Watchmaking icon; watch industry legend; the guru of luxury watches; the saviour of the Swiss watch industry... The most cursory online search for Jean-Claude Biver throws up a forest of superlatives. Garlanded with praise, showered with honorary degrees, eagerly sought as a keynote speaker, trusted implicitly by LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault and generally believed to be able to walk on water, Jean-Claude Biver is more than a successful Swiss watch boss, he is famous beyond the world of watches as an inspirational leader, a genuine star, a celebrity in a country that does not do celebrity.
Today, the industry maverick is a transcendental figure, the man who, within four years, transformed Hublot from a dying brand with a turnover of 25 million Swiss francs (£11.3m) to a business for which LVMH paid almost half a billion (£250m) in 2008. It took Bernard Arnault to work out that the most valuable part of his purchase was Biver and he promoted him to run the LVMH watch division, turning TAG Heuer and Zenith around.
Biver’s boisterous confidence, his enthusiasm and his energy make him seem like a natural phenomenon. You may see him posing in Milan at the launch of a new Hublot with Lapo Elkann and Luca Rubinacci; in a historic New York gym clowning around in boxing gloves with Iris Apfel at the launch of a Muhammad Ali tribute watch; or hosting a press conference in China to announce a partnership with China’s space agency that will put TAG Heuer on Mars by the end of the decade.
One of my personal favourites was seeing him on stage at LVMH Tower in New York a couple of years ago, sharing a stage with Arnault and a couple of Silicon Valley moguls to introduce the TAG Heuer Connected watch. He presented his co-speakers with full-size cowbells, after which a ritual truck wheel-sized cheese made with milk from his herd of Alpine cows was brought out and sliced up, with Biver – despairing of the American way of wielding the cheese knife – stepping down from the stage to cut it himself.
You never quite know what’s going to happen around Biver. One morning he gave me a lift in his plane from Geneva to Paris. Just as the wheels went up, he received a call to say that the compere for that morning’s press conference had cancelled at the very last moment. He asked if I would mind helping out. What he did not say was that the conference involved Cara Delevingne and two lions, one adult and one infant. So it was that I wound up moderating an anarchic press conference, microphone in one hand and baby’s bottle full of milk in the other, feeding a lion cub that was struggling to extricate itself from Cara’s embrace.
In an industry that is increasingly a career choice rather than the vocation it once was, Biver is a Pharos of individuality, a triumph of character over the tyranny of the focus group, a passionate personal communicator in the age of Powerpoint. It is impossible to imagine the watch industry over the last decade without his commanding physical and emotional presence and yet, mirabile dictu, it seemed that 15 years ago he was seriously considering giving the Swiss watch industry a break.
He had recently recovered from legionnaire’s disease and, after seeing if he could work with the flawed genius that is Franck Muller, he told me that he had been approached to take over a little brand called Hublot. To me, this seemed like José Mourhino managing a Sunday league side and I said so. But, of course, he could see something I couldn’t, and the following year he brought out the Big Bang: the archetypal early 21st-century sports watch.
Even if he had walked away from the industry 15 years ago, he would have earned his place in the history of watchmaking. And yet, because of the effulgence of his success in the last decade and the relative youth of those clever young executives who join the industry today, Biver’s career pre-Hublot is less well known than it should be.
The industry Biver joined in 1974 was smaller than it is today, and the sums of money involved were smaller too. It was also parochial: international exhibitors were not allowed to present their products at the Basel Uhrenmesse (as Baselworld was once known) until 1973; the following year, a tall, skinny, good-looking young man with fine blond hair turned up at the Le Brassus headquarters of Audemars Piguet.
Today, AP is known for one watch – the Royal Oak – but when Biver first joined the sales department the revolutionary octagonal design was still a novelty and AP was still regarded as a traditional manufacturer with a reputation for fine complications and (according to Biver) an annual production of around 5,000.
Although Biver is not usually given to unnecessary nostalgia, his eyes brighten with fondness at the recollection of those days. “There was an incredible family spirit. We were friends with the competition, we went to the same bars, we drank together and everything was very simple. At the Basel Fair, you ate Swiss sausage. It was friendly, it was unpretentious, everybody was humble and I loved it because you had the impression you were belonging to a club.”
In those simpler times, the food and atmosphere were not the only things that were modest and the terms of his engagement were almost like a set of indentures. “For a year I was only paid a half salary. I had no office, no phone line, no secretary, no business cards. I took no business trips. Georges Golay [the visionary CEO of Audemars Piguet who had green-lighted the Royal Oak] told me that I did not need any of these things. He said, ‘First of all, the job is to learn the trade in the workshops. You will watch and you will listen to the watchmakers. Through them and their way of life you shall learn the tradition and the art of watchmaking.’”
