Spear's Wealth Management Survey

Bang on Time

Josh Spero meets the unstoppable Jean-Claude Biver, whose career has combined the best of traditional Swiss watchmaking with his own revolutionary vision, culminating in Hublot’s Big Bang

 
SWITZERLAND IS AN unlikely epicentre of the cosmos: when the universe first exploded, it didn’t instantaneously produce private bankers or ski chalets. This primordial Big Bang has, however, found a modern-day Swiss counterpart: Hublot watches’ distinctive Big Bang range, so called, says CEO Jean-Claude Biver, because both Big Bangs ‘were very destructive but ended up being constructive’.

This may seem a grand claim for a watch (not so much for the origin of the universe), but Hublot’s line destroyed a lot of received wisdom about watch design by including materials such as gold, rubber and Kevlar in one watch, before rebuilding a broken business and creating new horizons for watchmakers.

Biver himself is not in the Big Bang category, which is not to understate his importance: it is just that his development in the Swiss watch industry and then rise to the top, to become a legendary name among people with tiny screwdrivers and the consumers of their products, was the product of years of hard work, inspiration and innovation.

He works 16 hours a day, taking only three hours’ sleep, so when his competitors get up, he has already done half a day’s work. Despite being 60, there is no break in his activity. When he flies to the Far East, where he has been opening Hublot concessions, he goes for a day and returns, then heads off somewhere else straight away.

His interest in watches was not even prompted by the watches themselves but by a Proustian recollection when he was 26, in 1975: ‘One of my friends worked with his father in the movement factory and I looked at his wrist and I saw a steam machine. Why a steam machine? Because the watch had no dial, you could see the movement, and this reminded me of my steam machines as a kid.’

At the time, Biver was busy with ‘honey and cheese’ (very Swiss), not industry, but his friend helped him get a job at Audemars Piguet, where it seemed like his life was set out for him: ‘After four and a half years, I applied for more responsibilities, and they said, “In fourteen years, you will have a new career plan.” I thought I would be an old man in fourteen years’ time, so I said, “I quit!” I left because the vision was eternity!’

Eternity is something Biver is well poised to contemplate as we sit at his house, whose garden runs down to the shore of Lake Geneva, poised between the mountain-shadowed lake and a high hill on the other side where he pastures his cows, whose milk he turns into cheese.

 
TIME IS WHAT he has been contemplating all these years, and there is something fitting and moving about the setting for our interview: a life concentrated on seconds and minutes yet set against unchanging scenery. On the back porch, shaded from the sun, outside a lounge displaying some of his art collection (featuring a mixture of Swiss and international artists), he smiles as he recalls how abruptly quitting Audemars led to a useful if not enjoyable time at Omega.

‘Audemars Piguet was watchmaking art; Omega was watchmaking industry,’ he says. ‘The shock was even bigger because it was in 1980, when the Swiss had this phenomenal quartz revolution after the Japanese had almost beaten them down by adopting it first. [Quartz gives incredible accuracy for watches.] The Swiss were not at that time ready to understand that accuracy is not why people buy watches. They were giving up their mechanical watches to transform into a quartz industry.’

It is this mass commercialisation against which Biver revolted, and his remark about the true motives of buyers — heirlooms, not stopwatches — indicates the deep thoughtfulness that has allowed him to cater to his market. As well as providing a negative lesson, Omega also provided Biver with a positive route, though one so well hidden that it took his watchmaker’s eye to discern it: ‘In 1982 I left Omega and I acquired this little, forgotten brand called Blancpain that had been out of business for twenty years. I bought just a name — no factory, no plan, no machines, no contracts, no stock, no people, nothing. I discovered Blancpain when I was at Omega — I saw it on some files, because the name belonged to Omega.’

Blancpain, a then-dormant company founded in 1735, allowed Biver’s contrarian side to flourish: beyond the control of industrial suits at Omega and with nothing to destroy, only something to build, he began to develop mechanical watches in the age of quartz. The irony that this contrarianism is in fact a turn back to the traditional is surely one Biver appreciates. Blancpain started producing watches in complete revolt from the era, mechanical pieces with no hint of quartz nor the digital. (Its slogan during the quartz revolution was: ‘Since 1735 there has never been a quartz Blancpain watch and there will never be’.)

1984 saw it launch the world’s smallest movement, 1989 its thinnest. (It continues in this grand complication mode today: the Blancpain 1735 has 735 components and with its ultra-slim movement, moon phase calendar, minute repeater, Tourbillon, perpetual calendar and split-second chronograph, it is a masterwork in miniature, selling for nearly $1 million.)

 
A DECADE LATER and Blancpain had gone from obsolescent to phosphorescent, fêted for its concentration on the mechanics of the watch, pushing the art of watchmaking into innovative territory. Biver sold it to Swatch in 1992, which he found difficult because Swatch was the owner of Omega, his previous unhappy home, and he harboured fears that Swatch might industrialise the brand. (The price tag of CHF60 million — after buying it for CHF10,000 — was some compensation.)

This time, however, Biver was on the board of Swatch and in charge of Omega, but ‘it was a changed Omega, an Omega that had done its revolution — and was back to mechanics. I was in a good position to help Omega because they were coming back to me. I was very comfortable and inclined to help.’ He returned to a company that had come to see his way of thinking.

