F.P. Journe is a baby, relatively speaking. Rolex has been making watches for more than 120 years. Patek Philippe has been doing it for almost 190. Audemars Piguet was founded in 1875. F.P. Journe, though, only properly arrived in 1999. And yet, in just 27 years, it’s become one of those names that makes very serious watch guys go a little bit funny.
“Everyone actually does now,” says Perri Dash, creator of the Wrist Check Podcast and co-founder of Time To Drive Fest, when I ask why it feels like everyone wants a Journe. “The brand has exploded in popularity with affluent watch enthusiasts. It’s still not mainstream, but if you pay attention to the industry in any way, you now know the brand. There’s no escaping it.”
Watch writer Vivian Morelli has another way of putting it. “F.P. Journe is having a moment because it’s basically the anti-hype hype watch,” she says. Sounds contradictory but actually Morelli gets pretty close to explaining the whole thing.
F.P. Journe Élégante 48mm Titalyt Calibre 1210 (2019)
F.P. Journe
François-Paul Journe isn’t some newly discovered watchmaker. Born in Marseille, he began working on watches and clocks in Paris in the ’70s and built his first tourbillon pocket watch in his twenties. His eponymous label arrived much later, with his first collection of wristwatches launching in 1999. Those watches carried the words “Invenit et Fecit” (Latin for “invented and made”) on their dials, and Journe has spent the years since making some extremely complicated watches in extremely small numbers.
For the longest time, though, you needed to be pretty deep into watches to know what any of that meant. Cameron Ross Steiner, founder and host of Collectors Gene, has been collecting watches for around a decade and remembers Journe being “absolutely part of the conversation” even then. “It just wasn’t part of the broader cultural conversation in the way it is today,” he says. “I don’t think the watches suddenly became better. I think everybody else woke up to how special they already were.”
Morelli dates the shift back to around 2018, when Chanel acquired a 20 per cent stake in F.P. Journe, before things really accelerated during the pandemic-era watch boom. Dash remembers it happening in waves. First came the growth of watch media. Then companies like WatchBox (now The 1916 Company) began buying up Journes on the secondary market, effectively betting that the wider collecting world hadn’t yet realised how special the brand was. Prices rose, demand followed, and then came the big auction results. “That’s pretty much when things got crazy,” he says.
F.P. Journe Chronomètre Bleu Calibre 1304 (2009)
F.P. Journe