Hello, Earlier this month, I set up an interview with the watch designer Sylvain Berneron. At the prearranged time, Berneron’s name and voice appeared on my laptop screen, but there was no video. He apologised for the technical hitch. We must proceed without looking at one another.
This, frankly, was a relief. Stylish, charming, French, and so good-looking you feel like bursting into tears every time you see a picture of him – his wife and business partner Marie-Alix could also pass for an international model – Berneron is hot in every sense. |
The yellow gold Mirage Sienna. And the white gold Mirage Prussian Blue |
The watch designer’s company – also ‘Berneron’ – announced itself to the market towards the end of last year. The response was ecstatic. If no one knew they wanted an asymmetrical dress watch that looked like a mash-up of a Patek Philippe Calatrava and a Cartier Crash, cost the same as a London flat and came in any material you liked – so long as that material was 18k yellow gold or 18k white gold – that changed overnight. This was the Mirage, Berneron’s debut watch, the first models of which arrive next month.
The Mirage doesn’t just come with a Dalí-esq face. Its movement – the entire eternal structure that makes the watch tick – also looked like it should be hung in the Louvre. This too was made from solid gold. In fact, everything was. Right down to the spring bars – the small pieces of metal that no one sees that are used to hold watch straps in place. Berneron’s arrival chimes with what has been called ‘the rise of the independents’ – small-batch, high-priced, design-led companies that are giving the top-tier Swiss luxury brands a run in the bragging rights stakes.
What makes Sylvain Berneron unique is that he launched his own brand while maintaining his day job – as chief product officer at Breitling.
Breitling is hugely popular and successful, but it is known for producing adventure-adjacent lifestyle watches, especially pilot’s watches. It has yet to venture into solid gold dress watches with melty faces.
Sylvain’s time at Breitling coincided with the arrival of formidable CEO Georges Kern, formerly of IWC Schaffhausen. Together they transformed an already successful business into a very successful one – according to a Morgan Stanley 2023 report Breitling entered the top 10 of luxury Swiss watch brands for the first time, joining Rolex, Cartier, Omega and Audemars Piguet. The designer has been fulsome in his praise of his old boss, for allowing him to crack on with his own project – an unusual situation, to be sure. |
“I have to applaud Georges for his open-mindedness. He gave me the permission… I’m allowed to do pieces under my own name,” he said, last year. “And these products have nothing in common with Breitling pieces. Because all the good ideas for modern sports watches, I already give them to Breitling.”
But now Sylvain has gone solo. Based on the reception his watches have had, that seems to be working out nicely. But enthusiasm alone can’t put food on the table – and the move was a massive roll of the dice, as we shall see…
About Time: Congratulations on the reception for Berneron Sylvain Berneron: It’s a very interesting turn of events, to be honest with you. It has taken 15 years of savings, pretty much all the money I’ve got. I went against the advice of my father to buy a house. Instead, I’m 35-years-old, renting a flat and making weird watches. But I’m happier this way. And I would never have guessed that it would get such positive feedback.
What was your father’s advice?
To save a third of your salary every month, and you will have enough to buy a house. And I stuck to it. Which was not easy. A few years back I got a good job – chief product officer of Breitling. So, I’ve been very tempted to treat myself and spend the money on toys. But I didn’t. And that’s helped me now because I never upgraded my lifestyle. The economics of a project like the Mirage are pretty brutal. I’ve invested CHF1.1m [£970,000], which is all the money I had. I’ve been working almost three years now, seven days a week. And [the watches] haven’t made a single Swiss franc.
What do the rest of your family think?
My mother is no longer with us. She was a painter, so she gave me the artistic inclination – the courage to develop ideas, no matter what the consensus is around them. My dad is more rational and planted into the ground – so he was not happy. My wife is an architect. She works full-time at an architecture agency here in Neuchâtel [Switzerland]. She’s been helping me during the weekends. Of course, I asked her permission because she’s entitled to know how I plan to allocate my finances. But she knew it was a huge risk.
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Why was the Mirage particularly risky?
