Heritage Watchmaker Urban Jürgensen Gears for June Watch Launch

PARIS — When you’re a 253-year-old “watchmaker of kings,” you can afford to take your time.

That’s the approach for the new chapter beginning for historic watchmaker Urban Jürgensen, which traces its roots back to 1773 and a family of royal watchmakers in Copenhagen.

“Our view was that there is absolutely no rush to get this company back on the market,” said Alex Rosenfield, who is co-chief executive officer alongside multiaward-winning master watchmaker Kari Voutilainen. “We would launch when the watches are where they need to be in order to be launched.”

For the co-CEOs of the watchmaker headquartered in the Swiss city of Biel, home to numerous watchmaking facilities, the time is nigh.

Ahead of Watches and Wonders, the brand quietly introduced through limited appointments in Geneva its updated identity and vision, which includes a logo and custom typeface that take cues from the marking on a historic Urban Jürgensen watch made for a Danish king.

Come June, it will reveal the first three watches of a new chapter initiated in 2021 when Voutilainen, Rosenfield and a tight cadre of private investors banded together to buy the brand.

The brand has been far from idle in the past four years. Early months after the acquisition were spent “clearing the deck” to bring everything back in-house. Then while Voutilainen began prototyping and building the new watches, the team was busy servicing older models, many from the 1980s.

Underpinning the new era is the idea of “time kept and spent beautifully.”  

Voutilainen spoke at length of Danish design’s purity, functional decoration and the “clean forms and clean surfaces” that he favors also in his own work. The joy and pleasure derived from these beautiful objects came up even more often.

“[A watch] can be simple or more complicated,” he said. “But at the end of the day, it’s [about] the feel of the watch that is important, how it looks and how it feels on the wrist.”

Rosenfield takes it even further.

“A Tool for Life”

“Too much of the way we talk about watches is to talk about the watches themselves, but what matters is the time you spend and how you spend it,” Rosenfield said. “The watch is a tool for a life that you’re living beautifully and for the more meaningful things in your world.”

This idea is embedded in the brand’s communication, which will focus less on watches than on the world in which they exist, one rife with surreal images ranging from the founder riding a penny-farthing made of watch parts to breezy images of timekeepers among pencil shavings and “Lug,” a handsome dog who sports a watch for a collar.

It will also be at the heart of the “Time Well Spent” campaign photographed by Ellen von Unwerth. It will be a series of portraits of interesting people — “an incredible young ceramicist and a great old visual artist, a dancer, an architect,” Rosenfield teased — doing things they love.

“In some case, [that] is what they do for work,” he continued. “But in a lot of cases, it’s something entirely different and we’re focusing on what time well spent means to them — a singer fishing or an actor on a sailboat or an architect in their garden.”

For all the fine engineering and watchmaking at play in the Urban Jürgensen of today, it’s the human element that seems to have been most finely turned here.

With good reason: more and more watch consumers are keen to learn how and where things are made and by whom, Voutilainen said.

“They want to learn and to get to know the people behind the independence of a brand, they want to have these human connections,” he continued. “And very often, [people] are not happy just to go to a retail shop and take out the credit card and pay and go out.”

At Urban Jürgensen, there has always been plenty to say, then and now.

The Beginning

The story began in 1773 when Jürgen Jürgensen opened the “Larpent & Jürgensen” atelier with a fellow watchmaker. Born three years later, his son Urban Bruun Jürgensen grew up to be even more skilled.

Given a state grant to study in Geneva, Paris and London under the likes of Abraham-Louis Bréguet, Ferdinand Berthoud and John Arnold, he eventually published “Rules for the Accurate Measurement for Watches and Clocks,” a book that is still a reference today, and was elected to the Royal Danish Academy of Science — a rare distinction for a craftsman.

Purveyor of clocks and watches for the Danish royal family and state institutions over the decades, the brand passed to outside hands in 1919 when Urban Bruun Jürgensen’s last descendant died without children.

A second golden era began in the late 1970s under the ownership of Swiss businessman Peter Baumberger, who brought on esteemed English watchmaker Derek Pratt. By the late 1990s, they were famed for remarkable pocket watches and wristwatches. That’s when the duo met Voutilainen, at the time watchmaking’s new wunderkind.

It was he who would finalize the 2005 “Pratt Oval Pocket Watch,” an advanced flying tourbillon with remontoir and detent escapement that Pratt was unable to finish due to ill health. In November, it sold at a Phillips auction for more than $4.2 million, setting a new record for the brand.

For all that, don’t expect the brand to go back to its greatest hits.

“We must forget the previous models and make our own in-house movements, to create a new identity that respects what has been done in the past, but also make it something which is modern,” said the master watchmaker.

While details are kept under tight wraps, Rosenfield said the first reference would speak to the company’s legacy. A further two, one a time-only model and the other a perpetual calendar, will be double-wheel natural escapement watches.

It is the direction that the brand will pursue through subsequent releases of “handmade and soulful” pieces that are “classically Danish but completely contemporary” for Rosenfield.

While he declined to give prices for the new watches, he said they would be at the top end of the market.

For now, they will be sold directly to clients, with communication relying on social media and the brand’s website. Further down the line, there might be pop-up experiences, participation in art fairs and perhaps showrooms in a handful of cities globally.

And don’t expect any leaks from the brand in the run up to June. That’s also part of the co-CEOs’ intention of “casting a net that’s a bit wider” than competitors, including with female watch enthusiasts.

“We want women to feel as welcome as men,” Rosenfield said. “There’s a perception given that [watches are] made for men and women are allowed to wear them. We’ll be showing them on women. We’ll be showing them on people of different ages. We hope to make it a very broad universe.”