Urban Jürgensen: Introducing Elite Watchmaking to New Audiences

Historic Danish watch company Urban Jürgensen, which was relaunched in 2025 and positioned at the top end of the market, is mainly a collector’s brand.

Chief executive Alex Rosenfield sees potential to broaden its appeal. To that end, Timothée Chalamet took a minority stake in the company this year and will be involved with a push to engage younger, lifestyle clients.

Urban Jürgensen was reborn in 2021 when the Rosenfield family led a group of investors that acquired and poured $25 million into the brand. Veteran watchmaker Kari Voutilainen, who had worked at the watchmaker in the 1980s, led revival efforts.

Founded by a Switzerland-trained watchmaker from Denmark, it had served the Danish Royal Court in the Eighteenth Century and was the Danish navy’s clockmaker but had gone dormant for decades and previous attempts at revival had met with little success.

Today, timepieces, which include the three-handed UJ2 model and UJ3 model featuring a perpetual calendar, are priced between $140,000 and $500,000. Made in the watchmaker’s workshops in Biel, Switzerland, they are sold directly to clients, on a first-come, first-serve basis, bypassing traditional retail channels.

Rosenfield explains in ‘Face to Face With Luxury Clients’ why he thinks independent watchmakers should move beyond traditional communication focused on the technical details of a timepiece and engage with people through an emphasis on lifestyle and a fresh approach to community building.

BoF: Who are your main clients?

Alex Rosenfield: Eighty percent are very, very serious traditional watch collectors. But 20 percent are people who’ve bought Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet and Rolex. They haven’t delved deeply into the world of watches, but they want things that are exceptional.

We’re working to build that group. They are often not spoken to by the watch world. There’s a lot happening here that will interest them.

BoF: Can you talk about your tie-up with Timothée Chalamet?

AR: He is very much the customer we want to speak to — he had mostly been exposed to Cartier and big brands. We explained our history, how we were relaunching, the way we were doing things very methodically and slowly with focus on craft, on creativity. He wanted to be part of it.

We have a 10-year development plan. He wants to help us make things and bring his ideas of how to communicate, especially with younger people. How do we take independent watchmaking to a Gen Z audience and help them understand the through-lines of craft and creativity? It is natural for him.

BoF: With big brands like Rolex, Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet increasingly dominating a polarised watch market, where do independent watchmakers fit in?

AR: What we are trying to do and what most independents have not done — while the big brands have — is tell a story. Not just to the gearheads, but to lifestyle customers, people who care about beautiful things, about fashion, the objects they’re surrounded with and what they wear.

The world of independent watchmaking can often be inadvertently verboten. There’s so much about engineering and precision and mechanics — we shouldn’t need to prove that the watch keeps time.

What matters is how you spend time. No matter how much you love watches, your day is not about your watch.

BoF: How do you define luxury today?

AR: Luxury is living beautifully, having the time to enjoy the things you love to do, less about enforced rules and more about spaces and objects that bring joy.

Three brands have defined modern luxury in a special way. Ralph Lauren did the best job at world building and creating a universe that you wanted to step into. They had ads in the 1980s and 90s where there were no clothes at all. A picture of a boat with no clothes told you more about Ralph Lauren’s clothes than any product picture.

Hermès does craft incredibly well and explains its universe without feeling stuffy and does it with joy, while also having this focus on craftsmanship.

The Row has taken modern luxury and said, ‘What does it look like to live in a beautiful world today?’ Their Instagram feed, especially at the beginning, was as much about the glass you were drinking wine out of as it was about the clothes or painting on your wall or which chair you bought.

BoF: Are you seeing new generations of watch nerds emerging? What are they looking for?

AR: We have collectors from their late 20s to their early 80s. Different people connect to different aspects of what we’re doing.

Our idea is, what if you talk about the craftsmanship, the history, the universe of luxury? How do different things within that world touch different people? We’ve done this campaign ‘Time Well Spent.’ We take somebody we think is interesting, doing something we like. The first one was [artist] James Turrell.

None of the people we were speaking about have been paid. They each receive a watch for being part of ‘Time Well Spent,’ so they only do it if they like what we’re doing and are passionate about it.

BoF: How are you engaging with clients?

AR: We try to have a very personal interactive relationship with clients and collectors. We’re also doing dinners and events, getting people together. It creates an emotional connection. It’s getting out of this idea of sales and into the idea of community building.

The industry has been captured by the use of scarcity to sell products. We hate the idea. Urban Jürgensens are slow to get because they’re slow to make.

BoF: What are your retail channels?

AR: We’re inside Pace Gallery [in New York]. We meet with collectors here. We have our atelier in Biel, Switzerland, where the watches are made, and are opening an office, watchmaking atelier, showroom in Geneva within the next year. There’s a lot of event-based interaction. It’s all direct-to-clients.

A lot of the industry has been captured by the use of scarcity to sell products. We hate the idea. Urban Jürgensens are slow to get because they’re slow to make and they’re rare. I would hate the idea of somebody leveraging that to sell somebody something they don’t like. Our sales structure is to be candid, give people honest estimates of when things will be done, communicate if there’s a delay.

This article first appeared in ‘Face to Face With Luxury Clients,’ the latest edition in our State of Fashion series co-published by BoF Insights and McKinsey & Company.

This interview has been edited and condensed.