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A coterie of high-end watch collectors gathered at a cottage in this moneyed lake region north of Toronto one Saturday in August to enjoy the waning days of summer, drink wine and talk watches.

The hosts of the soiree — Kevin O’Leary, the Canadian businessman, personality on ABC-TV’s “Shark Tank” and devoted watch enthusiast, and his wife, Linda — have been inviting collector friends to their lakeside cottage for an annual get-together for the past few years. This year’s gathering, with about 30 guests, was the largest. And unlike most watch meet-ups, where Rolex and other big brands tend to dominate, it celebrated watchmaking esoterica.

The collectors, many of them Canadian entrepreneurs and captains of industry, have gravitated to niche brands — Ferdinand Berthoud, Greubel Forsey, Ludovic Ballouard and Simon Brette, for example — that reflected their rarefied tastes.

One maker, however, stood out, remarkable for how often he was mentioned and the respect that he commanded.

“Journe is a base line for all of these people,” Mr. O’Leary said, referring to the French-born watchmaker François-Paul Journe, who founded his namesake brand, F.P. Journe, in Geneva in 1999.

“The guy’s making 900 mechanical pieces a year,” he added. “There’s demand for 10,000.”

Regarded by many experts as the greatest living watchmaker, Mr. Journe, 69, has built a business in which extreme demand, scarcity and hype have intersected to produce spectacular results in the primary and secondary markets. Even the brand’s quartz-powered Élégante watches, which start at 15,400 Swiss francs (about $18,700), sell secondhand for as much as 10 times their retail value.

Paul Boutros, the head of watches in the Americas division at the auction house Phillips and a guest at the Muskoka gathering, put it bluntly, “It’s the hottest brand in the world right now.”

Mr. Boutros would know. In June, after nearly nine minutes of bidding, a Chronomètre à Résonance Souscription, No. 007 by Mr. Journe sold for $13.92 million at a Phillips sale in New York. According to the auction house, it was the most expensive watch that the brand has sold at auction and the highest price ever achieved by an independent maker on the secondary market. It bested a record set in December, when the brand’s FFC Prototype watch, which belonged to the film director Francis Ford Coppola, sold for $10.75 million, also at Phillips in New York.

Mr. Journe himself acknowledged the market’s extravagance. “I am very pleased with the results, although I find them a little exaggerated, even for very rare watches,” he wrote in an email.

And those were merely the headline grabbers. Behind the multimillion-dollar auction sales, F.P. Journe has all but rewritten the rulebook for secondary market success, said Giovanni Prigigallo, a co-founder of EveryWatch, a platform that aggregates data on what pre-owned luxury watches are worth and where to buy them.

EveryWatch is on the brink of publishing a 132-page report on F.P. Journe that describes the brand’s secondhand business as “the fastest-appreciating market in modern horology.”

“F.P. Journe makes three to four watches a day,” an early draft of the report said. “In the first half of 2026 the secondary market moved $202 million of them — up 196.9 percent on the year, and the strongest result on record for any independent watchmaker.”

King of the Indies

To understand Mr. Journe’s cultlike following, Mr. Boutros said it was important to consider his achievements in the wider context of independent watchmaking. The term loosely refers to artisans who produce limited numbers of high-end mechanical timepieces with total creative freedom, not beholden to any corporate interests.

Even though Chanel acquired a 20 percent stake in F.P. Journe in 2018, the deal, by all accounts, did not change how Mr. Journe, a famously prickly personality, ran his business.

“He’s not following the market, not following any trends, just doing his thing,” Mr. Boutros said.

Mr. Journe said as much: “I do not chase growth,” he wrote. “I like our human scale, like a family.” (The business, which has its headquarters in Geneva and two workshops in Meyrin, Switzerland, has a total of about 155 employees in watch production.)

That streak of nonconformity, coupled with Mr. Journe’s commitment to the scientific tradition of horology epitomized by George Daniels — the 20th-century British watchmaker credited by watch experts as the first person to transform the craft of watchmaking from a utilitarian pursuit into an art form — has made him a guiding light for a generation of horological talents. (In 2015, he made his mentorship official with the creation of the F.P. Journe Young Talent Competition, an annual contest, supported by the Singapore watch retailer the Hour Glass, which helps young watchmaking students and recent graduates establish themselves in the world of independent watchmaking.)

But initially, with relatively few Journe timepieces in circulation, it took time for the market to catch up. “Now, here we are, 27 years since the official launch of Journe, and, at most, there are about 20,000 mechanical Journes out there,” Mr. Boutros said. “And that’s enough to make it interesting.”

Devotees of Mr. Journe, such as Igor Boguslavsky — an I.T. executive from Illinois who, along with his wife, attended the O’Learys’ watch soiree in late August — often point to his instantly recognizable aesthetic as the gateway to their obsession with the brand.

