds me of a brief encounter I had with Stern in 2015 at Baselworld, when the Travel Time Pilot was launched. I’d just had the meeting and was coming down the stairs when I ran into Stern on the landing. I said to him, “Well, it looks like there are some strong feelings about the new Pilot,” and he said (wearily, I thought) “Yes, well, do you know how many people say in the meeting, ‘I hate it, I hate it,’ and then on the way out they ask if they can reserve one for themselves?”

It has been just shy of ten years since that conversation and I think more or less the same situation obtains. This is aside from but not unrelated to any feelings anyone might have about the Cubitus, which had at launch the same disadvantages as the Code 11.59 albeit the Cubitus, any reservations you might have about the design, seems to be commercially successful right out of the gate.

One of the most interesting observations I’ve heard about Cubitus so far was from a collector who said, “Well, the problem is that Cubitus is a sequel, isn’t it? It’s a sequel to the Nautilus, and think about the Marvel sequels – the longer they go on the harder it is to do a good one because the studio feels that it has to stick to a money-making formula, so it starts to repeat itself.” Whether or not you think the Cubitus is to the Nautilus as The Marvels is to Avengers: Endgame (and some people apparently do) his remark does bring out the fact that in creating the successor to the steel Nautilus, Patek found itself in the difficult position of perceiving a need to build connective tissue between the old and new, without seeming too derivative of the ancestor. This is a very difficult trick to pull off and in both movies and watch design it often doesn’t entirely succeed, but a larger, more aggressive version of the Nautilus which not only says HNW, but also privileged access, on sight, is going to sell like hotcakes.

The other question the launch raised has to do with Stern’s remarks about the haters, which was salty, and not entirely true (there were plenty of Patek collectors on social media who were not in love with the design) but also of course, not entirely untrue. Now, are these remarks that the CEO of a luxury brand should be making on the record? Pragmatically speaking, it would seem wisest for the third generation heir to the business to err on the side of inoffensive, banal platitudes. Historically however this has not necessarily been how luxury company bosses have behaved. For counterexamples to the notion that it behooves a luxury boss to speak blandly and with a honey’d tongue, we can (for instance) look back at Ettore Bugatti’s reason for refusing to sell a car to King Zog of Albania; Bugatti is supposed to have said, “That man’s table manners are beyond belief!”

The sadomasochistic relationship between luxury brands and their clients has been a staple of the business for many years and those interested in its genesis may wish to peruse the history of the House Of Worth, whose founder, Charles Frederic Worth, is generally credited with being the first “dictator of fashion” and who was the first couturier in the modern sense, which is to say unlike the dressmakers who used to go to their clients, Worth’s clients had to make pilgrimages to him.

This asymmetry in which the tradesman is suddenly the master of the merchant princes and nobles who make the luxury trade possible, must have been exhilarating in the extreme and one wonders if one doesn’t see the glee of the servant who has become the master, even now, more than a century later, in some of the remarks and the general cut of the jib of today’s luxury bosses, who have accumulated wealth, temporal power and prestige that would be the envy of any real noble house. (The bar there admittedly is set pretty low as being a royal is today, not what it used to be).

The enthusiast press coverage ranged from relatively neutral reporting to almost unreservedly enthusiastic, but despite the general sentiment that the watch press is going through an existentially threatening phase with respect to credibility (which may well be true) I don’t think that the basic character of watch coverage has changed very much in the quarter century or so that I have been reading it. The major change in enthusiast watch coverage over the last decade or so has been the number of attempts to commercialize online watch coverage, which presents the same basic challenges as any other kind of consumer journalism – nobody wants to pay for content. There are obvious potential conflicts of interest in depending economically on the industry you cover, but this is merely to say that critical coverage from anything other than a publication of record – and sometimes even from a publication of record – needs to be taken with a grain of salt if the subject is an advertiser. There are subjects which historically have been subjects of sometimes delightfully pointed and sarcastic coverage from critics – film is one, theater is another, restaurants are yet another (there are few things more enjoyable than a really savage takedown, especially if it’s of a sacred cow) but luxury watchmaking is not one of them. Paying the bills in consumer media means either accepting advertising, or selling the products you cover, or both; this is less a problem to be solved than it is a reality to be managed.

