Parmigiani Fleurier cemented its presence in London earlier this year with a permanent boutique in Harrods’ prestigious Fine Watches Room.
It was a show of confidence in the UK after a successful run as a pop-up that first opened at the legendary department store back in December 2024.
By Swiss watchmakers’ standards, Parmigiani Fleurier is a relatively new atelier (founded 1996) which may never have grown in size or status were it not for its founder Michel Parmigiani securing the support of Switzerland’s Sandoz family, which made its fortune in pharmaceuticals and might be described as venture capitalists for the art world.
The family’s foundation began its journey into watchmaking with an investment in Michel Parmigiani’s studio in 1995 and has since been acquiring stakes in businesses that — together — can autonomously produce complete watches and all their components under the Parmigiani name.
This mission led to the acquisition of MBBS in 2000, since renamed as Atokalpa, a manufacturer of gears for watchmakers. Sandoz’s investment helped the business to expand into producing more sophisticated components and assembling completed regulators.
In the same year, the foundation bought Les Artisans Boîtiers in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a specialist in high end case manufacturing.
Elwin was the next purchase, in 2001, which brought the manufacturing of precision tools, software and watchmaking machinery into the operation.
Complete movement maker Vaucher Manufacture Fleurier, which remains part-owned by Hermès International, joined the fold in 2003 and dial-maker Quadrance & Habillage was assimilated in 2005.
The result is a network of companies that, collectively, have almost every manufacturing process covered, and a globally respected brand, in Parmigiani Fleurier, as its public face and beneficiary of all the skills, experience and equipment that the Sandoz-owned network of suppliers deliver.
In 2021, Parmigiani hired former Bulgari head of watches Guido Terreni to bring order to what had become a watchmaking hot house without an obvious commercial, strategic or even creative direction.
He immediately set about rationalising a line-up of watches that was high on innovation, but scattered in its positioning on clientele, price and style.
Mr Terreni was at the first Watches and Wonders after the pandemic to launch the Tonda PF, a watch that took on some design elements like a finely-crimped bezel from the 2020 GPHG-winning Tonda GT (the Hijri Perpetual Calendar model picked up the gong).
The new PF line was lauded for bringing precision craftsmanship to a watch with its complexity and fine finishing whispering beneath an unimposing two-hander.
It was a decade-defining launch, 25 years after Parmigiani was founded, and the design language of that first Tonda PF has now being used across three families: Tonda PF, Tonda Sport and Toric.
Frankly, they are so closely aligned in their aesthetic, they could easily be a single Tonda collection.
Parmigiani’s first PF was a simple two-hander with date, and it was exquisite simplicity it delivered again with the second watch in the collection, the Tonda PF GMT Rattrapante, which has a unique complication where the second time zone hand is concealed behind the hour hand until required.
With the press of a discrete pusher, it pops out from its hiding place and jumps to the hour in another chosen time zone.
Once again, it demonstrated pure elegance in its design, engineering and finishing, precisely the qualities that watch connoisseurs, a target market identified by Mr Terreni, was aiming at.
“These connoisseurs appreciate personal choices, understand the soul of a brand, and are not driven by marketing trends. Our watches are designed to appeal to individuals who seek sophistication and exclusivity over conventional luxury,” Mr Terreni tells WatchPro.
Today, Parmigiani has discontinued almost every watch that pre-dates the new Tonda PF collection and has been relentlessly rolling out different dial treatments, movements, complications and case materials across the Tonda PF, Tonda Sport and Toric collections, which all now carry Mr Terreni’s new PF logo.
Attention to detail trumps overt complexity at every turn.
Take the choice of colours since 2021. Mr Terreni has an unwritten checklist for hues that could grace a Parmigiani dial.
“Colors should be subtle and not flashy,” he begins. “They must be timeless and not likely to fall out of fashion. They should be easy to wear with any outfit. They should reflect light in interesting ways,” he continues.
It has taken Parmigiani four years to develop a palette of colours that tick all of these boxes, and they are used on dials that might be sand blasted, brushed, hand-guillochéd or skeletonised.
At a time when Rolex is happy for its watches to shout across a crowded room with dials in yellow, turquoise and pink, Parmigiani’s faces come in a dark denim blue or charcoal grey.
Even when it experiments with something bolder like a green, as it did with a 2025 Tonda PF GMT Rattrapante, it is a muted tone inspired by the crystal waters of Switzerland’s Verzasca Valley.
Two new Toric Perpetual Calendars, launched at this year’s Watches and Wonders, are a little more eye catching, but you can see how a hand-grained golden dial is in the tone of a gentle sunrise will remain classically popular for generations. A pale blue piece in platinum is another timeless execution that was inspired by a 1931 Swiss architect’s colour palette for home design, according to Mr Terreni.
Of course colour matters to every watchmaker, but few take the four years Parmigiani devotes to developing a new hue. “It is not just an aesthetic choice, but a strategic element of the brand’s identity,” Mr Terreni says.