Making a watch brand is a risky endeavour, like any start-up project. And in this case, when you make a new watch, and especially when you create a new movement, the movement development part and the tooling [machining] represents around 70-75 per cent of the whole investment. So, making this new calibre cost around CHF700,000 [£620,000]. From a business perspective, what you want is to protect that investment as much as you can. Which is why watchmakers make round movements. Then, if your design fails, you can still reuse that movement in another case shape. In my case, the case and in the movements are completely married. The shape of the watch emulates from the movement being asymmetric. So, if [I couldn’t sell the watch] I’d be stuck with these movements. On top of that, with the sort of artistic insolence that I like to practice, I made [the watches] in full gold. Creatively speaking, it is very exciting. But once you play this project back into reality, I had to face obstacles that I would never have imagined in the beginning. One of which was that I had to convince the suppliers to do it. They told me ‘Look, we think you’re committing professional suicide. You should go home and rethink. We’re not willing to do that for you’. You’d think that once you have the money, the idea and the time to do it, you would be good to go, right? Not even. So, I had to push very hard. And in order to decrease the risk for them, I agreed to pay in full at the beginning. And then wait for 18 months. So, the financial risk involved was tremendous. I had endless resources to play with at Breitling. But these kinds of projects cannot be made within big brands. Because when you put the numbers together on an Excel Sheet it simply doesn’t add up. The risk involved is disproportionate to the benefits.
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The caseback of the Mirage Prussian Blue |
You started off as an industrial designer, right? At BMW?
Yes. There was a design contract for students back then. And the first prize was a six-month internship at BMW. So, I packed my backpack when I was 19. They took me out of school. I [was doing] a full day as an apprentice at BMW and then going back to [the prestigious university] LMU München in the evenings. What was that like? It was the biggest structure I’ve worked in. The BMW Group Research and Innovation Centre. We were 11,000 employees – almost like a micro city, in a city. This is where I was taught the strong basics of industrial design and how to develop a product and methodology. The ethics that I still work by today.
Is there much crossover between car design and watch design?
Yes, a lot. In the watchmaking industry, you find a lot of guys from the car industry. Like Fabrizio Buonamassa from Bulgari [acclaimed designer, responsible for Bulgari’s Octo Finissimo, among others, formerly of Alfa Romeo]. Both a car and a watch are very technical objects. In a car you discuss down to a millimetre. In a watch, we discuss down to a tenth of a millimetre. That takes quite a while to get your eye trained to. But I found the car industry way too restrictive, creatively. The days when you can make Testarossas and Lamborghinis are long gone, because of the safety features and all the tech you have to put in. And also, in the long run, cars will no longer be the personal commodities that they are today. But the watch industry is a little bubble of creativity, where effectively the worst thing that can happen is that the watch stops. They also have marginal impact on the environment. Those two things are more in line with my personal values.
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Were you always into watches?
My father and uncles were traditional watch guys. I was surrounded by Rolex Submariners and [Omega] Speedmasters. The usual suspects, if you like. But at the time [watches] were far from being such a big deal, like they are today. I remember seeing my dad gardening with his Submariner – and throwing it in the grass, because it was annoying him. They cost 25 per cent of what they cost today. My dad got his for CHF2,500 [£2,200] or something. Racing motorcycles was my hobby when I was a kid. I was far more attracted to the speed and the thrill of riding than hanging around with watches.
Tell me about your time at Breitling
I started in a small team because effectively Breitling didn’t have an in-house product development team when the new management took over [Georges Kern joined Breitling in 2017 after a successful 15-year tenure as CEO of IWC Schaffhausen. Under his leadership, Breitling has experienced exponential growth, doubling its turnover over the last two years]. They were still working with suppliers. So, Breitling was not constructing its cases. It was not designing its own product. This was all done externally, like in the old days. So, we started product development. It started with four guys and when I left five years later [earlier this year], we were almost 60. I really enjoyed my time there. I learned a ton. I learned a great deal about management, large-scale manufacturing, the economics involved in ramping up a turnover. We started at [an annual turnover of] $400 million – now it’s close to a billion. It has been a tremendous journey.
A large part of that success has been down to revamping the watches
I completely rebuilt the entire portfolio from start to finish, over the course of five years, which was extremely intense. My team and I have developed 12 collections in five years, including seven new calibres [movements]. It was quite easy to start with. When we started I had a product portfolio of 600 references [ie: different models]. And frankly, even for me as a watch guy, it’s all the same. You had 600 pilot watches. Berneron watches are very different to Breitling ones – they are almost certainly for a different customer. But when you work for Breitling, you are working for a brand. Your job is to follow that brand’s DNA?