The Cubitus in person (I did have a chance to see all three launch models, albeit briefly) is a striking watch; its relative slimness (8.3mm for the time-only models and 9.6mm for the complicated 5822P, all 45mm diagonally, corner to corner) and large diameter makes the watches overall feel pretty flat for their size; I was reminded a bit of another relatively wide but thin watch – the Bulgari Octo Finissimo; these generally run around 40mm in diameter and are usually less than 7mm thick. These wide-but-flat proportions can take a little getting used to – I thought the most successful was the two tone, whose height-to-width ratio felt like a good fit for the slightly 1970s feel of the watch overall. Cubitus obviously feels like a sibling of the Nautilus and equally obviously this is by design, but in the metal it feels like a distinctly different watch, more so than you’d think from shared design features like the bracelet and case “ears.” In particular, the porthole vibe of the Nautilus is conspicuous by its absence; its case aspect ratio and the angular geometry take the Cubitus a greater distance than you might think from its predecessor. There is an overtly attention-seeking quality to the Cubitus which I don’t associate with Patek in general – even the 5711 at its most hyped was not a watch conceived to achieve notoriety; it was instead a watch which for various historical reasons had had notoriety thrust upon it. The impression Cubitus gives of being a design outlier may fade with time, though – for all that the Pilot Travel Time drew its share of fire when it launched, we all seem to have adjusted at this point.

I had an interesting talk about Cubitus last week with someone who’s been in the industry their entire life, who said they wondered how differently the Cubitus would have landed if it had gotten a bit of a softer launch. The actual Cubitus launch event was already pretty restrained – Patek flew some folks to Munich last October, and the actual launch as reported by those who were there seemed factual, professional, and largely devoid of any obvious attempts at glamor (the launch party was in a big space with tons of people, but it was no weekend in Mykonos, for example). However, as my interlocutor pointed out, the reception might have been very different if Cubitus had been announced as a Nautilus line extension at (for instance) Watches & Wonders, with just one model announced at launch and successors rolling out over the rest of the year. This, I think, would obviously have made a short term difference but I don’t know that it would have made the slightest difference at all in the commercial impact and success of the watch. Given the fact that Cubitus was announced as a new collection and that it was the first from Patek in a quarter century, the launch event such as it was felt like a reasonable power-to-weight ratio. Still, the whole soft-launch hypothesis – which is basically that new medicine goes down easier in smaller doses – is an interesting one. I think a lot of other brands would have gone a much more conventional route – celebrities, sports stars, influencers, maybe the announcement of a new strategic partnership or a simultaneous launch of a limited edition of the new model in collaboration with some hot artist or musician or designer. Either way, we are not going to be in a position to evaluate the success of Cubitus or the wisdom of the launch strategy without years of hindsight.

The same person who aired the soft-launch hypothesis to me, also pointed out something which I had never particularly noticed before, and that is that Patek Philippe’s continued growth and increasing prestige, which has been trending more or less steadily upwards for decades, is noticeably devoid of any of the marketing strategies employed almost universally by luxury watch brands. Patek in fact, has no brand ambassadors; no movie stars paid to sport their timepieces; the company does not do red carpet placement; it has no relationships with any sports franchise, be it yachting or motorsports or soccer or anything else; Thierry Stern is not a regular feature of society and gossip reporting; he does not hobnob publicly on the regular or as far as I can tell, even on the semi-regular, with stars of any kind. And yet despite disdaining such strategies so thoroughly that you don’t even notice that Patek doesn’t bother with such things, the brand overall enjoys a continued prestige and reputation that would be the envy of some of even its closest competitors.

This is rather remarkable. Of course, Patek began this century with what was already an enviable image in the market but the fact remains that its position has not only been maintained, but has also grown, driven solely by its own image and by a 20 year plus explosion of interest in fine watchmaking, with all that that implies in terms of massive social media overexposure … but you know, still. This is an interesting question which just gets more perplexing the more you think about it. We take Patek’s preeminent place in the watch universe so much for granted that we don’t even ask how it got there, and we don’t even notice that it has apparently done so without even trying and, moreover, without even bothering itself to care about and protect its position. There it is, however: a brand with one of the most unassailably patrician images not just in the watch world, but in luxury in general, appears to have achieved and held its preeminence without doing any of what virtually every other luxury brand deems indispensable. Even Rolex has its sports figures (and laudable charitable endeavors, which largely go unnoticed). It seems deeply weird that Patek has gotten this far just on the strength of its history and reputation, the quality of its watchmaking, and an ad campaign which has been around since 1996, but here we are.