That is especially true of the Chronomètre à Résonance, arguably Mr. Journe’s defining timepiece. Introduced in 2000, the model was inspired by a double movement pendulum clock made by the 18th-century watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet for King Louis XVIII of France. In 1983, Mr. Journe, then just 26 years old, restored it for the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris.

“The fact that there was something so unique about the design and the dials — it was like nothing else on the market,” Mr. Boguslavsky said. (He said he could not be sure whether his first Journe watch, acquired about 2011, was a Résonance, but it might have been)

He reflected on how the watch business had changed since he started collecting in the late 1990s. “I remember a time when you bought a watch and you expected to lose 20 to 30 percent after wearing it,” Mr. Boguslavsky said. “The idea of getting a watch that’s worth two, three, five, even 10 times what you paid for it is a phenomenon.”

Cultivating Collectors

A decade ago, buying a timepiece directly from F.P. Journe was as straightforward as walking into one of the brand’s worldwide points of sale and paying for one. Today, it’s the horological equivalent of trying out for the Olympics.

Allocations are tightly controlled. Unlike some luxury watch brands, which require customers to purchase additional, less-coveted watches in order to buy the one they really want (a practice known as bundling), F.P. Journe insists that its clients understand the timepiece they are buying and can demonstrate that to their sales adviser.

Pierre Halimi Lacharlotte, the longtime general manager of F.P. Journe Americas, explained that the brand holds regular talks at its boutiques and invites prospective clients to attend.

“Our job is to find the best collector possible for Journe,” he said in a recent phone interview. “If you’re not passionate about the watch and you do not know what it is, you’re not going to have it.”

Mr. Lacharlotte, who is based in Miami, said it took the brand’s U.S. team two months this year to come up with a list of sales recommendations. “We are traumatized by flippers,” he said.

Michael McGovern, a 26-year-old collector in Toronto who joined his parents at the O’Learys’ cottage in late August, where Mr. Lacharlotte and his wife also were guests, said he was aware of the brand’s strict policies about resale.

“There’s actually kind of a procedure for selling a Journe,” said Mr. McGovern, who wore a titanium Élégante model he had bought directly from the brand. “You have to contact them and say, ‘I’m not interested in this watch anymore, and here are the reasons why.’ I was at an event once and they literally said, ‘If you sell your watch without talking to us, you’re never getting another watch again.’”

The Journe Society, an invitation-only group of collectors dedicated to honoring Mr. Journe’s vision and legacy, operates according to a similar transaction philosophy, said Brad Schwartz, a finance executive in New York who serves as the society’s president.

“It is not about trading or speculation,” Mr. Schwartz said during a coffee meeting in early September in Beverly Hills, Calif.

He said the group, which formed a decade ago, operated independently of the brand, but he declined to disclose its membership numbers.

“We’re not a secret society, but we’re discreet,” Mr. Schwartz said. “People from all different walks of life come together — you sit down at the table and try to crowd out the market noise. It has to come back to the fundamentals of what brought us together, which is, ‘What makes Journe special?’”

Timing Is Everything

Among Mr. Journe’s most devoted followers, the answer to that question inevitably centers on his commitment to chronometry.

“That is a fundamental value for the best watches in the world — being able to keep accurate time,” Mr. Boutros said. He compared Mr. Journe’s use of high-quality escapements (the mechanism that controls the release of energy from the mainspring to the hands) to Rolex and Patek Philippe, the two blue-chip brands.

“What does Journe have in common?” he added. “He uses free-sprung escapements across all of his mechanical models. At the same time, he’s a great artisan. The watches fit wrist sizes of all types.”

William Rohr, the founder of the independent brand Massena LAB, who is known in the industry as William Massena, said he fell under Mr. Journe’s spell nearly 30 years ago in Geneva and remained an acolyte for all the reasons that Mr. Boutros mentioned.

“He’s such a luminous watchmaker, so good on so many levels,” Mr. Massena said. “Today, it’s all about finishing: how perfect the watch is. But to Journe, what’s important is the aesthetic of the watch, the chronometry of the watch, the reference to important watchmakers who came before him.”

That combination has steadily transformed F.P. Journe into a top-performing asset, said Linden Lazarus, co-founder and chief executive of Collectible, a watch technology company focused on after-sales service.

“If you asked people 10 years ago, ‘Are they worth this money?’ nobody would have said yes,” Mr. Lazarus said by phone recently. “The magic is there are very few of them. They have such a specific design language that they don’t look like any other watch. Because of that, they can support a high price.”

And yet, with models such as the Chronomètre Furtif, which trades for about $1.4 million in secondary channels, it is natural to wonder: Is the Journe mania, the madness of recent years, just a bubble?

For Mr. Massena, the question itself hints at a larger concern.

“F.P. Journe is the watch for the real watch lover,” Mr. Massena said. “He went from being unknown — if you know, you know — and today he’s the biggest flex in watchmaking.

“It breaks my heart,” he added.