Gaia Award - Three Industry Figures Honored
WORLDTEMPUS - 17 September 2010
The Gaia Award was presented last night at the Musee International d'Horlogerie in La Chaux-de-Fonds for the eighteenth time. Presided over by museum curator and previous recipient Dr. Ludwig Oechslin, it has been sponsored by the Julius Bär bank since 2007. Two special awards were given out by the bank during the ceremony to promising young watchmakers having completed special projects: Aurelie Michaud for restoration at the MIH and Masaki Kamasawa, previously of Vincent Berard's manufacture (which unfortunately closed its doors this week), were the obviously delighted recipients.
Jacques Muller and Elmar Mock are two names that have not been widely heard in our industry for years. But it was these two gentlemen receiving the prize for artisanal creation who were so instrumental in revitalizing the Swiss watch industry in the 1980s. They were the fathers of the Swatch watch: the plastic piece of pop culture that was the object finally turning all watch-interested eyes back to Switzerland after the home of haute horlogerie was just about decimated following the arrival of the inexpensive quartz watch from the Far East.
Muller and Mock, who humbly accepted their prizes with only a few words of thanks, were introduced by Swiss journalist Lucien Trueb, who had prepared a short history of the battle for recognition for these two men. He explained that after revisiting the topic of the creation of the Swatch in the Swiss-German daily newspaper NZZ in 2008, he received a letter from Swatch Group chairman Nicolas G. Hayek. In this letter Hayek told Trueb that the Swatch had had many fathers and included a list of about 50 names he considered part of the creation. Trueb's next slide showed a hand-drawn sketch of the first Swatch, signed by Mock and Muller of ETA and dated March 27, 1980.
The second honoree of the evening was a prominent figure of the Swiss watch industry familiar to every watch enthusiast. It was Jean-Claude Biver who aided in heralding the age of the mechanical renaissance by founding Blancpain, which he later sold to the Swatch Group, then breathing new life into Swatch Group brands Omega and Breguet, and finally turning Hublot into one of the industry's current top watch brands. Biver received the Gaia Award—which Julius Bär bank board member Remy Bersier called the "Nobel Prize of haute horlogerie"—for "spirit of enterprise," and this could hardly have been more fitting. The 61-year-old Biver has throughout his career embodied the hungry entrepreneur, though financially he has no longer needed to for many years. The prize was given to him by former Omega marketing director and Biver's co-worker Fritz Hamman, who explained that Biver "lives his passions."
In his own short acceptance speech, the dynamic Biver talked much about love and dedicated the award to his longtime managing director Ricardo Guadalupe. Guadalupe has accompanied him throughout many stations of his career. The excitable Biver summed up by saying, "You need to work for what comes after."
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