At no point in this period did I ever try to pour my own taste into the work. As you say, a designer is there to serve the brand. They should be able to adapt their foreign language depending on the brand. I didn’t do the same work at BMW that I did at Breitling. If you’re a cook, and you get hired in a big restaurant, you cook in the style of this particular restaurant. And if you’re a good cook, you should be able to cook different flavours.
How did you manage to do that, and work on Berneron at the same time?
In the past three years I first had to reduce my participation in Breitling from 100 to 8o per cent, then from 80 to 50. As of two months ago I’ve been dedicating 100 per cent of my time to Berneron. Now I have a 12-year business plan with one launch per year. And, if I do my job correctly, in 2035 we will have four collections, 16 references [ie: different watch models] and an annual production of around 350 pieces per year. We will always be very small batches. We also have eight more calibres [movements] to develop. At the moment I’m working heavily on assembling the first pieces that we’re going to deliver next month. And also finalising the second launch that we're going to reveal in October.
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Breitling's Chronomat, revamped by Sylvain in 2020 |
What are your proudest of, from your time at Breitling?
In terms of business development, the return of the Chronomat collection [distinctive chronograph launched in 1941; revamped in 2020] has been extremely successful. We were selling 2,000 pieces per year, of the old model [ie: hardly any]. That collection hadn’t been worked on for 15 years, so it was very dusty. And yet the expectations were high because in the 1980s and 1990s the Chronomat was a commercial success and a big-seller. We have people in the manufacture who were telling me about the golden days, where actors and movie stars were wearing the Chronomat. And that had vanished over the course of time. So, rebuilding that was a huge challenge. Now it is the third strongest collection at Breitling. So that’s probably the most impactful work we did to ramp up the production of the company. And the second achievement was the evolution of the [classic pilot’s watch] Navitimer collection. There, it was more about making sure that the product stays relevant despite the years going by. To avoid the Chronomat syndrome of getting lost.
Why did Georges Kern let you pursue your own project?
I worked for him for five years at Richemont [the specialist watchmaker group comprised of Panerai, Piaget and IWC, among others]. Then at Breitling. So, we [already had] all the spicy and difficult stuff sorted out [between us]. I asked if I could do my own thing because I wanted more, creatively. [What I wanted to do] is not what customers expect from Breitling. So, Georges was not very pleased when he heard my request. It took me a year to negotiate it.
He's known for being a tough cookie
Georges is not somebody that will give you something. You have to get it from him. But I really enjoyed working for him. When I left Richemont to go to Breitling, people were, like, ‘Five years with Georges was not hard enough?’ [Laughs] People did not understand my choice. It’s true that he is extremely demanding and impatient because of the level of intensity that he puts into the business. But he has the courage to move heavy blocks in the company, and he always gave me the resources that are needed to get the job done. I’d rather work with people like this because it's business, not friendship. Rather than working with a very soft and friendly CEO that makes the daily job a pleasure. But where the strong decisions aren’t made, the business runs down – because of a lack of courage. Georges is probably the bravest [person in the watch business]. I’ve seen him in meetings where you have 50 people telling him not to do it and he still goes for it. Especially during the Covid years. We had suppliers that kept their company open for us when all their other clients had shut down.
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The Superocean Heritage '57 Limited Edition II. Released in 2020 in support of Covid healthcare workers |
I remember. You even put out a special edition watch for the NHS. No one else was releasing anything at all Yes, exactly. How does product development work at a big brand? Do you follow customer demand? Trends? Try to break into a new category?
It depends on the brand you work with. Richemont is a lot more analytic. So, the brief for the new product is entirely based on the previous commercial success. Which is a very safe way of building brands. But it is also – in my opinion – why you always come late to the party. I don’t believe that history repeats itself. Based on what’s happened, it’s very hard to tell what will happen. In order to be sharper, creatively, designers have to keep their fingers on the pulse of trends and then try to anticipate where the market is going to go. For example, I started the Mirage three years ago, and back then making a 38mm full gold watch was a complete nonsense. It’s why suppliers told me to fuck off. ‘You’re completely mad!’ They place their bet on you – ‘You’re never going to sell that, ever. Don’t waste my time. And don’t waste your money trying to make this thing. It won’t work’.
