The Relaunch of Czapek Genève

In the watch world, most revivals feel like marketing—names dusted off, logos revived, stories stretched to fit modern campaigns. But every so often, there’s a resurrection so improbable, so meticulously earned, that it reads less like branding and more like fate. That’s the story of Czapek Genève, a brand that vanished for nearly 150 years, leaving behind only traces—a few pocket watches, a partnership that helped spark Patek Philippe, and a mystery that refused to die quietly.

François Czapek was never meant to disappear. He helped shape the earliest chapter of Swiss watchmaking alongside Antoni Patek before their partnership dissolved in 1845. Czapek continued independently, opening ateliers in Geneva, Warsaw, and Paris’s Place Vendôme long before it became the heartbeat of French luxury. His pocket watches blended French romance with Swiss discipline—enamel dials, elegant Roman numerals, dual subdials arranged with mathematical grace. Then, sometime after 1869, he was gone. No collapse. No scandal. Just a brilliant craftsman erased by time, as though the story had been paused mid-sentence.

More than a century later, three men felt that unfinished sentence tug at them. Xavier de Roquemaurel, a strategist who saw patterns where others saw noise; Harry Guhl, a historian convinced the past still owed the watch world answers; and Sébastien Follonier, a watchmaker fluent in the language of 19th-century mechanics. Separately, they found Czapek. Together, they decided he deserved more than a footnote. They gathered fragments—museum pieces, ledger notes, signatures fading on aged paper—and realized the truth: the brand wasn’t lost. It had simply been waiting for someone stubborn enough to wind it back to life.

On November 10, 2015 in Geneva, Switzerland, they made that life official. And in a move that felt almost rebellious, they resurrected the company using Czapek’s own 19th-century subscription model. No conglomerate funding. No venture capital. Just collectors willing to stake their money on the belief that a forgotten master deserved a second chance. In an industry where brands rarely take creative risks, this was an act of conviction bordering on defiance.

The Quai des Bergues, the first watch of the rebirth, carried the soul of the founder without imitating him. Its dial was lifted from an 1850s Czapek pocket watch; its heart was the SXH1, a hand-wound seven-day caliber developed with Chronode. Open ratchets. Dual barrels. Hand-finished bridges. It wasn’t nostalgia—it was continuity, like a conversation interrupted for 150 years and suddenly resumed with perfect clarity.

The brand didn’t stop at honoring history; it expanded it. The Place Vendôme Tourbillon Suspendu in 2017 introduced a suspended tourbillon and GMT complication that felt like mechanical architecture—Parisian elegance reimagined through modern engineering. In 2018 came the Faubourg de Cracovie, an integrated chronograph with Vaucher’s high-beat SXH3, proving Czapek wasn’t a revival project. It was a living atelier with something new to say.

And that’s the brilliance of the Czapek story: it isn’t about recreating the past. It’s about rescuing a legacy that slipped through history’s fingers, about three men who refused to believe that a disappearance was the same as an ending. Most watch brands measure time. Czapek Genève measures something rarer—the stubborn, almost miraculous belief that some stories are too important to be left unfinished.

In the end, Czapek’s resurrection isn’t proof that time heals. It’s proof that time remembers—and waits patiently for the right hands to bring a masterpiece back into motion.