Just four short years ago, the word ‘hublot’ still meant a port-hole, at least for French-speakers. And of course it still does mean exactly that. But in the luxury industry the word, with a capital H, has come to be known as the brand of a watch, more particularly a new kind of watch. If, like Cristiano Ronaldo and several other footballers at Manchester United, you can afford a Hublot starting at around 37,500 euros, you have on your wrist a hand-made watch whose ten-fold increase in sales in the last four years is based on a blend of high-tech materials with Switzerland’s time-honoured, horological craftsmanship.
Jean-Claude Biver, the man behind the remarkable revival of Hublot, describes this blend of old and new as “fusion”. And just to emphasise the point, he hired human missile Yves Rossy, dubbed him “Fusion Man”, and subsidized his 200kmh, rocket-powered flight across the Channel last September.
An inspired stunt, you might say. But this is typical of M. Biver, one of the great entrepreneurs of the Swiss watch industry who has revived no less than three brands through, well, a fusion of skills and collected numerous commercial accolades along the way. His career allies a flair for marketing with a passion for traditional watch-making and, by no means least, a management philosophy that owes much to an almost peasant attachment to commonsense.
M. Biver has a degree in economics but insists it taught him nothing. “Experience is everything,” he says. Thus you won’t find the headquarters of Hublot, based near Geneva at the old Roman village of Nyon, full of bright young people with MBAs. “An MBA doesn’t mean you have commonsense,” he says dismissively.
The chairman, chief executive and saviour of Hublot Geneve sets great store on a whole different set of values that isn’t taught on Wall Street or indeed in much of the City, although perhaps it should be. For M. Biver, what counts in business these days is a sense of practicality, the experience of setbacks (“in sport you learn to accept small defeats and that produces success”), and a devotion to the product. As he puts it: “Passion is the essential, a gift from God and it’s superior to any MBA.”
To these three qualities should be added a reverence for tradition, which M. Biver sees as the foundation of innovation. “The Japanese make great watches,” concedes M. Biver. “But the designs have only modernity, not tradition. If you build on tradition, you have a harmony with the past. You must look backwards before you look forward. Experience is not everything. It is yesterday, but it is like the roots of the vineyard. It’s where it all starts. The vision is the future.”
So not exactly economics 101 then, but it works. Last year M. Biver sold Hublot to the leader in the luxury industry, LVMH, for 500m Swiss francs [336m euros at today’s prices] and banked some 100m [67m euros] for himself.
The commercial education of Jean-Claude Biver began in the most unlikely of places – in the rugged Joux valley sheltered by the Jura mountain range. It had been the stronghold of the prestige watch-making industry for nearly 300 years, but in the early seventies was threatened with extinction by the rise of quartz-driven watches. Manufactured by Citizen and other mainly Japanese companies, they kept perfect time at a tiny fraction of the cost of Switzerland’s elaborate timepieces. Even many in the industry believed the Joux valley was dead and buried, and its historic craft skills would go the way of the steam locomotive.
The young Biver, Luxembourg-born but raised mainly in Switzerland, was enchanted with the industry. For him, the intricate workings of a watch reminded him of the mechanical toys he’d played with as a child. Fresh out of university, he joined Audemars Piguet, then approaching its centenary, and spent a first, blissful year working in all the departments. The experience gave him a grounding in the industry and only served to deep his admiration for watchmakers. The passion was born.
In 1980 he left Audemars Piguet – “I thought I could do better,” he recalls – for one of the most responsible jobs in the industry, that of product manager at Omega. Here he acquired corporate skills – – the rules and constraints of a major group and a multinational brand. But it wasn’t him. Hankering for the charm, idiosyncracy and freedoms of a smaller brand, he resigned from Omega in 1982 and returned to the heart of the Joux Valley. With his friend Jacques Piguet, he had become part-owner of Blancpain. One of the treasures of the industry, Blancpain was nearly 250 years old but had been dormant for nearly 30 years and many thought was likely to remain so.
With a statement that became something of a call to arms for the Swiss watchmaker, M. Biver declared: “Since 1735 there has never been a quartz Blancpain watch – and there never will be”. He had nailed his flag to tradition.
The two friends revived Blancpain almost overnight. Within a few years, turnover was up to Swf50m. But the failure of his marriage – Jean-Claude Biver is an unapologetic workaholic – forced him to sell out to what is now the Swatch Group of Nicolas Hayek. Suddenly, he was back at Omega all over again with responsibility for marketing the brand. Over the next ten years, he revived Omega as an emblematic, hand-crafted watch largely through the development of new products endorsed by Cindy Crawford, Michael Schumacher, Pierce Brosnan and other international figures.
They were dazzling and dramatic years, but also exhausting. At the end of 2003 M. Biver took a sabbatical. It didn’t last for long. Within a few months he was tapped on the shoulder by one, Carlo Crocco, who had founded Hublot Geneve in 1980 but was heavily involved in philanthropic work and wanted to hand over the reins. It was a chance to jump back into the world that M. Biver knew best and it proved irresistible.
Crocco had pioneered the match-up of a natural rubber bracelet with a gold watch, a heresy in 1980 but one that had been copied in the years since. The ex-Omega man saw the future and it was called Fusion, the blend of the traditional with the new to make a dramatic and modernistic statement. Not a man for textbook marketing, the new part-owner of Hublot drew his inspiration from a concrete example – the glass pyramid designed by American architect IM Pei for the Louvre.
Within months, by April 2005, M.Biver and his long-time collaborator Ricard Guadalupe, shocked the industry with a watch called Big Bang. It blended kevlar and carbon fibre, natural rubber and titanium – the materials of F1 – with gold and jewels. It felt good on the wrist and looked magnificent.
With the Big Bang rapidly gaining a following, M.Biver looked around for celebrities with international reach and found them in a sport long regarded as down-market. “Footballers have become stars. Their wives are as pretty as those of actors. They’ve got nice cars, nice houses,” he explains. In short order Hublot Geneve is a sponsor of the 2008 European Cup and a formal partner with Manchester United.
Of all his three rescue missions of Swiss watch brands, that of Hublot Geneve was the quickest and biggest. As sales growth outstripped those of rival brands, luxury giant LVMH clearly felt it had no option but to dig into its deep pockets. In a record valuation, in April 2008 it paid two times estimated earnings to bring Big Bang into its stable.
Although he mixes in a glittering milieu of the wealthy, celebrities and royalty, Jean-Claude Biver prefers the simple life. He spends weekends on his cheese-producing farm with his family and cows. He loves nothing better than to don traditional Swiss garb and go walking with friends in the mountains. And he treasures health more than wealth (“a minute without health is like death”).
The global recession doesn’t daunt him. Typically drawing on a sporting metaphor, he compares it to a yacht race. “When the wind drops in a regatta, the whole fleet slows down,” he says. “The goal is to finish the course in front.”
Nor does it hurt if you sponsor the race as well. Every year Hublot Geneve has its name on the classic wooden-boat regatta at Monaco where there’s not a Kevlar or carbon fibre boat in sight. Now that’s fusion.
