Patek’s new Ref 6301P
Patek Philippe recently unveiled its new Ref 6301P Grande Sonnerie wristwatch, which is as much a testament to the technical superiority of the brand as it is a revealing statement of intent for its future path
The Grandmaster Chime Ref 5175R, which was launched in 2014, was a breakthrough timepiece – and not by some narrow, inward, company-defined metric, but on a universal watchmaking standard. Need proof? The two-sided wristwatch, which was released to commemorate Patek’s 175th anniversary, featured a staggering 20 complications.
Among those many complications, the Grandmaster Chime carried a grande sonnerie for the very first time in a Patek wristwatch. In fact, it went further. It also had a total of four other strikework complications apart from the grande sonnerie (which strikes the hours and quarter hours), including a petite sonnerie (which strikes the hours), an alarm, a date repeater and a minute repeater (which chimes the time on demand). An approximately $2.5m price tag placed it in the rarified company of multi-million dollar timepieces.
By 2016, Patek decided to launch the Grandmaster Chime as part of the regular collection and the Ref 6300G was the result – a statement piece that is the watch of choice for moguls like Jay-Z who wore one to Diddy’s 50th birthday party in 2019. A few weeks ago in November, Patek launched this new 6301P Grande Sonnerie which is a further evolution of the Grandmaster Chime and the Ref 6300. It is fitted with a new Patek calibre GS 36-750 PS IRM that is modelled on that of the Grandmaster Chime. However, the chiming mechanism hasn’t just been lifted from Grandmaster and placed into the 6301P. As Patek’s Philip Barat, head of watch development explained to us, there were adaptations made over the course of crafting the 6301P. “When we conceived this movement, we had to decide how many gongs we were going to include – two, three, four or even five. We wanted to have a melody, and for a melody, the minimum is three gongs,” explains Barat.
He adds that the company’s president, Thierry Stern, is always closely associated with the development of all of the brand’s creations and asked the design team whether they could integrate four or even five gongs. However, adding more gongs would mean reducing each of their size to fit within the wristwatch. Smaller gongs would result in a weaker sound and so the team decided to stick with the three-gong arrangement that would ensure a louder chime.
Barat says that it was Stern who decided to include a small seconds indication on this wristwatch which can be found at 6 o’clock. For this mechanism, the team turned to another Patek watch that was also unveiled in 2014 alongside the Grandmaster Chime, the Chiming Jump Hour Ref 5275P. “In 2014 we launched the Ref 5275 where the seconds and minutes used a jumping mechanism. We used this same patented mechanism on the 6301P. It’s not a sweeping seconds, but rather a jumping seconds,” says Barat. The design team did push back though on certain design elements. “Initially, Thierry didn’t want the power indication, he didn’t like these two hands,” says Barat of the sonnerie power reserve indicated at 3 o’clock and a separate going train power reserve at 9 o’clock. “For him, it wasn’t well balanced with the hour and minutes. We had to convince him to keep the two power reserve indicators. We told Thierry that this is a manual winding movement, so it’s important for a customer to know if there is power or not in the movement. That’s when he said we can keep them.”
The main movement has a power reserve of 72 hours while the strikework has a power reserve of 24 hours, each powered by its own set of twin barrels arranged in series.
There are three patents from previous Patek timepieces that have been employed in the 6301P. The first, borrowed from the Grandmaster Chime, is the mechanical isolation of the grand sonnerie from the main movement when the silent mode is selected so that the main movement’s power reserve is conserved.
The second is the use of a single slide switch, found here on the case at 6 o’clock, for engaging the three strike modes – also a legacy patent from the Grandmaster. The third patent meanwhile is the jumping second mechanism which traces its origins to the Ref 5275. “The components of the jumping second are in silicon for two reasons: they don’t need lubrication and also because they are lightweight,” says Barat.
Aesthetically, the new Ref 6301P is a triumph too. The 44.8mm platinum case with a satin finishing includes a diamond set between the lugs (all Patek platinumcased watches have a diamond set in the
“We are prepared to go through difficult times, it’s not the first or the last crisis. This is a part of business”
case) whose design distinctly resembles the Ref 5370.
The movement on the 6301P also features Geneva stripes and exceptional finishing. The enamel dial meanwhile has its hour markers and hands made from white gold. A persistent challenge among sonnerie timepieces is getting the thickness of the watch right – not too thin to compromise on tonal quality and not too thick to come across as unwieldy. “Thierry is like his father – he wants things as thin as possible. We are proud to have a grand sonnerie of this level that is only 12mm thick with the case,” says Barat.
To say that 2020 has been a challenging year for the luxury watch industry, and even posed an existential question for a few, is to state the obvious. The pandemic may not have caused as much of an upheaval among the seven biggest watch brands – Rolex, Omega, Longines, Cartier, Tissot, Audemars Piguet and of course, Patek Philippe – each of whose annual sales is believed to exceed a billion Swiss francs, but none can claim to have emerged unscathed.
“Of course 2020 will not be a record year and will not be at the same level as 2019, with the lockdown in production and many markets, retailers having to close and some [of them] still closed,” Thierry Stern tells Gulf Business. “We think that the sales will be affected by about 20-30 per cent, but most importantly we see that demand for Patek Philippe watches remains strong.”
Striking a positive note, he adds, “We are prepared to go through difficult times, it’s not the first or the last crisis. This is a part of business, sometimes it’s very good, sometimes it’s less so.”
Resiliently, Patek soldiered on with plans like opening up its CHF500m manufacture, five years in the making, in 2020. Like its peers though, it too had to step out of its comfort zone in other areas of its business in order to remain top of mind. For example, for the very first time last year, Patek allowed select retailers to sell its watches via e-commerce channels for a limited period.
But Stern adds that the measure was merely a stopgap arrangement and not indicative of a fundamental shift away from its brick-and-mortar business. “This option (e-commerce) was only a limitedtime solution proposed during the period of total lockdown to help our retailers, it was open to all markets concerned by the lockdown. This experience proved once more that for the time being, our clients and partners prefer the experience of onsite retail, the relationship with the retailer, seeing, and trying the watch. The digital experience is of growing importance, but it does not replace the real-life experience, the emotion.”
This year, Patek will be looking to cover lost ground. After breaking away from Baselworld last year, it has said that it will participate in the 2021 edition of the Watches & Wonders exhibition which will be a fully-digital experience with the onground event cancelled as a result of the pandemic.
The million-dollar question though is what will Patek bring to the table this year? Stern states: “We will have lots to share in 2021. We have new models and movement development plans ready. Just be patient.” You can hardly fault us for blithely ignoring his advice when Patek caps 2020 with something like the Ref 6301P.