This is a lightly edited companion piece to Episode 04 of the SmallSeconds podcast. You can watch it at the top of this page, listen in the sticky player below, or read the full transcript at the foot of the article. Timestamps are clickable throughout.
Twelve chapters. Skip to any.
00:00Cold open — the workshop at six in the morning02:1802:18Introduction, and why this conversation took three years to arrange04:2706:45Where it all started — Kari's first bench10:0216:47Years at Parmigiani — on being twenty-five in Fleurier11:3828:25On finishing as a moral question09:4438:09Waiting lists, allocation, and the people we've said no to12:2150:30The 28 and the Masterpiece — what changed, and why10:081:00:38Succession, or: who does this after me13:521:14:30Fatherhood, apprentices, and the forty-year question09:181:23:48What the press never asks08:111:31:59Listener questions07:441:39:43Closing — leaving via the kitchen02:35The recorded conversation, once we sit down in a small side room behind the varnishing bench, covers ground Kari has covered before — years at Parmigiani, the independence in 2002, the slow refusal to scale — and some he has not. He is funnier than he reads in print. He is also, I think, more anxious.
The question I had prepared, and had held back until roughly the halfway mark, was about succession. It is a question the industry avoids. There are roughly fourteen working independent watchmakers in Switzerland of his calibre, most in their mid-fifties or older, and the question of who, exactly, does this work in forty years' time is either answered in a sentence (we have apprentices) or not at all. Kari answers it in forty-two minutes.
If the last person who can polish a bevel by hand retires, and I have not taught someone, then I have not actually done my job. The watches are beside the point.
On finishing as a moral question
We spend a long stretch of the middle of the conversation on anglage — the beveled edge that runs along the inside of a hand-finished movement bridge. To a watchmaker it is the single most telling piece of evidence about who made a watch and how seriously they made it. To almost everyone else it is invisible: you cannot see an anglage without a loupe, and most watch buyers never once open the caseback.
Kari's position — stated, un-ironically, at 31:30 — is that anglage is what separates the act of assembling a watch from the act of making one. He is not interested in the commercial argument for hand-finishing. He says, at one point, something like: "I am aware the customer cannot see it. That is not a reason to stop doing it."
The second question on my list — succession — comes back, obliquely, via the anglage. Two of his apprentices are at adjacent benches when we speak. Both have been with him for over five years. Both, he tells me, can already do work he would sign. "If I died tomorrow," he says — and he does not smile when he says this — "the workshop would continue for a while. Not forever. But a while."