The day I visited Biver started like any other – with breakfast. But it wasn’t a normal breakfast, because I was seated opposite Jean-Claude Biver, at his own kitchen table. A few days after Watches & Wonders wrapped up I had the opportunity to visit the brand’s atelier in the countryside near Geneva, and I was lucky enough to spend some time with the man himself before he went to the airport; he was headed to Boston to deliver a guest lecture at Harvard Business School.

Dismissed in his early career as a ‘nostalgia salesman,’ Mr Biver helped pioneer the contemporary luxury watch industry in the midst of the Quartz Crisis by proving the consumer demand for artisanal mechanical watches. The story is well-known but it bears repeating; Mr Biver, together with his friend Jacques Piguet, head of the esteemed Frederic Piguet manufacture, paid CHF22,000 to buy the rights to a defunct brand from what would later become Swatch Group. Their deft products and marketing made Blancpain one of the stars of the mechanical watch renaissance, allowing the pair to sell the brand back to Swatch a decade later for CHF60 million.

From left to right: CEO James Marks, Jean-Claude Biver, and Pierre Biver. Image – Biver

The success of Blancpain was extraordinary and helped pave the way for the rebirth of other brands like A. Lange & Söhne. But this was just the opening act.

After selling Blancpain back to Swatch, Mr Biver helped put Omega on the wrist of James Bond and transformed Hublot into what it is today. It’s easy to see why in 2010 he was awarded the Prix Gaïa, the highest honour in modern watchmaking, for his entrepreneurship and lasting influence on the industry.

Over coffee and croissants, Mr Biver explained the rationale for starting his own brand with his son Pierre, and what they’ve been working to achieve over the past few years. A charismatic speaker, his passion for watchmaking is palpable, and he has a charming habit of smacking the table to emphasise his points.

Our conversation was wide-ranging, from his initial pitch to a group of skeptical Credit Suisse bankers to secure the funding to start Blancpain, to his vision for the family’s eponymous brand. As he put it, after a 50-year career in the industry, there was only one place he wanted to start: the top.

Understanding Biver

Finding the Biver manufacture means getting out of Geneva and heading north toward Givrins. It’s a comparatively rural area, a world apart from the canton’s industrial watchmaking clusters in Plan-les-Ouates and Meyrin. But it’s still close enough to Geneva that, on a clear day, you can see the famed Jet d’Eau.

Arriving at the manufacture, I was struck by the similarity to Blancpain’s famous ‘farmhouse’ in Le Brassus, established by Mr Biver and Jacques Piguet in 1983. The similarity begins with the architectural style of the building and extends to its idyllic surroundings – even the typography of the brand logo is familiar – but it doesn’t end there. Similar operations occur within, namely finishing and assembly, and on similar types of complicated watches.

Mr Biver clearly has a penchant for the pastoral, and I have to admit it gives the operation a decidedly familial atmosphere, which suits the father and son operation. But neither father nor son are watchmakers in the literal sense, so they’ve hired a team of 26 engineers, watchmakers, designers, and logisticians who together will produce about 150 watches in 2025. This production includes the last few Carillon Tourbillons, and about 140 Automatiques.

Most of the value creation takes place at the farmhouse, where all Biver watches are designed, finished, assembled, cased, and tested.

To cover the gap in the middle, the brand contracts out engineering and the production of cases, dials, and raw movement components to a network of well-known suppliers. Mr Biver’s prominence is no doubt helpful in this regard; his name alone opens a lot of doors and he probably has an easier time having small orders fulfilled than do most other small-volume watchmakers.

The brand introduced its first watch, the Carillon Tourbillon Minute Repeater, in 2023. While the popular reception was skeptical, it’s proven to be a hit with its target clientele.

A year later, the Carillon Tourbillon was joined by the comparatively simple Automatique, which is noteworthy for featuring one of the most technically and aesthetically elaborate automatic movements in the industry, complete with a return-to-zero function for the central seconds hand.

As a business, the Biver brand feels a lot like that of Laurent Ferrier in its early days – a small team of just under 30 people focused on design, finishing, and assembly, with cases, dials, and movement components outsourced to specialists in their respective fields.

Both companies started out with a tourbillon before adding a micro-rotor automatic, and sought inspiration from the great designs of the past. The Biver Automatique, for example, clearly takes inspiration from the Patek Philippe ref. 1579’s so-called ’spider lugs’ and features a concave bezel to reduce perceived thickness, borrowing a page from Patek Philippe’s grand complication design playbook.

Finishing

Mr Biver is extremely passionate about finishing, which makes sense given that much of the Biver brand’s value-add is in its excellent finishing. Over breakfast, he articulated his distaste for the common industry practice of brands finishing different movements to different standards depending on the complexity and price point.

The finishing department

In his view, brands should commit to a single quality standard that is consistent across the range. Fortunately Mr Biver is not alone in this belief; A. Lange & Söhne and FP Journe come to mind as brands that seem to share this philosophy.

The finishing protocols are meticulously documented and unambiguous

For his own watches, Mr Biver believes it’s critical that the ‘simple’ Automatique is finished to the same degree as the Carillon Tourbillon, with the same care taken to heighten the movement’s aesthetics with sharp inward angles and black polished steel. And he emphasised the importance of finishing the unseen components under the dial to the same standard as those seen through the case back. From what I observed in the finishing department, he’s assembled a team that shares his values.

