Girard Perregaux

I am a long time forum member, enjoy its every aspect, but maintain a discipline of never posting - knowing that once in I would spend even more time being enthralled in the Purists world.

This topic however trips the wire - so without turning back;

I know what you mean.

I have owned several GP's. I have loved their designs and respected their impressive competitiveness as a small family owned concern facing their much larger, better known and certainly better capitalized competitors.

To my experience, service has always, always been their weak spot.  Openly acknowledged by GP, usually with a nice sensibility and more often than not it involved sending my watches to a well known third party service center here in the United States. There the services were handled with the upmost professionalism. The limiting steps often involved a lack of spare parts, but with some patience, good humor, creativity and a willingness to compromise on items such as dials, hands, crowns, etc, the returned pieces were always satisfactory to me.

As business conditions and ownership transitions were underway at GP, I can attest to noticeable changes in their availability, interest and responsiveness.  Many unresponded inquiries, e-mails, etc..  It was made clear to me at least, that they were unable to provide service.  I continued using the third party service center where repairs that could be made were made.

As of now, I am left with a single semi operating GP. It is a model only recently discontinued from production. It was purchased new six years ago and has seen very little wear due to a multitude of problems. It has been back and forth between the dealer and GP for repairs, but I cannot really be certain regarding any chain of custody during repairs. All of this occurred during not only the GP ownership transition, but also an ownership transition at the dealer as well. I incurred significant repair costs once the warranty period expired. 

Allowing some time to for business conditions at GP to improve seemed my best choice.

Knowing that GP has become a key element of an important luxury conglomorate, I renewed contact with GP looking to finally resolve the watch's problem.  The response from their New Jersey center was very prompt, courteous and professional.  The individual assigned was friendly, informed and eager to engage.  Her well disciplined script however hardly matched. Not suprisingly, they were unable to locate any records of the watch.  There was no appreciation for the larger circumstantial and organizational failures to date, and instead the sole option offered, "Please send the watch in, the minimum service will cost $1100 plus any parts."

Dissapointed, I reached out to the trusted third party service center to see if any assistance was possible there. I was told that GP would no longer sell them parts and their own small stock could not be used for the movement in my watch. So my GP still sits in a drawer having long ago lost a spot in my watch case.

So that's the end of that story.

I certainly hope GP pays attention to the points made in this thread.  My own experience with all my GP watches has been that they are fragile and need constant service and repair.  Without a reliable, efficient and cost effective service structure, GP will continue to fail the clients they should otherwise value. We are the life blood of their business, but it is their choice how they choose to run it.

I promise any further posts will be much more in the spirit of Purists!

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