The company does not say how many watches it makes per year, but it is estimated to be around 3,000; a fraction of the 70,000 pieces made annually by Patek Philippe.
It recently trimmed its distribution by around two-thirds, focusing on quality over quantity with its retail partners, and now sells through around 80 doors worldwide. Forty are in Europe, 22 in the United States, 11 in the Middle East, an important new market for the brand, and just four in Asia.
This is a far more manageable network, and one where partners will have enough watches from Parmigiani to have a good range to show to clients and a commercial incentive to develop expertise and a deep relationship with the brand.
Surprisingly, Parmigiani does not have a single monobrand boutique in the world, not even in Switzerland, but its presence in Harrods shows how a shop in shop or boutique might look for retail partners.
Mr Terreni says the discussion is in the balance about whether to go this route. “The advantages of boutiques is that they perfectly showcase the brand and can maintain a full range of watches to display,” he begins. “But, boutiques mean brands are responsible for generating footfall and, at our size, we are not set up for that,” he adds.
There is a middle way, WatchPro suggests, the joint venture or franchised boutique model where Parmigiani retail partners open monobrand stores on behalf of the brand. This would require a complete concept for Parmigiani boutiques, but that could be used to flesh-out the full story of the brand through the experience and its timepieces.
“We are open to opportunities and people are coming to us asking to open boutiques,” Mr Terreni responds. “But we remain cautious. For now we prefer distribution to multibrand retailers whose stores allow watch lovers to browse.”
Today’s watch market is increasingly dominated by the big four brands, and more customers buy from branded boutiques or at least large branded shop-in-shops from Patek Philippe, Rolex, Cartier and Audemars Piguet where they are pretty much at the mercy of the storekeepers for what watches they can buy.
Parmigiani customers are different. Its watches are for connoisseurs who are, “not following the flow”, Mr Terreni describes.
They are independent thinkers with personal style; their watch choices are not about showing-off and being noticed, but about personal appreciation for their wristwear, he continues.
They are also rich.
An entry level time and date Tonda PF Micro-Rotor in steel and platinum retails for CHF 23,700. The GMT Rattrapante is CHF 4,000 more. Steel Tonda PF Sport Chronographs are CHF 28,200 and even the three-hand automatic is CHF 19’900.
Top of the line Toric watches, which are a little more dressy and formal than the beach-to-ballroom Tonda PFs, start at CHF 54,000 for small seconds references and tops out at CHF 138,000 for the rose gold Chronograph Rattrapante.
The big launches of 2025 were into the Toric line, which welcomed two Perpetual Calendars in platinum with a pale blue hand-grained dial priced at CHF 92,000 and a rose gold model for CHF 85,000.
Across the range, it is important to appreciate the perfection Parmigiani is striving for on its dials, cases, bracelets and movements.
The new perpetual calendars use an in house PF733 hand-wound movement with a sand-blasted main plate and Côtes de Fleurier guilloche. They present all the information of a QP with just central hours and minutes and two subdials, just below centre to the left and right of the dials.
This is a conscious choice to conceal the complexity of even grand complication watches — which include tourbillons and even a piece-unique Les Roses Carrées Grand Feu minute repeater — rather than shout about them. “Our focus is on simplifying complications,” Mr Terreni says. “We want to make movements that make watches intuitive and easy to read.”
A place in the premier league of horologically-driven watchmakers does require contributing to technical innovation in movements, which is why they shout so loudly about patents for the tiniest mechanical advancement.
Parmigiani wants to be in this league, which is why it continues to invest in R&D for advances like the world’s first Hijri Perpetual Calendar and a Chinese Calendar watch.
“Movements are seen as an expression of deep horology,” Mr Terreni states. “Which is why we continue to invent movements like the GMT Rattrapante and cultural calendars.”
Mr Terreni has been given a mandate for a root and branch transformation of Parmigiani, which can now be seen in the distillation of its portfolio into three closely-related collections with an obvious shared DNA.
As that simplification took place, research into new movements and maintenance of centuries old watchmaking skills continued.
That took investment, and Mr Terreni says it took until 2023 to bring Parmigiani back into the black.
Remaining profitable has been made considerably more difficult since, with cooling demand (although mostly in Asia where the business has few stores) last year. This headwind has been compounded over the past 12 months by the soaring cost of gold, powerful Swiss franc and new tariffs from the United States.
These external factors are putting margins under strain because rising costs cannot all be passed onto customers. “Brands must absorb some of these increased costs while remaining cautious, attending to the bottom line and waiting for the market to stabilise,” Mr Terreni says.
The Sanchez family have demonstrated a far-reaching view of their investment into fine art and related disciplines like haute-horlogerie, and Parmigiani is also thinking like a brand whose horizon stretches generations into the future.
Under Mr Terreni, it is continuing the work of its founder to create sophisticated, personal timepieces for true connoisseurs. “It is a journey of continuous refinement, not a race for market dominance,” he concludes.