Michel Parmigiani was born on 2 December 1950 in Couvet, in the Val-de-Travers region of Neuchâtel canton, Switzerland. He trained as a watchmaker at the École d'Horlogerie de Fleurier and subsequently at the Technicum in Neuchâtel, before opening his own restoration workshop, Mesure et Art du Temps, in 1976. The workshop quickly earned an international reputation for its work on historical movements and automata, and Parmigiani became the restorer of choice for several major museum collections and private foundations, including the Sandoz Family Foundation, which would later fund his manufacture.

In 1996, with backing from the Sandoz Family Foundation, Parmigiani founded the Parmigiani Fleurier manufacture in Fleurier. The brand was conceived from the outset as a fully integrated manufacture — one capable of producing every component of a watch in-house — and has built a reputation for technical precision, finishing quality, and a design vocabulary of classical elegance that reflects Parmigiani's background in restoration rather than innovation for its own sake. His conviction that a watch should be made to the standard of a museum piece — that it should be restorable in two hundred years — informs both the choice of materials and the quality of finish across the range.

Every year on 2 December — his birthday — Parmigiani Fleurier releases an Objet d'Art piece: a complication or decorative watch of exceptional ambition that brings together craftspeople from across the industry in a collaborative act of horological tribute. These pieces, which have included restored historical movements, pocket watches with hand-engraved cases, and objects incorporating métiers d'art techniques of considerable rarity, represent the brand's clearest statement of what it believes a watch should be. Michel Parmigiani remains involved in the brand as its founder and spiritual guide, though day-to-day management has passed to a professional team.