In November, Urban Jürgensen, a luxury watch brand founded in 1773, was sold by one group of investors to another. Most of the new owners have chosen to remain anonymous, with one notable exception: Kari Voutilainen, a respected Finnish watchmaker who is now the CEO of Urban Jürgensen, continues to run his own brand, Voutilainen.
“There are many elements that made the decision very easy,” said Mr Voutilainen (pronounced voo-till-EYE-nen) in a telephone interview from Urban Jürgensen’s headquarters in Bienne, Switzerland.
Those factors, he said, include “the style of the watches and the history of the company.”
“My personal taste,” he added, “is not far from what we do today at Urban Jürgensen.”
Stylistically, the brands do feel like like-minded people. Urban Jürgensen’s watches (pronounced OOR-ben YOOR-gen-sen), are traditional and typically cost around 50,000 Swiss francs ($54,800). The current collection ranges from a 40 millimeter stainless steel round watch that sells for about 16,000 francs to a one-off minute repeater tourbillon for about 300,000 francs. The Jürgensen One, a sporty model with a stainless steel bracelet introduced in 2019, has a starting price of approximately 40,000 francs.
Founded in 2002, Voutilainen produces watches that sometimes have a sophisticated touch of flash — guilloche patterns in bright colors or elaborate embellishments on their dials — but still look quite conventional. For example, a current piece that is more understated is a 39-millimeter round white gold watch with a black grand feu enamel dial; it sells for about 86,000 francs.
“Both appeal more or less to a conservative, quieter kind of collector, as opposed to someone who wants something so flashy on their wrist,” said Leon Black, owner of Cellini, a luxury watch dealer in Midtown Manhattan that carries both brands.
As it begins planning for the first watches designed under new ownership, Urban Jürgensen has just four employees, including Mr Voutilainen and his daughter, Venla. At the age of 22, she entered the position with remarkable professional experience: she apprenticed for four years at Vaucher Manufacture Fleurier, a Swiss company that makes timepieces for luxury watch brands; and worked in Singapore in the after-sales department of the high-end watch retailer The Hour Glass. In 2019, she also made a timepiece with her father: a one-off white gold 42 millimeter pocket watch for Only Watch, a biannual charity auction in Monaco.
She returned home to Switzerland a few months ago, and joining Urban Jürgensen rather than Voutilanen was “her wish and choice,” her father said — as was, he added, her decision to become a watchmaker.
Ms Voutilainen said she became interested in watchmaking as a career after attending a job fair at school when she was 14 or 15. “It wasn’t really because of my father,” she said, adding that, as a student watchmaker, people sometimes treated her differently because of her well-known family name. “You have to learn to deal with it,” she said, so “it doesn’t hurt you or touch you.”
Ms Voutilainen works full-time at Urban Jürgensen; her father splits his time between the headquarters and the Voutilainen workshop in Môtiers, a Swiss city about an hour away. He also owns Comblémine, a company in St.-Sulpice, Switzerland, that makes dials for luxury brands, and owns Voutilainen & Cattin, in Saignelégier, Switzerland, which makes cases for watch brands.
Urban Jürgensen has had many owners since it was founded as Larpent & Jürgensen in Copenhagen. (Urban Jürgensen was the co-founder’s son and one of several family members who have worked for the brand over the years.) By the mid-19th century, the brand had begun production in Switzerland and relocated its operations eventually to there.
About a hundred years later, the last members of the Jürgensen family who made up the company had passed away and ownership began to change, including Peter Baumberger in the 1980s. He shifted the company’s focus to wristwatches – for most of its history it had only produced pocket watches.
Mr. Voutilainen, 59, started working with Mr. Baumberger in 1996, where, while working at Parmigiani Fleurier, he performed some technical tasks at Urban Jürgensen, such as assembling timepieces and prototypes. He continued in that role for quite a few years, even after he founded his own brand in 2002.
Mr Voutilainen said his dealings with Mr Baumberger, who died in 2010, “was like a friendship, but he had tremendous respect for the work. I have the same values with my staff.”
In the past six to nine months, demand for watches from niche brands such as Urban Jürgensen and Voutilainen – which produced just 67 watches last year – has grown, in part due to the high prices that other independent brands, such as FP Journe, can command on the market. resale market. “A lot of smart watch collectors said, ‘If an independent party can finally reach this level, what will happen to the independents who produce significantly less?’” said Mr. Black by Cellini. “Suddenly there was a big wave of collectors really wanting something that was rare and unique and super limited.”
Insiders have begun to theorize about how Urban Jürgensen, who plans to unveil its new watches next year, could change. “There’s quite a bit of buzz about Kari actually being strategic about creating a Rolex and Tudor,” said Andrew McUtchen, founder of the Time+Tide Watches website, referring to the relationship between Rolex and the smaller, less expensive mark it owns.
That hypothetical plan, he said, would be that “you can lure people in with an Urban Jürgensen and then work them up into a Kari.”
Mr Voutilanen says he is considering changing some of the retailers that sell Urban Jürgensen watches, but has no plans to drastically change their design.
“An Urban Jürgensen watch has a signature style,” he said. “I mean, you like it or you don’t like it, but it has its own style.”
“There will be no major revolutions,” he added.