Patek Philippe’s president, Thierry Stern, laid down something of a challenge to his retailers at the unveiling of his brand’s all-new Cubitus watch collection yesterday, the first new family to be added to the brand’s core range since the 1990s.
‘The target, as we say, is younger: guys in their early thirties – someone sporty, elegant, early in his career, maybe building a business. These guys know the brand, their parents maybe have Patek, but it hasn’t fully resonated with them yet,’ Stern said of the striking, square-form metamorphosis of the brand’s famed Nautilus bracelet watch.
By way of reinforcing that message, Patek has produced a glossy video ad in which a wealth scion enjoys rooftop party in his honour, while musing about being ‘humbled by my good fortune’ – and so he should be, given that the spot culminates in his being gifted the platinum Cubitus as a present. With an asking price of £75,690, that’s good fortune indeed – but Stern is emphatic that newbie watch guys are firmly in his sights.
‘The message we’ve given to retailers and distributors is to please sell these watches to local clients who fit this profile,’ he said during the roundtable interview at the unveiling of the collection. In other words, put the longstanding VIP collectors on the back-burner and skip straight to that mythical next generation? ‘I’d like to think some retailer will have the courage to do it,’ he said with a smile. ‘Maybe there’s a chance…’
The reality, of course – and Stern readily admits this – is that in Patek-world, loyal, established, deep-pocketed clients will always have first dibs on the hottest stock (and however many more dibs they need after that). Since Patek Philippe continues to sell almost exclusively through traditional retailers rather than managing a sales network of its own (its flagship store on Bond Street is one of only three in the world that it owns itself), the old-school deference to the connections and relationships of its retail partners remains an intrinsic characteristic of the way Patek does business.
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And among those networks, the arrival of the Cubitus is major news, even if its design tropes are somewhat familiar.
The Cubitus is, effectively, a squared-off version of the famously eccentric and shape-shifty Nautilus that was introduced in 1977, and which perfectly mapped out the beach-to-office-to-nightclub lifestyle of that era’s glamorous set. The Nautilus also became among the hottest properties in luxury-land during the past decade, skirting the resale heights in the days of the Covid-induced asset bubbles. Stern lanced the Nautilus bubble himself before it got completely out of hand, discontinuing the most iconic Nautilus, the Ref 5711A stainless steel automatic, at the height of the pandemic but not without first inflating it a bit more himself with a couple of controversial versions to see it out – one with a dial in olive green, and a collaboration with the jewellers Tiffany & Co. with a dial in Tiffany blue.
The notorious olive green dial now returns in the watch that, finally, is intended to step into the 5711’s void as Patek’s glam, steel-cased celebration of ‘sports chic’. Stern says that for years he’s been wanting to bring a new square-form watch into the Patek Philippe collection – he’s a fan of TAG Heuer’s famous square watch, the Monaco, it turns out – but had struggled with how to conceive it. In the past, the brand’s squarer watches have tended to be fancy, old-fashioned collectors’ items – a style that Stern has been keen to navigate away from. The need to evolve and renew the Nautilus in the wake of its own hype bubble created an opening to go further, he says, and launch another sports-luxe collection altogether.
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Currently, the Cubitus collection has three watches, consisting of the stainless steel automatic; a dandyish two-tone version in rose gold and steel with an electric blue dial; and the much more complicated platinum version. But further iterations, including smaller women’s options, are in the pipeline and, according to Stern, planned for years to come.
From the Nautilus, the Cubitus takes its hinged ‘ears’ on either side of the watch (part of Genta’s ingenious waterproofing of the case construction), its horizontally-stamped dial layout, its beautiful bracelet, and the contrasts of finishes and polishes that give both watches such a pure, iridescent sense of richesse. The other important aspect it brings over from its older cousin, though, is thinness: the Cubitus is not a small watch, at 45mm from corner to corner of the square case, but it wears elegantly and comfortably, lying close to the skin just as the Nautilus does, with a case that’s just 9.3mm thick.
And it certainly has presence. Stern, as president of the company his family acquired (and still owns) in 1932, has tended towards designs offering vigorous, full-blooded expressions of Patek finery, rather than the quiet ultra-elegance of earlier eras, with rich dial colours, bold textures and decorations, and larger sizes. In that sense, the Cubitus is on-brand: rather than the enigmatic contours of the Nautilus, it borrows that watch’s language to produce something emphatic and straight-to-the-point, if no less tactile and beautiful in its sense of quality.
The pinnacle piece, the platinum Reference 5822P (on a denim-effect composite strap, rather than a bracelet), brings a new movement to the party too, with Patek’s first oversize date display, shown in a double aperture at 12 o’clock, along with day of the week and moon phases, all of which change instantaneously at midnight. There are all kinds of patents attached to it for the kinds of marginal technical gains that are meat and drink to Patek watchmaking. Plus you get an attractive view on the reverse side, with a gold micro-rotor engraved with the same motif as the dial. Watch nerds can (and will) fight it out over whether it’s heresy or not to have a round movement in a square watch (as opposed to one whose parts are custom-designed to that square case). It doesn’t bother me a jot…
Thierry Stern wasn’t the only family member wearing one of these platinum Cubitus watches at the launch – his 21-year-old son, Adrien, was also present, now apparently apprenticing into the company himself. Other Gen Z wearers of the watch may be very few and far between for now, but from Stern Senior’s perspective, the Cubitus is firmly a next generation moment.