This connection with the watches and the watchmakers, then, is the key to understanding the man: as a child, his favourite toy was a model steam engine and in the watchmakers’ ateliers he reconnected with this youthful enthusiasm for mechanical objects. It also helped him appreciate the link between the Swiss way of life and its emblematic industry of watchmaking. Although he took Swiss nationality a few years ago, Biver was born in Luxembourg in 1949 and lived there until he was ten, when his family moved to Switzerland and he attended a boarding school in Morges.
During those first months at AP, he learned and understood the skill and passion of those who worked in the watch industry. But he was, and remains, impatient. He rose to be European sales manager and after four years he went to Golay with a list of recommendations for changes. “Yes, you can do things differently, but you’ll have to wait 14 years,” came the response. Back then, sleepy Audemars Piguet was not the place for a young man in a hurry. He moved to Omega in 1979 and was in charge of the gold watch division, the youngest “deputy director” at Omega. But by 1981 he was on the move again as electronic watches threatened the traditional watch industry with extinction.
With the stubbornness that characterises his later years, Biver bought an old brand name, Blancpain, for 22,000 Swiss francs and decided, with his friend Jacques Piguet, that he was going to bring back mechanical watchmaking. It is hard to think how counterintuitive such a decision was – a little like making a dinner reservation on the Titanic after it has hit the iceberg. He knew the kind of watch he wanted to make: a watch that his grandparents would have recognised, small, round with a moonphase indicator on an ostrich-skin strap.
After laying out their 22,000 Swiss francs (about £20,000, adjusted for inflation), “We had very little money left,” says Biver. But he knew the truth of the business school cliché that to be a success he had to act like one. So he took his sleeping bag to Geneva Airport and waited until he could get a cheap standby ticket to New York. Upon his arrival in the US he phoned Tiffany & Co with a new twist on the cold call. “I’d like to meet you tomorrow. I am currently in Switzerland, but I will take the Concorde to come to see you.” And he promised not to take too much of their time.
“I will come for half an hour and have a sandwich with you.”
But the reality of these start-up years was rather different to the myth of 30-minute transatlantic supersonic sandwich lunches. “When we went to visit customers, we slept in a camper van and not at a hotel. We went to shave and shower in stations. You put in a token and were entitled to three minutes of water. You had to shower fast!”
The camper van was his base during the Basel watch fair and in the early days he had little to attract visitors to his stand. “We were exhibitors, but we decided not to show any watches. Imagine a fashion show without models. Without clothes! It was very provocative. Instead we highlighted our message: ‘Since 1735 there has never been a quartz Blancpain watch. And there never will be.’”
This being Switzerland in the early Eighties, no one had ever seen such a thing. The fair organisers were unamused and insisted that Biver never repeat the stunt, so the next year he showed a single watch and on the night before the opening of the fair he swiped the “Fully Booked” sign from Chez Donati, Basel’s leading Italian restaurant, and put it at the front of his stand. Of course, once again, it created an outcry and thanks to the outcry, “People were even more interested in us.”
The furore was in inverse proportion to the production figures. “The first year of production was 1982/83. We made 97 watches, if I remember well,” he says, adding with a gust of laughter, “We didn’t even reach 100!”
Sales may not have been immense, but he had caught the attention of the market and one of those intrigued by what we know today as Biver’s disruptive guerrilla marketing was Marcus Margulies, the famed British watch importer. Back in the Eighties, Margulies had a hotline to Brunei, which, as far as the watch industry was concerned, made him a cross between King Midas and the Man From Del Monte. He was courted by most of the major manufacturers, but found himself drawn to the young iconoclast.
“The turning point was in 1983/84 with Marcus,” says Biver. “He came to me and said he would like to buy 50 pieces in gold.” Half a year’s production was a good order, but there was a problem. “I said, ‘Mr Margulies, we only have steel pieces. We cannot afford to buy the gold.’” Instead of cancelling his order, Margulies advanced Biver the money (negotiating a generous discount of course). “He gave us prestige and he really helped us position ourselves at the top.”
Indeed, for a small brand run by a man who slept in a camper van or a sleeping bag at Geneva airport, Blancpain made a huge impact. There was little like it, or him, at the time, and before long the sleeping bag was consigned to the attic, the camper van was retired to the garage and the sandwich lunches were replaced by a penchant for Château d’Yquem.
