In 1961, when Hank Edelman started his career at Patek Philippe—working in New York City as a messenger at the company’s U.S. distributor, the Henri Stern Watch Agency—the Swiss watch industry looked a lot different than it does today. For starters, simply getting retailers to buy into the brand required effort. “The key element was to go out and visit the retail accounts and convince them to buy a few pieces for their inventory—which was a challenge,” Edelman, who has been chairman of the Henri Stern Watch Agency since 2006, tells Robb Report. In the years leading up to the quartz crisis of the 1970s, when competition from cheap, Japanese-made battery-powered wristwatches ravaged Switzerland’s mechanical industry, the brand’s bread and butter wasn’t sport styles or complications, but simple, straightforward dress watches from the Calatrava line, mostly encased in precious metals. “Convincing a retailer to purchase anything that was complicated was difficult,” Edelman says...
