Charles Girardier is one of the more unusual revival stories in independent watchmaking because it doesn’t begin with a marketing exercise.
It begins with Patrick Ulm, a former private banker, a pocket-watch collector and a historic Geneva signature that had slipped into obscurity.
Since reviving the name in 2018, Ulm has steered Charles Girardier toward a very specific idea of modern haute horlogerie, using documented antique pieces as starting points rather than making replicas.
At a glance
- Patrick Ulm, founder and chairman of CG-Watches SA, revived Charles Girardier in 2018 after researching the work of Girardier l’aîné.
- The brand’s modern watches draw on historic objects, with signatures including automata, grand feu enamel and the Plénitude’s cone-and-feeler power reserve.
- The Plénitude PL1 retails for CHF 17,800, with 25 pieces per reference and a declared ceiling of 300 pieces for the collection.
From a pocket watch at Greenway to a revived Geneva name
Ulm says the path to Charles Girardier began at Greenway, Agatha Christie’s former holiday home in Devon, where he encountered an enamelled pocket watch signed “Girardier l’aîné”.
At the time, the name meant little to him, even though he had collected pocket watches for years.
The contradiction intrigued him.
As Ulm has described it, Christie was not someone who collected without reason, yet here was a refined enameller, guillocheur and movement-maker whose name had largely disappeared from view.
His subsequent research took him through museums, archives and auction catalogues, leading to Charles Girardier, born in Geneva in 1759, who opened his own workshop at 21 and died in 1839 without descendants.
Ulm has been careful to frame his role not as an heir, but as a collector rebuilding a name around evidence.
That distinction matters, because the contemporary Charles Girardier watches are not styled as period pastiche.
The brand’s method is to begin with an existing Girardier object, then translate one idea into a present-day watch.
A brand shaped by automata, enamel and the GPHG
The revival moved quickly.
In 2020, the Charles Girardier Signature Mystérieuse “Fleur de Sel” won the Ladies’ Complication Watch Prize at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève.
The 37 mm watch combined a grand feu dial with silver paillons, an automaton, a 60-second flying tourbillon and a diamond-set bezel.
For Ulm, the prize was more than validation for a new independent brand.
He has said it also brought the Charles Girardier name back into the room where fine watchmaking is judged, 181 years after Girardier’s death.
The technical and decorative choices were not incidental.
Ulm identifies métiers d’art, automata and historical mechanisms as part of the Maison’s DNA, while also acknowledging that a brand can’t be built on spectacle alone.
The Plénitude is the pivotal watch in that respect, because it marks the move from supplied calibres to the brand’s own movement work.
Buchs and the modern La Fabrique approach
Charles Girardier is headquartered in Buchs, where Ulm works with watchmakers Cyrano Devanthey and Dominique Buser.
Ulm says the CG PL1 and CG PL2 calibres were designed with Devanthey and Buser, and he is notably direct about naming the people behind the work rather than hiding them behind vague manufacture language.
That fits his broader view of how a small independent should operate.
He has compared the structure to Geneva’s historic La Fabrique, the decentralised network of specialist workshops that supported watchmaking in Girardier’s century.
In Charles Girardier’s present form, that means specialist decoration in Geneva, assembly with independent watchmakers and hand-stitched straps from Geneva.
It also explains the brand’s commercial stance.
Ulm says Charles Girardier has no boutiques, no advertising budget and no distribution layer taking margin, allowing the company to sell directly to collectors.
The Plénitude and its Volcano power reserve
The Plénitude is the clearest expression of Ulm’s method.
Its starting point was not a dial sketch, but a winding key from a period Girardier pocket watch.
That inspiration became a layered mechanical idea.
The crown takes its form from the historic key, while beneath the dial a cone on a screw thread measures mainspring tension, and above the dial a hand displays that change along the north-south axis.
The mechanism is known as the Volcano Power Reserve.
Rather than placing a small power reserve display in a corner, the indication runs from 12 to 6 o’clock, giving the complication visual priority.
Ulm has described the construction as a wheel in mesh with the ratchet wheel turning a vertical screw, with a truncated cone descending as the watch is wound and rising as tension falls.
A feeler arm follows the cone and drives the hand.
The watch’s appeal is not just the presence of a proprietary complication, but the way its concept can be read through the object.
Key, cone and hand become one idea expressed at different levels of the watch.
Details & Specifications
| Brand | Charles Girardier |
|---|---|
| Model | Plénitude PL1 |
| Case material | Steel |
| Case thickness | 10.95 mm |
| Movement | CG PL1 manufacture calibre |
| Complication | Volcano Power Reserve with cone, screw and feeler mechanism |
| Decoration | Hand anglage with cabron and diamantine, as described by Patrick Ulm |
| Price | CHF 17,800 |
| Production | 25 pieces per reference, with a declared ceiling of 300 pieces for the collection |
| Distribution | Direct to collectors |
What comes next for Charles Girardier
Ulm has indicated that the next step is not simply another complication.
His emphasis is on consolidating the identity that now exists through the brand’s method, its manufacture calibre and its named collaborators.
There is, however, a confirmed development ahead.
For Watches and Wonders 2027, Ulm says the Synchronaut will receive a new dial.
The model is built around a GMT function with home time set by pushers and a snailed date counter derived from a Girardier pocket watch.
That future direction sounds consistent with the rest of the project.
Charles Girardier is not trying to make antique watches for modern wrists, but modern watches that remain accountable to the antique pieces that inspired them.
For collectors drawn to independent watchmaking, that may be the brand’s most compelling quality.
