16/06/2026
Philippe Stern (1938 – 2026) – A tribute by Henry Tay.
There is a particular kind of knowledge that comes from skiing downhill fast. Not recklessly, that is a different thing entirely. The discipline is in the calculation: how much speed the line will bear, where the margin lies between commitment and catastrophe, how to read a slope that cannot be read straight on. Philippe won the gold medal in giant slalom at the inaugural Winter Universiade in 1960, and when he spoke about what the sport had taught him, he did so with the directness that I would come to know as characteristic of him. You are always calculating how fast you can go, he said, weighing risk against benefit. He thought it was good training. He was right.
Over the years that followed, he applied that same calculus to decisions the rest of the Swiss watch industry considered frankly ill-advised. He was right often enough, and consequentially enough, that by the time he handed over the presidency of Patek Philippe in 2009, the company he had inherited as a workshop of 150 people producing some 5,000 watches a year had become the measure against which the entire world of fine watchmaking is taken. I had a closer view of that transformation than most were given. For more than fifty years, Philippe was a partner, a teacher, a friend. What follows is not a chronicle of his achievements, it is my attempt to set down what I learned from him, and what I will miss.
Tribute continues on https://www.thehourglass.com/en-TH/story/philippe-stern-tribute
