Biver restarts the clock on family watch venture

After Jean-Claude Biver launched the first watch bearing his name last spring, seasoned watch-industry observers gave it mixed reviews. Biver — an industry veteran of 50 years and the man who turned Hublot into one of the hottest names in global luxury — had trailed his new venture a year in advance. But few had anticipated the company he was building with his young son Pierre would kick off with an eccentric $500,000 grand complication that, in the company’s words, bridged “past, present and future”. Hodinkee, the influential online watch community, described the Biver Carillon Tourbillon as being “aesthetically unusual”.

However, 18 months on, the company’s newly appointed chief executive, James Marks, says the 50 models promised at launch are almost gone. And there are few start-up watch companies that would not happily trade Biver’s $25mn revenues, to date, for their own.

Now, Biver is about to release its second watch. This time, it is a simple three-hand automatic showing only hours, minutes and seconds, cased in 39mm of platinum or rose gold. Inside that will be the company’s second calibre, JCB-003 — a base intended as a platform for adding further complications. This features a “zero-reset” function: a complex mechanical system that sends the seconds hand to 12 o’clock when the crown is pulled out — which enables accurate time setting, and is regarded as a sign of watchmaking quality.

Not so simple is the price: the Biver Automatique collection will start at SFr75,000 ($89,000), rising to SFr121,000 for a platinum version with a grey obsidian dial, placing it at the higher end of the spectrum. Hyperwatch creators Richard Mille and independent wunderkind Rexhep Rexhepi are among only a handful of watchmakers that can command more for so-called entry-level pieces.

Still, Marks believes the price is right. “The market is responsive to simple time-only watches at high price points,” he says on a video call from his new office at Biver HQ in Givrins, halfway along Lake Geneva towards Lausanne. “We’ve seen that with Rexhep, with De Bethune, with François-Paul Journe. From an independent point of view, it’s not aggressively priced — it’s priced correctly for what the watch represents in terms of quality.”

Biver has pitched his burgeoning business on quality — particularly on finishing and decoration, and the recherché skills required to achieve them.

Midway through the conversation with Marks, the 74-year-old appears on camera in a monogrammed “JCB” shirt and, with his signature bullishness, begins a story about the screws in his watches. “They’re black polished,” he says. “And it takes 47 minutes to black polish the head of a screw. Now, remember, there are 40 screws in each watch. How many watches can you build when you need 47 minutes per screw?”

Marks says he thinks the company, which employs three watchmakers and four finishers in Givrins, will be able to produce 100, perhaps 120, Automatiques a year. But Biver is more philosophical. “The limit will be natural and not fixed,” he says, vigorously thumping Marks’s desk, a move he’s famous for. “The limit is the quality required.”

He adds that Biver will be one of the only brands to assemble an automatic movement twice (the Automatique’s JCB-003 is produced by Swiss movement specialist Dubois Dépraz): once to check it works; and a second time after the components have been polished and finished, a trick he says he learnt at Audemars Piguet when he got into the business in 1973.

Biver says the Automatique signals the beginning of the brand — as distinct from the company, which he announced on Swiss radio in February 2022, surprising even his son Pierre. “The Biver brand is born on August 1, 2024,” he insists. “That’s the real beginning.”

He says coming in with the Carillon Tourbillon was a gamble but that, because of his place in the industry, he had no choice but to go high. He also admits that announcing the company would limit the watch to 50 pieces “smells of marketing” — which he sees as a mistake for a brand that was only ever going to be associated with low production volumes.

James is passionate about watches, not a technocrat who only wears the watch the company lends him

August 1 was also the day Marks started his new job. The 44-year-old Englishman moved to Zurich in December last year with Phillips, the auction house for which, in 2019, he set up Perpetual, a network of bricks-and-mortar stores selling high-end, pre-owned and vintage watches to collectors. At Biver, he will continue to advise Phillips, which is due to open a Perpetual store in Zurich before the end of the year, to add to sites in London, Hong Kong and Gstaad.

“It was a chance I couldn’t pass up,” says Marks, who worked in finance before joining Phillips in 2018. “I’ve been incredibly fortunate in a very short time to work with two pillars of the industry in Aurel [Bacs, of Phillips] and now Jean-Claude.”

Because of his age, Marks will be seen as a bridge between the past, present and future himself. Pierre Biver is 25, 50 years his father’s junior. “We have two dynamic forces within one company,” says Marks, adding that Biver Sr remains deeply involved in the day-to-day running of the business.

Marks makes no attempt to deny that the business is hugely reliant on Biver’s reputation and that the brand is targeting collectors, rather than a particular demographic or market. But, despite its ties to collectors, Marks says Biver will not seek to maximise margins by selling direct, and will instead continue to rely on a global retailer network that takes in Bucherer in Europe, Material Good in the US, The Hour Glass in Asia Pacific, and Seddiqi in the Middle East.

In Marks, Biver seems pleased to have got his man. Marks mentored Pierre at Phillips in 2019 and, in 2020, advised Biver Sr on the sale of four of his rare Patek Philippe watches in a Phillips sale that netted him $8.76mn. “James is a big asset,” he says, beaming. “He’s passionate about watches, and not a technocrat who only wears the watch the company lends him. He has the typical British tranquility but, behind the tranquility, there is enormous energy.”

One thing is certain. Marks will need it to keep up with his irrepressible new boss.