6 Women in Watches: Joy and Strain

"With their smaller hands, women have always done the work that men couldn't do," said Anita Porchet, a watch enamel artist "My father had a few watches, and my mother owned a Piaget watch," she said "As a teenager, I was fascinated by watches even though watches were not a subject of conversation at home," she said.

After retiring from Audemars Piguet in 1999, she continued to work as an independent consultant in the watch industry The watch industry generally abandoned enameling 30 years ago, but Ms Porchet was able to find work producing dials for Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin.

With 20 years of experience designing sports watches and complicated timepieces, Magali Métrailler is something of an industry veteran at 42.She spent the first decade of her professional career at Jaeger-LeCoultre and has spent the next 10 working as an independent designer from her home in L'Isle, a 30-minute drive northwest of Lausanne, Switzerland Her first contact with watches came from her stepfather, a self-employed maker who also sold watches. . Source