“It’s why even today there isn’t much watchmaking in Catholic countries,” says Mr Benoît Mintiens, the watch designer and founder of Ressence. “Six hundred years on, watchmaking is still a regional activity. Even the northern climate, for which organising the provision of food to see you through winter was a matter of survival and which shaped a work ethic, has been a factor. You have to be very precise to work with watches and I think to some extent that has to be in the genes.”

Mr Jean-Daniel Pasche, president of the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry, agrees, arguing further that there are qualities in the Swiss – their culture, even their topography – that have coalesced to give them the edge in watchmaking. Historically a poor farming people, long hard winters left them seeking seasonal employment that could be done anywhere – remotely, you might say – without the need for the kind of major industrial infrastructure typically found around big cities. Watch assembly was one solution. “And while other countries have a long history of watchmaking, I think there’s something in the fact that watches are small things and the Swiss people like precision,” Pasche says.

Later, other factors came into play. In 1541, the city of Geneva, experiencing its own religious upheavals and the imposition of Calvinist austerity, banned gold jewellery. What did all the jewellers do? They turned instead to making watches and developed an early expertise in the process. Much later still, countries developing a watchmaking sector also needed to be relatively advanced in industrialisation. “Even a century ago, the complexity of the specialist machinery needed for mass producing watches was very high and access to that increasingly complex machinery was a factor in Switzerland dominating the global industry, even 40 years ago,” Mintiens says.

It has also been argued that WWI and WWII did much to kill off what was left of many nations’ watchmaking industries, either through occupation or through a necessary shift to making military equipment and instrumentation for the war effort. Neutral Switzerland found itself with an effective monopoly and free to continue to develop its civilian offer. There were other giant watch industries, in Russia, for instance, and India, which still has its Titan brand, but for reasons of politics and populations, they served only their domestic markets.

“The fact is that the Swiss never lost their skills and kept on exporting, and if you’re free to just keep at watchmaking constantly for decades, you get very good at it, whereas starting again from scratch is just incredibly complicated,” says Mr Giles English, co-founder of the British watch brand Bremont.

The result, agrees Büsser, is that the Swiss industry has attained a kind of critical mass that is hard to counter. “And that’s in its skills base, in its machinery and in public perception, too,” he says. “Switzerland has the ecosystem of parts supply such that, even if I wanted to, it would be almost impossible to make a watch in, say, Dubai.”

This is not to suggest that the Swiss just got lucky. As their industry grew less piecemeal, it also became adaptable. Contrary to the perception that “Swiss made” is only about top-end quality, the industry “always managed to meet the expectations of a wide variety of consumers, those who wanted extreme complications, but also those who wanted a cheap quartz watch,” Pasche says.

Then came arguably its smartest move. While other nations’ manufacturers fizzled out in the shadows, the Swiss industry embraced full-fanfare marketing. “Today you can go to any airport in the world and the first thing you’ll see is an advertisement for a Swiss watchmaker,” Pasche says.

“Pushing ‘Made in Switzerland’ as a brand in its own right was a brilliant idea,” says Mintiens. “It’s like buying wine. If you don’t know much about wine, eventually you just buy French because the assumption is that French wine is the best. And the same assumptions are made about Swiss watches. Japanese watchmaking is every bit as good as Swiss, but saying so is like telling a German car manufacturer that a Toyota is just as good. That may be true, but there’s still that layer of branding. It’s still cooler to drive a Porsche.”

Is that surmountable? Büsser notes how independent watchmakers, of which there are a rising number, are often found outside Switzerland, perhaps because the sheer scale of the industry there mitigates against a culture of entrepreneurialism. He says there’s “a whole new era of watch brands coming” that will continue to open up a growing secondary space for watch innovation and consumption, but he concedes that “this will still just be a blip on the radar relative to the Swiss”.

Maybe then, it is just a matter of time. Yes, Swiss watchmaking has the heritage, the legacy and the story-telling, contends Mr Giovanni Moro, co-founder of the Italian brand Unimatic, but other nations can develop the same, given time. “Since the Japanese entered the business, they’ve proved themselves to be rigorous makers of very precise watches,” he says. “It may take many years, but they too will have a heritage in watchmaking eventually.

“Besides, there’s also a younger generation of consumers now who are maturing and much less concerned about the physical place where their products come from. They know, for example, that their iPhones are incredibly good and they don’t care if they’re made in California or Shenzhen, as they are. You can see the same happening with watches.”

Unsurprisingly, Pasche doesn’t think the Swiss-made star will dim, even as the internet extends watch enthusiasts’ knowledge and awareness of makers from other parts of the world, even as the recent pandemic-induced crash in the availability of Swiss watches prompted enthusiasts to explore what’s available further afield, even as the nature of status symbols undergoes radical change.

“Of course, there are challengers now and the industry has to keep working to maintain the reputation is has,” he says. “The bigger challenge is just convincing people to take an interest in an object that really nobody needs any more.”