Conducting the Investigation of Lou Parnis' Namesake Watch

Many mysteries exist in our world. One of those has to do with my fascination with various timepieces. I came late in my grandfather's life, but I did have a chance to know him. He made watches and started his practice over one hundred years ago. I remember his shop, the clocks that went off at noon and his bench.


I'm an investigative reporter and my beats once included government and corporate wrongdoing. After my last book, I became a freelancer. I write about less threatening subjects these days. My most recent project involved a Parnis watch I found, named for a German Jewish watchmaker who fled to Hong Kong in the early 1900's.

A year ago this May 2015, I started  looking for watch manufacturers who people accused of making replica watches. Supposedly, that included one of the five companies manufacturing Parnis watches.

I treated my search like one of my standard cases. It usually takes about a year to complete, get all one's sources together, document findings and communicate with sources, subjects and so forth. After everything is written, an independent source has to verify the findings. I completed the investigative portion February, 2015.

I began by canvassing watch factories in Shenzhen. just north of Hong, Kong on the mainland. I found a legitimate manufacturer making watches for some top US and Swiss brands including Guess and in at least one case Glycine. My contact was the well informed Liang Hui Qian.

I ordered 50 watches from her company and solidified our business relationship.When one needs an informant, they'll become forthcoming when they can put earned some yuan in a paycheck. It also helps their employment track record.

She had real information and contracts inside a list of manufacturers reported to make Parnis watches. The list came from a popular, but highly speculative article entitle "Buying a Parnis watch, Read This First."

Another post from a German jewelry retailer Max Bouaraba, entitled  Myth or Real: PARNIS Watch Factory, contradicted the earlier post the earlier article.

Max wrote:

PARNIS is a real and almost worldwide registered brand. Most important to this, they are also registered in China and even in Europe (through Alicante). Why is it important for PARNIS to be also registered in China? It's because within China, Chinese Companies do mostly respect other Chinese Trademarks and Brands. If they don't, they easily get in trouble through their own law system.

All PARNIS watches come from only one manufacturer. 

If you think about a little, it will fast make sense to you, because no matter where you buy your PARNIS: You will not detect any slightly differences in the making which would 100% occur, if PARNIS watches would be produced by dozens of different factories. As a matter of fact: They are not. All the different sellers who even call themselves the real PARNIS are "just" wholesalers like us.

Another quote Max wrote, provided a clue:

So how could I find them anyway? 

At this point I cant go to deep, because our competitors are not sleeping. However, I had some concrete hints about the factory area and beside, I have my own QC-Team in China, so I asked them to travel to this area and check for me. 

The Same Shop In Max's Article

After many weeks of detective work we finally found the strap supplier of PARNIS who then gave us a shop address saying, that this shop was run by the wife of the brand owner. So we went to this mall and everything was clear then. After all this efforts, I was not surprised anymore about the fact, that obviously nobody outside china before ever found them in China. 

On a forum, a member asked me:

 why hire detective and not find out what does trademark caption originated from

We took it as far as we could without local assistance. The people around  the owner maintained tight lips. Also, the trademark did not help us find people at Parnis. The address given for the trademark owner is in Shenzhen, but the owner lives in Guangzhou.

I don't know if Max Bouaraba has a QC team in China or not. The girl in shop picture is not the owner's wife. The shop is not a wholesale outlet.

I contacted Max in Germany and found him most cordial. He wouldn't provide me with names. I used one of his photos of the Parnis shop in his article and sent it to a friend who works for a large watchmaking company in Guangzhou (Canton). He asked a several of his colleagues to lunch, passed the photo around and asked if anyone recognized the shop. Several did. That got us over the hill.

I made contact with another watch company employee this time in Guangzhou. I found him on LinkedIn. He had knowledgeable sources and provided much information. Next, I hired a paid investigator in Guangzhou.

We spent weeks working together. It got intense; I wound up living 12 & 13 hours ahead. Sunday night in east Texas is Monday in China. I felt like I had jet lag. My biorhythms are still out of sync. Aside from finding Parnis, we gathered a rich amount of research on Swiss watch companies with major undisclosed production facilities in China, but that's another story.

In the famous post that says Buying a Parnis? Read this first, I found a major source of misinformation. The key phrase the author wrote:  "I have my theories, and that's pushed me to write this". He had theories. Theories. The article also has this to say: "let's get something straight; Parnis is not a true brand, even if it's now been trademarked by a guy in Guangzhou." From my training, experience and knowledge, the "let's get something straight" comment feels like defamation. It's not my problem, it's the readers who refrain from purchasing the brand and the owner of the trademark.

The owner of Parnis is not some guy and his trademarks date back to 2005 in multiple locations, especially the EU facility in Spain. The "now been trademarked" comment is also misinformed. The owner renewed the trademark filed in Shenzhen, not Canton (Guangzhou). The "some guy" is Xiao Jian Hong (Avi) who started the company 01 Aug 2005. We have all the registrations from China, inspection reports and so forth to verify that assertion.

Parnis is a legitimate brand. Its owner is a registered Chinese trading company and that's not an easy registration. The current government eased some of those restrictions, but Parnis was founded in a strict registration era. (Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2015 7:06 a.m. ET, Charles Hutzler).

Here's the trail: First, I followed the money, then beat the bushes until I found my first source. Next, I contacted approximately 50 trading companies through purchase queries through aggregation sites in Beijing and Hong Kong (weeks on Skype). I found another information source through LinkedIN. One of the representatives referred me to investigators and I found one fluent in English, Mandarin and Cantonese. Next, we found Parnis's the mailing agents.

We discovered an important player known as Suntime Watch Company - the provider for all distributors according to Max.

We located Suntime in a busy manufacturer's mall (Shop A026, NO. 61, West Station Road (ZhanXi Road), Guangzhou, China.). We then tracked down the manufacturing arm, Pa JieCompany by looking in the help wanted ads.

Our investigator received quotes from Pa Jie and discovered their catalog, MOQ models and pricing. Before we made an order, we inspected their showroom in Canton, found the factory, obtained all public registration documentations, trademark filings, ownership filings, and state inspection reports. We submitted our findings to an independent source in Hong Kong. That lead to my article: A Very Close Look at Parnis Watch Company

Theories aside, the people working for the companies owned by Avi, don't speak English or at least they do not let on about their language skills. Max wrote about that in his forum post and we found it accurate. People in the Parnis facilities rely on distributors and many speak English. My inspector interviewed Chinese distributors and I contacted the English speakers.

I won't say my most difficult investigation involved finding Parnis. I considered it arduous and doubt we could have accomplished it without years of person experience as a journalist; it also didn't present me with some potential life threatening situations in which to gain valuable life skills.

That said, if I have accomplished anything with this effort, then it's setting the record straight and getting some nice watches in the process. Not bad, Zaydeh.