Why Universal Genève Is Poised to Become the Most Important Watch Brand of the 21st Century
I’ve never been a Led Zeppelin fan, but I’ve always respected the band for not getting back together. Rather than staging a revival that could end up being remembered as a lame money grab, Zeppelin instead preserved its glory years and nothing more. Well played.
English rock bands, Swiss watch brands—the parallels are surprisingly similar. There have been dozens of Swiss watch brand revivals in the past two decades, and many have disappointed. Lovely midcentury designs get bastardized to attract modern tastes. The watches are often too big and/or too colorful. Limited editions proliferate to exhaustion. Overwrought brand narratives soon wear thin. Sometimes you wish that, like Zep, the original was all you knew.
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If there was one defunct Swiss watch brand with a legend on par with Led Zeppelin’s, it was Universal Genève. With highwater achievements like producing the first chronograph in 1919 as well as wonderfully complicated and innovative wristwatches through the 20th century, U.G. became the favored watch brand of U.S. President Harry S. Truman and the French poet-dandy Jean Cocteau. Universal Genève slotted comfortably into the hierarchy of Swiss watchmaking, well above Rolex and just below Patek Philippe. It was a serious, long-standing, top-tier, Swiss manufacturer.
Then, like a blimp full of lead, Universal Genève came crashing down. The quartz crisis saw U.G. falter through the 1970s and ‘80s. Bulova owned the brand for a while (hence the electronic Uni-Sonic models), and then sold it to a Hong Kong holding company in 1989. Under that stewardship (if we can call it that), we got a handful of junky U.G.-branded watches that now form a sad layer of sub-$100 horological detritus on eBay.
And then there was nothing from Universal Genève for nearly three decades.
Despite all that late-life stumbling, Universal Genève remained fascinating and legendary to collectors. The potential for a proper revival was immense, but the challenge—and the cost—seemed insurmountable. Universal Genève wasn’t just some funky, old-school Swiss brand with a cool logo to slap onto a modern watch for the nostalgic set. Within Universal Genève’s dormant IP package was a weighty backstory, dozens of collectible models, and a bevy of innovative mechanical movements. Imagine Rolex having collapsed in the 1980s and you have a sense of what properly resurrecting U.G. would entail.
Though the company had long been kaput, the brand lived on in the hearts and minds of elite watch collectors, this further upping the stakes for a proper resurrection. Universal Genève wristwatches have been collected for decades by horological luminaries such as William Massena, Auro Montanari (a.k.a. John Goldberger), and, most famously, Eric Clapton (after whom the Tri-Compax reference 881101/02 has been nicknamed). The Uni-Compax, Bi-Compax, Tri-Compax, and Aero-Compax models are regularly auctioned at all three major houses and sold by A-list dealers like Eric Wind of Wind Vintage and James Lamdin of Analog:Shift. A rather complicated Universal Genève Tri-Compax reference 12555 was the central metaphor in Gary Shteyngart’s watch-centric novel Lake Success (as well as an actual watch in his collection).
Vintage Universal Genève watches are truly wonderful contraptions. They were inventive, complicated, and visually unto themselves. They were at once precise, legible, sporty, complicated, chic, and cosmopolitan. This strong appeal also makes reviving Universal Genève daunting: There’s so much to get right that just about anything could go wrong. Bringing Universal Genève back to life would be among the most challenging and expensive undertakings in Swiss watchmaking this century. Everyone in the know talked about it, but no one was going actually do it, were they?
In Steps Georges Kern
In December of 2023, Breitling CEO Georges Kern announced that the holding company, Partners Group, which has owned a majority stake in Breitling since early 2022, had acquired the intellectual property of Universal Genève. This announcement was by far the biggest news in Swiss watchmaking during the 21st century, so far.
A bit obsessed with Hollywood stars and filmmaking (at which he’s tried his hand), Kern doesn’t think small. I once attended a North American sales meeting for Breitling in which Kern commanded the horological soldiers gathered before him to “double…no, triple sales this year!” Partners Group recently invested heavily in a boutique-grade Swiss skin-care company called Soeder, which, Kern told Robb Report with characteristic bravado “…has huge potential.” Reviving Universal Genève aligns with the man’s grand ambitions.
However, an undertone of concern emerged in the watch collector community after Kern made his announcement. Maybe Kern wasn’t the right man for U.G., some wondered. His seemingly unbridled approach to the now very colorful, large, and shiny watches in the current Breitling catalog was one worry. Or consider Breitling’s recent offer of NFL team watches, which aren’t exactly aligned with Breitling’s heritage, or anything horological for that matter. The thought of American football married to a Universal Genève Tri-Compax sends a chill up the spine of a certain kind of collector, of which, I confess, I am one.
