The Art of Staying on Top, According to Cartier

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Steady hands, patience, attention to detail, and an ability to enter a trance-like state—these are all qualities I associate with professional watchmakers. At the Cartier manufacturer in La Chaux-de-Fonds this week, I learned it also requires a dedication to being swole as hell. I came to this information the hard way, at the end of an enameling class. After “painting” a dial with enamel (powdered glass) and putting it in an almost 1,500-degree Fahrenheit oven, the last step was to polish my creation. I knew this would be a problem when the master enameler leading the session suggested that my other classmates and I stand to use our full weight while pushing our dials into the polishing stones. At the end of our class, all our foreheads glistened with sweat even though not a single one of us could finish polishing the dials we were given to play with. It was a good lesson in how difficult it is to master just one of the crafts that have helped push Cartier to the top of the watch world in recent years.

During my visit to the Cartier manufacturer, I was a little surprised by how open our tour guides were about the brand’s approach to industry dominance: prioritizing exterior artistry over technical wizardry inside a watch. The brand’s strategy works from the outside in, not the other way around, the opposite of many watchmakers that dream up complications before imagining the packaging to house it. The very idea of setting technical records was dismissed: As long as the watch is reliable, Cartier knows it can win with design. That bet has been paying off over the past few years, as Cartier has risen to become the second largest Swiss watchmaker by market share, according to the annual industry report from Morgan Stanley and LuxeConsult. The brand’s rise is emblematic of a greater shift in collector taste from specced-out complicated watches to expressive and pretty designs.

The dial after painting but before the oven.