- by Alex Ghotbi, Head of Watches, Continental Europe and Middle East
The Geneva Watch Auction X is a milestone catalogue for the Phillips Watches team. We will be holding our tenth Geneva auction and as such we are celebrating our 5th anniversary.
We could be listing the incredible watches we have had the pleasure and privilege of auctioning in the past five years and the numerous world records broken, but the story of Phillips Watches is more than numbers, it is a human adventure, that of a team of watch fanatics, who eat, sleep and live watches 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
A five-year existence is not long in the great scheme of things, after all, our parent company Phillips has been in activity since 1796; yet we have come a long way from the day the international team was set up with five members: Aurel Bacs, Livia Russo, Nathalie Monbaron, Paul Boutros and Virginie Liatard-Roessli to create a watch department like no other. There was a renegade, pioneering start-up philosophy at the beginning, a way of being that continues today and that will continue to push us forward for the next 5, 10 or 50 years to come.
The teams have grown both in Geneva and internationally while maintaining a stability and consistency in our team members which stem essentially from the sheer pleasure of sharing the same passion when working together. This unity in turn creates a sense of reassurance among our loyal clients who over time have developed a sturdy relationship based on mutual respect, trust, shared passion, and even sometimes what often started as a professional relationship turned into a lifelong friendship.
Focusing on quality, rarity, integrity and transparency, we have created a strong bond with our clients be they sellers, buyers or both. They know that we do not look at watches as merchandise or just a business and that we invest ourselves when vetting, preparing, researching or exhibiting a watch as if it was our own personal timepiece or as if we were considering raising the paddle for it.
Our raison d’être is to discover, season after season, timepieces as the ones in the following pages which will charm, fascinate and captivate you with their ultimate rarity, quality and relevance.
We thank you for having been part of this amazing journey and hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. Your support means that we shall not and cannot rest on our laurels as we continue to think out of the box, to innovate, to bring you what you cannot find elsewhere and to continue to excite, intrigue and surprise you.
Thank you for these five years and ten sales, and here’s to the future.
Santé!