Right now, the market is going mad for unusual-looking blingy dress watches. So that was prescient
I don’t know. [At Berneron] we produce 24 watches a year. And after [annual autumn tradeshow] Geneva Watch Days, I was receiving 50 emails per day, for the next two weeks. Now it has slowed but I still receive 15-20 emails per day. I respond to everybody. I have many collectors who tell me ‘I don’t understand why you produce so little’? Effectively we have left millions on the table [by not making more watches]. But I don't see how [the Mirage] is meant to be a mainstream product. I think maintaining good collectability, especially for a young independent, is important. And not being too greedy and producing a fair amount – little enough so that it can stay rare and big enough so that we can have the financial metric for the business – is probably the right balance. I’ve had crazy offers. I had one of the three biggest retailers in the world offer to buy five years of production in one go.
You weren’t tempted? A businessman would do it. But the idea of having one retailer responsible for the entire company frightens me. Because if that guy wakes up the next day and says ‘Okay, I want a pink dial in a square case’ – effectively I can’t tell him no. |
How long have you had the Mirage in your head?
I call it the Mirage because it is a project that should not have been done to start with. I’ve developed a lot of movements for Richemont and for Breitling and you always have to sacrifice one part of the equation. So, if you want a nice watch on the wrist that sits low and will give you reasonable dimensions, you have to sacrifice the thickness of the movement. Which means you will have poor chronometry, no power reserve [ie: the watch will need winding a lot]. On the other hand, like at Breitling, if you want to have strong, steady, reliable movements, very often you’d have to go thicker and that will give you the real estate you need in the calibres to achieve these things. So, I started [to design the Mirage] from a blank piece of paper. And I ticked the boxes on my Christmas list. I wanted the large three-day power reserve barrel. I wanted a large balance wheel, so I could have reliable chronometry. I wanted a direct small seconds [subdial with the seconds hand]. And [I let] the mechanics find their own places. And that took quite some space. In a round case, [that] watch would have been 44mm in diameter. But if you break out from a circle, and just go around the wheels and pinions as they sit on the mainplate, you are able to have a much smaller, more compact movement. It ended up being heavily asymmetric. But the Mirage is different from any other shaped watch, if you take a [Jaeger-LeCoultre] Reverso or a Cartier Crash, for example. They are shaped watches. But the designer drew a case from the outside and then the poor watchmaker had to deal with whatever space was left inside to fit the tiny movement. Which is why some most of [them] are often called ‘fashion watches’. They lack the watchmaking substance that you find in in more traditional watchmaking. To my knowledge the Mirage is the first time that a ‘shape watch’ is drawn from the inside to the outside. Which to me is the main ethos of design. Form following function.
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And everything is in full gold, right? The movement, the hands, the case – even the spring bars, everything is in 18 karat gold. Spring bars that no one will ever see
Sure! And [the maker at] Le Cercle [des Horlogers, top-tier Swiss company] was telling me the same thing. ‘I have never done white gold spring bars in my entire life’. And he’d been making spring bars for Patek and AP. ‘You’re just throwing your money out of the window – it’s plain ridiculous’. And I told him ‘Look, if you don't understand, see it as an offering to God’. That's what I told him. ‘I’m just trying to do my best’. And the best would be to do it white gold spring bars in a white gold case. And he said ‘Okay, well it will cost you a fortune and you will have to wait forever’. So, I waited for 11 months to get these springs bars. And they cost almost 400 Swiss francs [£350] per watch. At Breitling I could develop an entire watch for that budget.
Would you generally characterise yourself as a risk-taker?
I’ve been racing motorcycles for 20 years, and that taught me the art of commitment and an appeal for dancing in the storm, so to speak. I try to take calculated risk. So, the maximum risk I could take within my sphere of influence. Which means I risked all my money. But I would never have taken money from the bank or from investors or from my wife.
When did you know the Mirage was going to work?
