Independents

Since especially with independent watchmakers, you largely invest / buy into the person behind the brand, I think it's worth to take a closer look at the journey Mr Frässdorf has had so far. 

Mr Frässdorf undoubtably has engineering originality and skills, although many of his creations did/do not work. But his way to conduct business and is a completely different thing and shines a not very positive light on the character "Frässdorf".

I try to keep it short but literally every business he has started in the past or even regular employments, have resulted in a lawsuit. Yes, a lawsuit. In watchmaking. This is so rare, that when I started readying up on Mr Frässdorf, I doubted the first few information until I gathered multiple sources (people and also legal documents available).

• Mr Frässdorf signed a contract with Marc Brogsitter to create a set of watches and received funds to setup up a complete watchmaking shop (six figures sum) and work exclusively on this set of watches to be commercially distributed later on. Mr Frässdorf also received a five figure monthly salary over the course of two years. Yet, this seemed to be not sufficient for KF and he started working on other projects which delayed the progress of the Brogsitter watches massively and resulted ultimately in KF being sued over breach of contract, when KF started to use parts constructed in the "Brogsitter workshop" or sold precious metals which were brought with Brogsitter funds and meant for gold cases. (documented in the EU lawsuit files)

• Through the contacts of Mr Brogsitter, KF got in contact with a wealthy widow from Germany. She invested a seven figure in the person KF and never received one watch. This was also disputed in front of a German court, KF lost and KF had to give an affidavit of means but of course he had no assets and everything, like his house or cars or money, was owned by his wife.

• Then he worked on the project "Fabrication De Montres Normandes"  which resulted in another dead company due to watches that never reached the market.

• Then came "Heritage Watch Manufactory" with impressive looking watches but even with another great watchmaker at his side, this company was doomed and resulted in liquidation

• After these came involvements with Leroy where he was tasked to construct watch movements. His creation of a Tourbillon never worked reliably and another movement was also never brought to actual production other than a prototype. As a result he was sued by the Festina Group and lost.

• Despite his obvious reputation at this point, he was also hired by ChronoSwiss to construct a new movement for them. He never delivered and their release plus production was heavily delayed due to the need to hire someone else. As a result he was sued and lost that lawsuit as well.

I'm curious when and how the first "problems" or rather lawsuits will popup related to his newest project "Montres KF".

The user Ornatus-Mundi has summed it up perfectly "The Watchmaker Designer has probably caused more lawsuits than he has produced watches"

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