After processing by the logistician, raw movement components are delivered to the finishing department; the parts themselves come from either Le Cercle des Horlogers, where the components for the Carillon Tourbillon are made, or Dubois Dépraz, which is responsible for the Automatique.

Here, a small team bevels every bridge, brushes every flank, and polishes every countersink the old fashioned way, by hand with metal files and boxwood.

This is time-consuming work – even in the simple Automatique, most bridges take about nine hours to finish, while the most intricate bridge, the so-called ‘guitar’ that straddles the grande sonnerie-style winding click, can require up to 16 hours of tedious polishing.

Once the components are finished, they are carefully organised and packed off to the logistics department until a watchmaker is ready to assemble them. The watchmakers have flexible schedules and keys to the building, so they can work whenever they need to while maintaining work/life balance.

A real treat of visiting any manufacture is meeting the watchmakers and seeing them in action. At Biver, many of them keep their school watches on hand and are delighted to show them off.

The personal school watch made by one of the watchmakers in the finishing department

If there’s any fault to be found in the finishing, it’s that it arguably calls too much attention to itself. The winding mass of the Carillon Tourbillon, for example, is engraved “196 angles rentrants” to indicate the number of hand-finished inward angles that can be found in the movement. It’s a staggering number to be sure, but perhaps better left unsaid.

Likewise, the painstaking clous de Paris guilloche decoration on the Automatique is impressive, but doesn’t leave anywhere for the eye to rest. Both critiques are subjective and stylistic; the quality is above reproach.

Assembly

The assembly workshop is adjacent to the finishing department. Here, each watchmaker starts with a kit of finished components and assembles a single movement from start to finish, a process we’ve documented elsewhere at other manufactures like F.P. Journe.

Anecdotally, watchmakers crave this level of autonomy, and the freedom to build a complete watch from the ground up is an appealing proposition for ambitious young watchmakers languishing at establishment brands, where the work is typically subdivided into an endless series of tedious repetitive tasks.

Though the watchmakers in this room start with finished components, they are responsible for any corrective finishing that is required, and have access to many of the same tools used in the finishing department, including metal files, boxwood polishing sticks, soft-tipped tweezers, and purpose-built jigs.

Because most of the movement bridges of both the Carillon Tourbillon and Automatique are made of solid white gold, specifically a high-palladium white gold alloy that does not require rhodium plating, extra care is taken to minimise scratches during assembly.

Even the typical wood-tipped tweezers can leave faint marks on polished surfaces, so extra-soft casein plastic-tipped tweezers are used to handle the most sensitive components. This extra care is worth it, since the white gold bridges give the movements a little extra gravitas.

This is also where the watches are cased up, tested, and, if specified by the client, paired with a matching bracelet. One of the interesting details about Biver watches is that the material used for the micro-rotor and the plating on the barrel is colour-matched to the case material, at least for the 18k rose and yellow gold models.

In other words, the yellow gold models feature a 22k yellow gold winding mass and gilded barrel, while the rose gold pieces feature these components in rose gold. This treatment does not extend to the platinum models, likely because it would render the appearance overly monochromatic.

The cases for both the Automatique and the Carillon Tourbillon are supplied by Efteor, a maker of top-quality cases used by the likes of A. Lange & Söhne, among others. Highly nuanced with elegant soldered lugs, the cases are unusually robust; the Automatique is water resistant to 80 m. The design of the crown tube is such that some water resistance remains even with the crown pulled, which provides a reassuring degree of safety.

This is one of many details that prove the watches are made to be worn. Another is the lug holes, which are lined with titanium bushings to prevent ovalisation. Even the Carillon Tourbillon is made to be worn and enjoyed, with 50 m water resistance for most versions and redundant safety mechanisms to prevent damage to the movement. While many of these watches are destined to live a coddled existence inside a safe, it’s nice to know they can stand up to the hazards of the real world.

Quality control

Ironically, none of these safety measures can protect the watches from the most significant hazard they are likely to face: the unforgiving scrutiny of Instagram. Like most brands that make watches for fastidious collectors, Biver fights fire with fire, examining every detail under high magnification to ensure the dial markers are perfectly aligned and that the movement is perfectly clean.

Here a technician uses a high-powered camera to systematically inspect each dial and movement, millimeter by millimeter. For the Carillon Tourbillon, quality control extends beyond what you can see to ensure that each watch strikes exactly the right high and low notes.

A yellow gold Automatique with a carbon fiber dial undergoing quality control

To this end, every minute repeater is tested in a purpose-built sound chamber to isolate any background noise and perfectly record each watch’s acoustic signature. This digital fingerprint is used during initial assembly to measure the frequency of each tone to ensure that it’s within spec. And when a watch comes back for service, the sound can be compared with the original recording and adjusted to sound like new.

The custom-made acoustic test chamber

Closing thoughts

On the road back to Geneva, I began reflecting on what I’d seen. The Biver name looms large, and carries with it high expectations. But as high as my own expectations were, I came away from my visit with the distinct sense that the Biver team has even higher expectations for themselves. 

The ambition and drive that motivated Mr Biver for the past 50 years is alive and well, and seems to have attracted a group of like-minded individuals. And based on a few details that were teased about upcoming models, they’re just getting started.