The darkest part of the project was when I pushed the button on the movements, and effectively spent CHF750,000 [£661,000] in one go. That was two years ago. And I lost sleep for almost a week. It felt like almost like a postpartum depression. Because I had zero customers at the time. I could have lost the entire amount by not selling any watches. But educated collectors found us. I am very lucky to say that we have highly esteemed collectors, especially for the first-year pieces. People like [watchmaker/ collector] Laurent Piciotto, [vintage collector] Roni Madhvani, [historian] Auro Montanari, [jeweller, formerly of Hermès] Nadine Ghosen and [collector/historian] Jeff Stein... these guys are heavy, heavy collectors. So, I was very touched. They also pushed me to put my own name on the dial.
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You weren’t keen?
No, it was not my first choice. Because as a designer it’s much easier to hide yourself behind a fancy name. When you say ‘I’m a designer, I work for Porsche’ or ‘I work for BMW’ it sounds good when you have Sunday lunch at your godparents. I had this discussion with a guy I barely knew in Geneva. He came across me at Beau-Rivage [hotel hosting independent brands during the annual Watches And Wonders trade fair last month]. He was, like, ‘Oh, you were chief product office at Breitling, right?’ And I was, like, ‘Yeah, yeah’. ‘And you left to make your own watches, right?’. ‘Yeah, yeah’. And he was, like: ‘Why?’ [Laughs].
What was your answer?
I understand that from an external perspective. It sounds completely silly. Because the guy was, like, ‘Dude, you were safe. Ninety-nine percent of people would have stayed in that job’. But the truth is, it was just not doing it for me. I was very well-paid and very well-treated. But I got artistic fire from my mother. I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse. But I really had to do it. It was in my mind day and night. For 18 months I was spending multiples of my Breitling salary [on getting Berneron off the ground]. That was very scary. It doesn’t take a PHD to work out that if you make 10 and you spend 30 every month, you won’t last very long. But I had to stick with this for a good 18 months. And you have to believe. Motorcycle riding taught me that in racing, you have to commit. Once you pin the throttle you are committed. The worst thing you can do is stop in the middle of commitment. Once you’ve committed to something – you have to go through. I’ve seen Georges doing that, as well.
How many watches have you sold now? We have almost finalised six years of orders. In a couple of weeks, we are going to close the order book. And this is 24 pieces a year – so we have allocated almost 150 pieces.
How does that rate of production compare to, say, Rolex? Rolex make 3,000 watches per day. They make a million watches a year – so that’s 20,000 a week. So, when we have completed the entire series for the Mirage, 240 pieces, in a decade, that is the equivalent of 30 minutes of production from Rolex.
To secure their watch, customers have to pay 50 per cent up front. If you’ve allocated nearly 150 of them, that must mean you’ve got some money in the bank now?
I’m very much aware of how expensive the Mirage is. We are talking about 55 [thousand euros/ pounds], excluding VAT. So, for example, somebody in Europe with 20 per cent VAT it ramps up to 66, 67 [thousand pounds]. This is a very demanding price. More than Patek. But I am making half the margins [a big Swiss brand] would make, by comparison. So, I’m certainly not doing this to turn a buck. All the money goes into development. The profits that we make on the Mirage are what funds the next project.
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You have ideas for new calibres?
Oh, yeah. For sure. Strategically speaking, the Mirage is the one I wanted to start with because from a technical perspective it’s not very complex. We’re talking about a very simple calibre with 135 components. Venturing into a minute repeater [a more complex chiming watch] to start to a brand would have been too much of a risk. But I want to develop nine calibres in total. And we’ll venture into complications. And we’ll go from 35,000-38,000, up to 100,000 – that’s the price bracket I want to play in. In October we’ll release a second calibre in a second product. That will be for sale in 2025. And for 2026 I’m working on a very technically ambitious annual calendar [ie: a watch that accurately displays day, date and month with minimal adjustment]. We’ve started in development. But then I need a minimum of a couple of years to debug it and make sure it works. You can’t compress the development cycle for a new calibre. It’s minimum three years.
Will the asymmetric look define the brand?
The annual calendar will be in a round case. The Mirage will be one of four collections – and [with the Mirage] the artistic idea was ‘What happens when you let the mechanics go free?’, and you don't frame yourself into existing circles and [other] shapes – what will happen? I’m very happy I took this decision. Because you end up with a product that feels very different from what already exists on the market. Will there ever be a more affordable Berneron watch? In steel, for example?