Biver resigned in 2004 after ten years, when he felt he had to scratch his entrepreneurial itch. The problem was how to avoid repeating what he had done at Blancpain: ‘That was my difficulty — my passion for traditional watchmaking was still 100 per cent there and I could not see how I could exercise that passion without betraying Blancpain, or copying it, or being inspired by it. Blancpain was me and I could only repeat who I am. I had a total obstruction.’

It was a third way, between tradition and modernity, that struck Biver: ‘I thought, “Why can I not take Blancpain and then let in some new techniques?” Blancpain would never accept these because those new elements would be a betrayal of tradition. But then I can have both: tradition and the future, the vision. I have what the architect I.M. Pei did in the Place du Louvre.’

His target was another company decrepit when he came to it: Hublot, founded in 1980 by Carlo Crocco and producing watches with gold cases and rubber straps: ‘I knew Hublot already. In 1984, Hublot distributed Blancpain. Then in the second part of the eighties, Hublot bought movements from us. We went far back. What I had not known was how bad a shape they were in.

'They were very passive; they were developing nothing new and always relying on their old Hublot of the eighties, when taste had changed. When people were aspiring for bigger watches, Hublot stayed as they were. They lost a huge part of the market. They had come down to a very small turnover. They were a forgotten brand.’ In other words, ripe for a takeover and a revolution.
 
 
BIVER BOUGHT 20 per cent of the company from Crocco and set to work in June 2004 on the Big Bang, the watch that put fusion at the centre of its concept, developing its gold-rubber basis. The range now starts at £7,500 for a steel version, moving up to £17,000 for a rose gold one and to £80,000 for a grande complication Tourbillon, with countless gradations in between; there is also a limited-edition ‘One Million $’ Big Bang, with 463 diamonds. King Juan Carlos of Spain wears his Hublot every day, apparently, and in 2007 Hublot produced 24,000 watches.

But no good deed goes unpunished: having sextupled Hublot’s turnover in three years to £67 million in 2007, Biver wanted to buy the rest of the company. ‘While I was in the acquisition process to buy the rest, the owner suddenly realised that the turnover in the meantime had been multiplied by six. Suddenly he became greedy, he changed the price. Now he was asking me to pay for what I have developed. Why should I be punished because I did a good job?’ For a man as passionate as Biver, this was a bitter blow; it almost appears that his good nature cannot quite comprehend the venality of business.

‘He found the solution — to sell to LVMH. I wanted to keep it, to buy it for myself, but not at that price. I would have loved to buy the company, but at my prices, not at the LVMH prices.’ Once again a brand he had built up was sold to a global conglomerate.

There is a cunning mixture of exclusivity and populism in Biver’s strategy at Hublot. He has not ignored the traditional watch/yacht partnerships: he sponsors the Monaco Yacht Club, the Copa del Rey and the Real Club Nautico de Palma, and indeed snatched the sponsorship of the Alinghi yachting team from his old firm Audemars Piguet in August when it hesitated over renewing the deal.

However, Hublot was the first luxury brand to sponsor a football team: it is the official timekeeper partner of Manchester United, its name on the clocks at either end of the stadium, ticking over as Rooney shoots. At the end of August, in the presence of the team and Sir Alex Ferguson, Biver unveiled a Hublot clock at Old Trafford, a spindly structure with four Hublot dials staring out over the grounds.

That same weekend, Hublot enthusiasts from around the world were flown into Manchester to see their match against Arsenal as a sign of corporate goodwill to its best customers. There were several people from the Far East, which Biver has visited frequently in the past year as he has opened Hublot concessions in Bangkok, Beijing and Shanghai (all documented by an omnipresent film crew on Hublot TV on hublot.ch). As Manchester United are especially popular in China, the move to sponsor the club is canny.

He is not worried that football debases the brand: ‘Football is populist, as you say, but strangely enough football is not only populist from the base of the social pyramid — it’s also populist from the vertical. It goes top to bottom. Many rich people, many entrepreneurs who can afford to buy a Hublot, are fans of football too, not just polo. If I have to invite customers to a football game or a polo game, where do I get the most emotional response? It gave us huge exposure because it was contrarian. It helped us enormously. The Manchester sponsorship and Euro 2008 and 2012 and our general involvement in the football world helps Hublot.’

 
THIS SORT OF corporate entertainment breeds tremendous loyalty, as does Biver’s interaction with his customers: he has posted more than 1,800 messages on the boards at timezone.com. This level of engagement is almost unheard-of for a luxury brand’s CEO. His posts are not even fob-offs: he gives thanks for kind comments and regularly offers the disgruntled ‘my personal and extended guarantee’.

The expansion strategy is not a result of LVMH deciding to push its new property, but was always Biver’s intention: he has upped his workload and travel even when most of his contemporaries are sitting by Lake Geneva sipping wine all day. Not that he could not do this if he wanted: he has a collection of Château d’Yquem going back 150 years. (Ironically, Château d’Yquem is also owned by LVMH.)

It seems unlikely that Jean-Claude Biver will be sitting by Lake Geneva ravaging his stocks anytime soon, although he is unlikely to try for a fourth great position in watchmaking: ‘When God gives you three times and says, “Go ahead,” you don’t dare ask him, “Can I start again with a fourth experience?” I’m happy he gave me three so I will not ask in case he thinks I’m greedy. I will not start a new adventure in watches. Eventually I could retire in the sense of instead of working 15–16 hours a day, I could eventually work seven or eight. It’s pleasure and I put pressure on myself.’

Would he do it any differently if he could? ‘I would start everything again 100 per cent the same! I wouldn’t change anything, anything, anything.'