You might think that being one of the oldest watch brands in existence would be marketing gold enough for Urban Jürgensen. But with production volumes that Swiss watchmaking circles like to call “confidentiel” (in other words, very, very small) the brand backed by an extensive Danish watchmaking dynasty nevertheless needs to find a way to help its products stand out against the massive marketing budgets of fine watchmaking giants like Vacheron Constantin and Patek Philippe. This is a considerable challenge when you want your product to remain the focus of attention but nevertheless need to find a way to put that product into a context that fits with the brand
Urban Jürgensen may now have found just the right kind of concept, an idea that takes its inspiration from the very origins of the brand in the mid to late 1700s. Jørgen Jørgensen, the founding father of the watchmaking dynasty and the first watchmaker in the Jørgensen family, followed the traditional route for craftsmen of the time: he served a seven-year apprenticeship with the newly-founded Clock and Watchmakers’ Guild of the City of Copenhagen, presenting his examination piece on 24th October 1765. The next step up the ladder in the guild was to become a journeyman, which is where the story starts to get interesting. Journeymen would traditionally be paid by the day, which is where the name comes from (the French “journée”, meaning day). Yet the journeymanship would often also include a kind of “study trip” that would expose the craftsman to new cultures and enrich his professional experience. Jørgen Jørgensen’s travels took him first to the German-speaking countries (leading him to adapt his name to the German writing style and become Jürgen Jürgensen) and later to Le Locle, where he arrived in 1768. This was a crucial stage in his career as a watchmaker, since it is where he made the contacts that could supply him with components and movement blanks that he could later import in Denmark. His stay in Le Locle inevitably exposed him to the watch industry in Geneva, where he also sourced components. It was undoubtedly also an eye-opener for a watchmaker from a city that had just 20 journeymen as late as 1771, compared with 800 trained watchmakers in Geneva alone in 1760.
It is almost a travesty, at this point, to throw out the cliché “the rest is history”. But we cannot do justice in one short article to the history of the Jürgensen dynasty, which occupies over 300 pages of John M. R. Knudsen’s excellent book of the same name. Instead, we would like to illustrate how the brand is subtly continuing this tradition with its latest, discreet, promotional activities. The idea of cultural enrichment through the “journeyman years” continues as the brand invites us to travel to culturally significant places. In a first step, the brand allows us to discover Florence, with its wonderfully preserved architecture and world-renowned museums. Naturally, the experience has been captured in photographs and video with the city’s landmarks acting as a fantastic background for photos of the real hero: the watch.
