ask the customary questions
Before she Patek Philippe watches came to work for the family-owned watch brand Patek Philippe, Flavia Ramelli spent four years at the International Red Cross in Geneva. Then she was trained as a historian at Switzerland’s national association for archivists.
And today, when she compares notes with archivists working outside the luxury industry, Ms. Ramelli says that the difference is very clear. “I notice that I have more resources and that my work has a more active role in keeping the heritage alive,” she says. “I think customers are more interested in our past too.”
As an archivist for a product that prides itself on lifelong use and exceptional customer service, she is often drafted to help clients with queries about their timepieces.
“I work with the after sales service on various activities around the restoration of antique watches, looking for technical drawings, photos and sketches of watches or the movements,” Ms. Ramelli said. “I also work daily with the communication and P.R. departments, looking for old ads, finding out when a model was created or sometimes researching a particular production cycle or retailer in the past.”
One of the less obvious ways that Ms. Ramelli transforms brand history into competitive advantage is her contributions to Patek Philippe’s internal magazine. She suggests that the stories give the company’s employees around the world insight into the brand’s heritage, which they then can pass on to the customer, something that becomes more important as the work force gets younger and has less background about the brand.
Although Ms. Ramelli’s collaborations with the design studio seem to be less frequent than those of her counterparts with luxury fashion, jewelry or textile brands, she did contribute to design elements of commemorative limited-edition watches and for products in 2006, during the 30th anniversary of the Nautilus collection, when she studied all the material she could find on the iconic product.
But even as her job relies on instinct and anticipation, mining for heritage is as also about perseverance and being methodical, she says.
“It’s not to highlight one part of a legacy over another which is left to be forgotten. It’s to collect the whole series in order to extract information when needed,” she explains. “Having a marketing-oriented mind, creativity and endless curiosity are, in my view too, the archivist’s main skills.
“But I’m always sure to put on my ‘historian’s glasses’; I ask the customary questions and, moreover, I try to stick to the Patek Philippe values.”
Last year, Ms. Ramelli’s work was given a ringing endorsement by the third generation owner and honorary president of the company, Philippe Stern, under whose tenure the company opened the sprawling Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva nine years before.
“I gave a lecture about the travels taken by the business’s founder, Antoine Norbert de Patek in 1851 around America,” she says. “And afterward Mr. Stern told me that he had learned a lot that he didn’t know until then.”
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