Hello and welcome back to About Time,
It’s been said that what Jean-Claude Biver doesn’t know about watches isn’t worth knowing.
Let us examine the evidence.
Legend has it that the Luxembourg-born son of a shoe salesman became smitten with mechanical watches in the early 1970s while out jogging with his friend, Jacques Piguet.
The latter’s skeletonised watch impressed Biver so much he orchestrated a meeting with Piguet’s father. Soon he was employed by Frédéric Piguet, a movement manufacturer in Switzerland's Vallée de Joux.
Biver and Jacques Piguet worked together. Biver did the marketing, Piguet the production, a double-act proposition seen elsewhere in the industry, the same division having been used with Messrs Patek and Philippe, for example, and Audemars and Piguet.
From there Biver moved to Audemars, concentrating again on sales and marketing, before joining Omega as a product developer overseeing its gold watches department.
Omega was a global company he cared little for, and a job that “helped me to understand I was made not for the industry but for the artisans. My passion is the watchmakers, not the machines," he explained.
Biver would prove true to his word when the "quartz crisis" arrived from Japan, introducing cheaper and more accurate battery-driven watches from Seiko, Casio and Citizen, and making two-thirds of the traditional Swiss industry redundant.
It was generally assumed the only solution to the quartz crisis was to copy the technology coming from overseas: the Swiss government was convening meetings with watchmakers to work out how to best catch up.
Instead Biver and Jacques Piguet bought Blancpain, an old company that had fallen dormant during the 1970s and, in 1983, revived it, with a focus on luxury mechanical watches.
Ever the canny marketeer, Biver declared Blancpain had been making watches continuously since 1735, positioning it as the oldest and most traditional of all Swiss watch brands.
"With our slogan 'Since 1735 there has never been a quartz Blancpain. And there never will be', we were talking about credibility, patriarchal wisdom," he explained.
The move put the focus back on the Swiss to such an extent that today it has been credited with "single-handedly" saving the industry from extinction.
Biver sold Blancpain back to its original owners for a huge profit, remained CEO until 2003 and joined the board of directors for the parent company, now renamed the Swatch Group.
From there he was asked to develop the marketing and products for his old company Omega, which had once vied with Rolex to be the highest-profile Swiss watch brand, but whose sales and prestige had waned.
Biver set about tripling profits by improving product, signing Cindy Crawford and Michael Schumacher and making it a part of the deal that celebrities would make appearances on behalf of the brand at press calls, while also leaning into movie product placements.
The fact that James Bond wears an Omega is down to Biver.
Then, in 2004, Biver was approached to help the little-known brand Hublot. Under a philosophy of being "first, different and unique" he coined "the art of fusion" and launched the Big Bang, a watch line that married traditional materials like gold with modern ones like rubber, carbon fibre and Kevlar.
Just four years later in 2008, the LVMH Group – owners of Tag Heuer and Zenith amongst others – acquired Hublot for almost half a billion dollars, and subsequently made Biver the head of its watch division. Today Hublot has a net worth estimated at £90bn.
At LVMH Biver next got stuck into Tag Heuer, reducing its high-end luxury aspirations and turbocharging its success by focusing on less expensive volume models. He also retuned some vintage Heuer models to the catalogue, and introduced the Tag Heuer Connected smartwatch.
Biver retired on health grounds in 2018, leaving behind not just a giant reputation as a product and marketing genius, but one of a charismatic leader and a workaholic. Many of the watch world's most prominent figures, including Frédéric Arnault, the current CEO of LVMH Watches, are said to have benefitted from his guidance.
In 2020 he added to his heaving shelf of watch industry awards by accepting the French Legion of Honour.
After that, Biver focused on cheese.
He has been producing handmade cheese since the 1970s, each year making around five tonnes of the "nutty and sweet" L’Etivaz, a hard cheese from the cows on his farm in the Swiss Alps. Biver's cheese is not for sale. Instead, he gifts it to friends and family, while also supplying select restaurants of his choosing.
No less than The Economist has described this as a example of Biver's masterful grasp of the value of rarity.
“I will be the master of my cheese until the last piece,” he has explained.
So, it was big news when, last March, Biver gathered a crowd of 150 partners, retailers, collectors and journalists to a three-level 1890s farm building in Switzerland to unveil his return to watches.
This was the launch of his own brand, named Biver, and founded with his 22-year-old son, Pierre.
Their first release was the Carrion Tourbillion Biver.
The technically adventurous gold minute repeater sounded different notes for hours, quarters and minutes – most minute repeaters come with two, not three, gongs – and featured one of two stone dials, grey obsidian or blue sodalite.
For these ultra high-end, artisanal watches Biver had once again fused old-world techniques with modern material science, but this time there was also a focus on hand-applied finishes and engraving.
There was a lot going on.
Initially produced in a run of 12 the Biver Carillon Tourbillon Minute Repeater cost £440,000.
The response to the watch was mixed.
People questioned the preposterous amount of money. Others took issue with the look of the thing.
“He has failed miserably,” wrote one reviewer. “An emoji that can accurately describe my feelings 🤮” offered another. Hodinkee declared it “the most controversial release of the year”.
On Friday morning this week Biver announced its second watch.
The Biver Automatique is billed as “the brand’s first three-hand automatic watch”. An altogether simpler, more classical dress watch – at least on first glance – it comes in two options. One in a 18k white gold case with dial, hands and markers to match, and one in an 18k rose gold case with dial, hands and markers to match.
There are also “Atelier Collection” options in two precious stones – pietersite and obsidian.
The watches all come with a zero-reset mechanism, which snaps the second hand back to 12 o’clock when pulling out the crown – allowing for precise time-setting.
Prices for the Automatique range from CHF 78,000 [£70,000] to CHF 108,000 [£97,000].
This time, the response has been more 🔥.
Two months ago Biver – the brand – was joined by a new CEO, James Marks.
Marks’ career has not been quite a stellar as Biver’s but he is no slouch.
A former hedge fund portfolio manager and longtime watch nut, in 2018 he became a “horological globetrotter” for Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo, the auction house, tracking down some of the world’s best and rarest watches.
The following year he opened Phillips Perpetual, the then-novel concept of a permanent boutique on the third floor of the auctioneers’ London offices in Berkley Square, where watches by the likes of Patek Philippe, Rolex and F.P Journe are offered for sale all year-round, not just in auction season.
One of Marks’ earliest hires was Pierre Biver as an intern.
He’s also often been called upon by journalists – not least this one – to provide sober and analytical opinions on the market, brands, industry news, or pretty much anything else related to luxury watches.
I spoke with Jean-Claude Biver and James Marks last month - but not Pierre. He was with his partner at the hospital on account of the fact they’d had just their first baby.
Jean-Claude, now 74, had just returned from meeting his new grandson.