Ironically, another concern was the same ambition that drove Kern to take on U.G. The doubters wondered if Universal Genève would be better served by a nerdier, quieter, and even less ambitious person. Wouldn’t it be great if the company hunkered down and got back to making complicated timing instruments for the few rather than shiny Hollywood-endorsed watches for the many?
Chief among the concerns I heard was that, rather than staying true to the original designs, Kern would make the watches big and colorful to attract a global market. Size and color is where too many brand revivals and model reissues go wrong. One often hears this complaint about retro-inspired modern watches from Omega, Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin, and even Rolex (the current Explorer II comes to mind). I can think of only two high-end brands currently making a midcentury-sized watch: Cartier and Piaget, notably both jewelry brands. It’s so common for brands to goof up the size that whining about it—as I suppose I am—has become a cliché.
All told, I would describe the mood around Kern reviving Universal Genève as a mixture of excitement that he was doing it at all and worry that he’d somehow do it wrong. If nothing else, these concerns reflect how dear Universal Genève is to the watch-collecting community.
A Most Welcome Surprise in the New Polerouter
Just last week, Universal Genève dropped three Polerouters. To be clear, there are just three watches, each a piece unique: one in steel, one in rose gold, and one in white gold with a bracelet by master metal weaver Laurent Jolliet. Phillips will auction the white gold Polerouter, and the other two will go into U.G.’s archive.
If we can trust these watches to foreshadow what’s eventually coming to market, it seems that Universal Genève under Kern’s guidance may be getting it right after all. It’s early days, of course, but—with fingers crossed and a prayer sent to the gods of horology—I’m ready to endorse the revival of Universal Genève.
Here’s why: The size is true to the original at 35 mm. The finishing looks stellar. The dial is constructed in the complicated manner of the original (this had to be expensive to do right—more on that below). The movements are refurbished vintage caliber UG 1-69 with micro-rotors (a famous movement). And, according to the brand, that woven bracelet by Laurent Jolliet is going to be available on production models. That’s a lot to get right, and if U.G. continues in this direction it’s hard to imagine collectors finding much to complain about. (Though, of course, some will.)
The Polerouter Is Uncannily On-Trend
The Polerouter was originally designed by Gerald Genta, the same man behind the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, and the Patek Philippe Nautilus, to name just two of his masterpieces. Genta was just 23 when he drew up the Polerouter, and the watch came out in 1954 to support Scandinavian Airline Systems (SAS) pilots, who were the first to fly between Europe and North America via the North Pole.
One can make out Genta’s touch in every detail of the Polerouter, especially the unique outer ring of the dial held in place by hour markers attached to the crystal, thus applying pressure to the central dial to seal out dust and moisture. It’s one of those Genta designs that doesn’t look complicated, but upon closer inspection shows a bit of mad genius at work. That strange dial configuration of the Polerouter would inform the unique way the Royal Oak holds itself together, for example. The importance of Kern & Co. getting that bit right cannot be overstated.
When I look over the Universal Genève catalog, the Polerouter indeed stands out as the brand’s most iconic watch (if not its most complicated or interesting model). The story of U.G. supporting SAS is only matched by Rolex supporting PanAm with the GMT Master. Genta’s contribution speaks for itself. The Polerouter is Universal Genève’s Tank, its Calatrava, its Datejust—that one watch that sums up the brand better than any other model.
Perhaps more importantly, there’s an uncanny alignment of the Polerouter with the shifting horological zeitgeist. We have documented the move toward smaller dress watches over the past few years, as well as the decline of interest in—and prices for—steel sports watches from Patek Philippe and Rolex. I lamented the Patek Philippe Cubitus, a watch that feels entirely out of alignment with where trends are headed. But this mid-sized, elegant-yet-sporty 35 mm Polerouter with its midcentury bonafides is pretty much exactly what a certain sector of the watch world seems to be clamoring for: smaller, dressier watches with great 20th-century stories.
For those of who may have doubted Georges Kern, or even the whole enterprise of reviving Universal Genève, these three Polerouters should not only quell doubts but also pique curiosity about where U.G. will wind up in the coming years. As most big Swiss watch houses follow their own strange inertia into the 21st century, perhaps Universal Genève not having danced with the marketplace over the past three decades affords the freedom to get up on stage and just crank out the 20th-century jams. If that’s what Universal Genève ends up doing, it could easily become the most important watch brand of this century. Let’s hope so.
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