Marc Brogsitter
Marc Brogsitter was a German lawyer and a passionate collector of shaped mid-century wristwatches, particularly those from Patek Philippe. In the early 2000s he was struck with the idea of creating his own eponymous brand, and partnered with Karsten Fräßdorf, a young watchmaker then working at Gübelin who would go on to found his own brand, Montres KF, in 2016. The pair were later joined by fellow Gübelin-trained watchmaker Urs Gottscheu; Brogsitter, who was not a watchmaker himself, drove the design vision while Fräßdorf and Gottscheu handled the technical execution.
Rather than build on an existing ébauche, the team developed its calibres entirely from scratch: a tourbillon (Cal. 793/794T) and a constant-force escapement (Cal. 793/794), each housed in one of two distinctive rectangular case designs — one with straight lugs, one with more elaborate fancy lugs and a faceted crystal — cast in 18-karat white or rose gold. Across the brand's short life, only around a dozen watches were ever completed and delivered.
Brogsitter himself showed the tourbillon and constant-force watches at Baselworld around 2005 or 2006, where he was introduced by Philippe Dufour to a young Phillips specialist — an encounter Dufour apparently thought important enough to personally seek out. The reference 2181 tourbillon, in particular, houses an unusually large 17mm tourbillon cage running at an extra-slow beat rate inside a genuinely rare rectangular architecture; the only other 21st-century rectangular tourbillon movements of comparable ambition are generally understood to come from Patek Philippe. The partnership ended in 2014 amid a legal dispute between Brogsitter and Fräßdorf that reached the European Court of Justice over jurisdictional questions in EU civil liability law, and the brand never resumed production.
In 2026, decades after the brand's operation had ended, Phillips uncovered a watch that revised what specialists thought they knew about Brogsitter's output entirely: a minute repeater, previously unknown even to those who had spent years assuming the brand made only its two rectangular calibres. Circa 2005, its platinum case is a comparatively compact 36mm and round rather than rectangular, its guilloché dial concealing a vintage minute repeater movement inside a case made by Jean-Pierre Hagmann — among the most celebrated case makers of the past half-century, responsible for some of Patek Philippe's most important minute-repeater cases and, later in his career, for cases made for Rexhep Rexhepi — his stamp visible both between the lugs and on an accompanying second caseback. Whether the piece was a special commission or part of a separate project remains unknown; only two Brogsitter minute repeaters have been identified to date, this round example and a second in a tonneau-shaped case.
Brogsitter passed away a few years before his family consigned one of the surviving tourbillon watches to Phillips's Geneva Watch Auction: XIX in May 2024 — the first Brogsitter watch to appear at international auction, estimated at 35,000 to 70,000 Swiss francs; the minute repeater followed in Phillips's Geneva Sessions, Fall 2026 online auction, estimated at 50,000 to 100,000 Swiss francs. The brand has no operating website, Instagram, or current retail presence; what survives is a small, closely studied body of work among collectors on forums like WatchProSite, most of whom admire the ambition and movement engineering while noting the rectangular cases ran larger and thicker than contemporary taste might now prefer.