Biver was a boss like no other in the industry: he led his staff on dawn runs, he claimed to be in contact with the ghost of Mr Blancpain and as things improved he did impulsive things, such as taking his entire factory workforce on holiday for a week to the Amalfi coast. Then, in the early Nineties, he became a multimillionaire, selling the business for 60m Swiss francs (£25m) to the Swatch Group and his life fell apart.
“I was depressed. My first wife left in 1989, and then in ’92 she wanted to divorce. There would be no going back and I gave up. It was a kind of emotional suicide. On the day we sold I realised that I was empty: I had no love, my wife had gone and I had lost the business that had been my passion.”
So Biver rang Blancpain’s new owner, Nicolas Hayek, the inventor of Swatch, by then well on his way to becoming the most important man in the watch industry, and asked for a job. “He said something that I will never forget. He said, ‘But are you crazy? You’ve just sold me the brand. Why don’t you take the money and go and play golf?’” Eventually Hayek agreed to meet. “He said, ‘OK, if you are serious then come to my home in Cap d’Antibes and we will discuss it.’”
Hayek divided opinion, but, says Biver, “He was like a grandfather for me. He was wonderful. And his wife was like my grandmother. I cannot say I fell in love with them, but I really felt they were so warm-hearted. They gave me hospitality, they cared about me and as I was a little depressed I was even more sensitive to this emotion.”
In 1993 he joined the board of directors of SMH (later Swatch Group) and devoted himself to Omega. So began the second act of this remarkable career. Today, Biver’s time at Omega is sometimes overlooked at the expense of his Lazaran resurrections of Blancpain and Hublot. Perhaps it has been obscured because Hayek was the overall boss. However, it is significant in that it prepared him for the work he was to undertake 20 years later at TAG Heuer.
“Omega was in trouble. It had been perceived as more or less equal to Rolex in the late Sixties and then it jumped into fashion. It changed its collection and tried to follow what the car industry was doing: every year a new model, every year another style. And then it had this big industrial move to quartz.” By the time Biver arrived, the collection had -mushroomed: “There was a massive, mixed collection, there were some watches in gold and some watches in gold plate and you cannot have both. Hayek agreed with me: we had to reposition Omega. And then I had this incredible luck to get the idea about Cindy Crawford and James Bond.”
The Bond franchise had been dormant for six years, a hiatus reflected in the nominal sum Omega was asked to pay to be the official timepiece supplier of 007. Instead of taking the bargain he was offered, Biver countered with a much higher one, requesting – and receiving – far greater involvement. “Hayek and I worked very closely. He trusted me. I could make a phone call to Hayek and say, ‘I have the chance to do something with James Bond, Mr Hayek. It will cost one million. Are you OK?’ He said, ‘Yes, OK, go.’ And that was that.”
Speedy decision-making has become part of the Biver approach, as has his flair for catching the zeitgeist. For the release of Apollo 13, he got hold of a moon buggy. “We drove it in Hong Kong, we drove it in Mumbai and down Fifth Avenue. It was extraordinary. In those days, people had forgotten the excitement of the lunar expeditions. I said the moon watch will never be obsolete, but at the time we were selling 3,000 to 5,000 pieces because everybody thought it was an old watch. I said, ‘Come on, you’re crazy. This is history.’ So, we promoted it and it was a huge success. It took a little bit of time, but we tripled the turnover between 1993 and 2000.”
In a career spanning more than 40 years in the watch industry there are few things that Biver has not done. He has worked with the greats: Gérald Genta, Andrew Grima, Georges Golay and, of course, Nicolas Hayek. He has also mentored some of the leading figures in the industry today, most notably Jean-Frédéric Dufour, CEO of Rolex. It was in order to transmit some of the knowledge he had gained that, a couple of years ago, he published a biography in the form of a series of Q&A sessions with Gerard Lelarge. In one he is asked if he has any regrets.
Typical of the man, he takes a potentially sombre question and turns it into a statement of affirmation and aspiration. “If I had a dream – and a dream is not a regret – it would be for my children to say to me one day, in five years or so, ‘Come on, let’s make a Biver watch. We will work like crazy and you, the patriarch, can give us a couple of instructions and bestow your blessing.’ Creating a Biver watch is a chapter of my life that could have been opened 15, 20, maybe even ten years ago: but it is much less likely today as I approach 70, as I do not see myself starting all over again!”
Those who know him well, know not to take such a statement entirely at face value.
Like this? Now read:
Meet the watchmaker turning neo-vintage into an American art form