It will always stay a precious metal collection, entirely. With the Mirage the goal was to have the strongest expression of a dress watch. And to me a dress watch is ‘time only’ [ie: no date window, or other complications] and is in precious metal. If I am on this ‘offering to God’ [idea]’ if I had to do one dress watch for eternity, of course I would make it in gold. So, this is why I went for it. And also the feeling of the product. Despite it being [just] 4.9mm thick, it is an extremely dense product once you have it in your hand because it’s been [made] entirely in gold. And that, to me, brings a strong contrast because the watch doesn’t look very serious – it’s got handwriting on it – and yet, when you hold it in your hand and you flip it over, you realise that it is a high level of watchmaking. That’s a very ‘jewellery’ approach, in the fact that it is aesthetically pleasing, but fun at the same time.
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You mentioned your dad’s Submariner, and how it costs four times as much today. The most famous watch brands have had rocketing profits over the last few years. What do you think the future holds for them?
If I had to bet right now on the future of the watch industry, I think that, on the one hand, we have the top 10 biggest brands that will slowly but surely swallow 80 per cent of the market. And on the other side, you have the stellar growth of the independents [ie: independent brands]. The development of the business of brands like [H.] Moser [& Cie] and MB&F, [F.P.] Journe, De Bethune – these are very small companies. And yet they have strong demand and they have been able to carve their own little space in the market. We could also mention Urwerk. And my friend Simon Brette.
They’re killing it From a PR perspective. And from a traction perspective in the market – but if you look down in the numbers, the businesses don’t mean anything, compared to Breitling.
Yes, but their price points are many multiples higher So, this is where I see the industry going forward. To me the worst place to be sitting in is to be making CHF1,500 [£1,300] watches. There you go head-to-head against an Apple Watch, when you don’t have enough resources for product to play with to make it distinctive. |
Why have your watches been such a hit?
I’m still wondering. I kid you not! I still see myself, turning to [his wife] Marie-Alix in the kitchen, ‘Honey, if I sell the first 12, I can die’. I would have achieved what I wanted to do. I could die happy. Of course, she laughed at me. But I was mentally ready to go to war with this. Because let’s not forget the watch industry is not very forgiving – when you see, for example, the roast that AP took when the launched the 11.59 [In 2019 Audemars Piguet, revered for its 1972 Royal Oak, swung big with a brand-new product line, the Code 11.59].
And the roast Bremont has taken in the last couple of weeks, with its new designs
Yeah – that’s the kind of feedback that you can get. It does not encourage any business owner to take the kind of risk that I have taken. But I think the response could come from the fact that it is frankly quite a unique proposal. I get that a lot of people do not like what I did – which from an artistic point of view is very good for me because I think if you do things that everybody likes, it simply means you haven’t done your job correctly.
Do you think the Mirage would have worked five years ago?
I think the timing is also a bit of luck. We are at the end of the steel sports watch era, clearly. I think [every brand] had their own variation of that style. So, the pendulum is slowly swinging back, which means dress watches will have their moment now. So, I’ve been lucky there. Also, I would never have had the balls to take on a project like this, five years ago.
Do you like being your own boss?
If you ask me, it’s amazing. If you ask my wife, it’s more difficult – because you don’t really know when to stop. My goal is, before next Christmas, to get my weekends back. That’s the deal I have with my wife – I’ve been working seven days a week, for three years. But I was, like, ‘If this goes south, for some reason or another, I will always be left wondering ‘What if I had worked weekends? Maybe it would have worked?’ So, it’s to reassure myself. But at some point, I should not sacrifice my marriage.
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The accommodation also comes with its own mini-Olympic Torch, displayed in a dedicated alcove, and facing a suspended punching bag ‘for a personal sporting touch so that guests can take part in the competition themselves’. You can insert your own joke about setting an alarm call here.
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Watch hype of the week goes to this, Toledano & Chan's B/1. A debut collaboration between watch designer Alfred Chan and artist, watch collector, businessman and TikTok personality Phil Toledano. With its tiny 33.5mm proportions, lapis lazuli dial and Rolex King Midas-style shaped case, it ticks every box for a market currently frothing over throwback stone-dial timepieces. Watch Reddit was split, with comments ranging from 'fantastic design" to 'great watch to wear in your Cybertruck'.
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