These watches cost more than a home. This is how master craftspeople make them in Switzerland.
Danièla Dufour, daughter of master watchmaker Philippe Dufour, grew up in her father’s workshop in the Swiss mountains, watching him meticulously craft watches from start to finish.
Philippe Dufour, now 77, has made just a few hundred watches over the course of his career. His 24-year-old daughter is now carrying on the tradition of making intricate — and expensive — timepieces. She said she can “see the magic operating” when her father is at his workbench.
“And then you see the heart of the watch beating for the first time and you understand that he just created life, and you want to do the same thing,” Danièla Dufour said.
Inside Philippe Dufour’s workshop
Philippe Dufour studied at a local watchmaking school and worked for major brands before striking out on his own more than 30 years ago. Today, he works from his own one-room workshop in Vallée de Joux, a valley about an hour north of Geneva. When he arrives in the morning, he lights his pipe, sips coffee and plays classical music.
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It took him more than two years to make his first watch, he said. That was 1992. He says he can now spend about 2,000 hours on a single watch, which is about a year if working 40 hours a week. The pieces he crafts are custom made and priced in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. One model, the Simplicity, contains 153 individual components.
Swiss mechanical watches are like fine art pieces. Collectors sometimes resell them at auction. One of Dufour’s watches sold for $7 million at auction.
“I’m very happy. I don’t get the money because it’s not mine anymore, you know what I mean? But, I mean, it’s a recognition,” he said.
How watchmaking became a big Swiss business
Dufour’s workshop isn’t the only one in the Vallée de Joux. The area, home to green meadows and grazing cows, has been a global watch manufacturing hub since the 17th century. At the time, local farmers needed a side-hustle during harsh winters, so they started tinkering with watches.
In the 1970s and 80s, Swiss watchmaking was decimated by the so-called quartz crisis, when Japan began pedaling more accurate watches — for a fraction of the price — that ran on a quartz crystal and a battery.
The Swiss then launched their own quartz-powered Swatch watch — and also doubled down on the high-end mechanical market, adopting Alpine-high pricing and limited supply as a business model.
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Today, Swiss watches account for fewer than 2% percent of the units sold globally, but more than 50% of the market’s overall value. Rolex is the biggest player, producing more than a million units a year — roughly a third of the Swiss market share.
Getting a watch can be a journey. Customers can languish on waitlists, sometimes for as long as a decade, before getting a watch from some brands.
“It’s a way of driving this desirability for a product,” said Marc-André Deschoux, the founder of WatchesTV, an educational site about watches. “It’s not a question of money. You really need to, you know, go along this kind of journey to get your watch.”
That journey hit a snag earlier this year when the U.S. issued tariffs on Swiss exports at a punishing 39%, driving prices even higher. But after captains of Swiss industry, including watch company executives, visited the Oval Office last month, the Trump administration dropped the Swiss tariff rate to 15%.
The art of watchmaking
Down the road from Philippe Dufour’s workshop is a barn that Antoine LeCoultre converted into a watchmaking studio in 1833. It now houses the global brand Jaeger LeCoultre. Work there is segmented, with each employee tasked with one of 180 watchmaking crafts — from adjusting springs to turning caterpillar secretions into glue for jewel bearings.
A handful of employees work specifically on decorating the backs of watches. One of the company’s best-known watch models, the Reverso, was originally made for polo players, who protected their watches by flipping them over during matches. Now reproductions of masterpiece paintings, done with a single-thread brush, decorate the backs of the timepieces.
On a tour of the Jaeger LeCoultre’s workshop, 60 Minutes watched as one worker assembled his first Reverso. Hundreds of hours or went into perfecting the entirely mechanical timepiece, and the worker admitted that working on something so pricey can be nerve wracking.
“I look cool but I’m not,” he said.
While Jaeger LeCoultre has been around for nearly two centuries, some newer independent brands have established devoted followings. Max Büsser, founder of the cult brand MB&F, gave 60 Minutes Correspondent Jon Wertheim an up-close look at some components the size of poppy seeds in his mechanical watches.
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Büsser, an engineer by training, started his company in 2005 and struggled at first. But demand surged in recent years and his company couldn’t accommodate it — nor did he want to. Büsser said he has no interest in ramping up from his current output of roughly 400 watches a year.
“I believe watchmaking is art,” Büsser said.
His company grew to the point he recently sold a 25% share to the Chanel brand. But it’s small enough – and he still interviews clients before selling them a watch, which can easily sell for as much as $250,000.
Büsser said telling time is not the point of meticulous craftsmanship.
“I mean, a mechanical watch is totally pointless today. It was pointless in 1972 when the Quartz era arrived,” he said. “Anybody who tries to tell you, ‘Yes, a mechanical watch has a point,’ except for emotional art and artisanship, I don’t think so.”
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