In May, Brigitte Courtet said, she was shocked to receive an email about reviving Eberjax, her family’s defunct watch business.
It had made chronographs, or stopwatches, from 1947 to 1983 in a large factory in Charquemont, a French region near the Swiss border. And while Ms. Courtet, 66, said she had not done anything with the brand since buying it from her father and uncle in 1983 as production ended, she now was eager to return to the watch world.
The email had come from Christophe Hoppé, 50, the French-born founder of Bausele watches in Sydney, Australia. (He translated for Ms. Courtet during a recent video interview.)
About 20 years ago he inherited a 38-millimeter gold-plated stainless steel Eberjax chronograph from his paternal grandfather and, through online searches, found out the name Eberjax was in the public domain. He registered it this year, but then decided to ensure that Ms. Courtet “was happy for me to take over,” he said.
While Mr. Hoppé is continuing to raise the 1.3 million euros ($1.35 million) he needs for startup funding, they have agreed that he will operate the company with Ms. Courtet acting as a consultant. After all, she was the quality controller for a watch company in the nearby Maîche, from 1972 to 1975; an accountant for Eberjax from 1976 to 1983; and had owned a watch and jewelry store, selling local brands such as Herbelin and Clyda, until 2019. She also became one of Charquemont’s deputy mayors in 2020.
As for Mr. Hoppé, he said he would be able to work on reviving the brand because he had streamlined Bausele’s operations over the past year “so I have a bit more time.”
Charquemont’s watchmaking history dates from about 1800, according to Camille Grandmaison, the collections assistant at the Musée de Temps (Museum of Time) in nearby Besançon. “It’s a mountainous area so during the winter, the farmers weren’t able to work because there was a lot of snow back in these days,” so people needed a second job.
By the end of the 19th century, some of those part-time watchmakers “began to make complete watches, not just components,” she said, and “began to build workshops or very small factories.” Distribution was helped by the arrival of rail travel in 1905, she noted, but growth slowed during the world wars and the economic crisis of the late 1920s.
Many of the region’s watch factories closed in the 1970s and ’80s, unable to compete with the popularity of inexpensive Japanese quartz watches, but Ms. Courtet wrote in a later email that her family’s business was lucky that it had “a niche product with a very specific market.”
Eberjax, she said, was an amalgamation of Courtet family names: “My grandfather, which is Emile, and then my uncles, Bernard and Jacques, and Jean, my father.” It was her father and an uncle, Bernard, who ran the business, so it closed when they retired.
Today only a handful of watch-related companies survive in the area, Ms. Grandmaison said, mentioning Herbelin and Perrenoud, which has diversified from watches into medical equipment and other products.
Mr. Hoppé said that next September he plans to introduce the revived brand with a 60-piece limited-edition chronograph — 47 pieces in stainless steel and 13 in gold — sold through the company’s website. Parts would be made in the French-Swiss watchmaking Jura region and assembled by an atelier in Vauclusotte, about a 20-minute drive north of Charquemont.
The new watches “will be based on the vintage look, because that’s what is working commercially at the moment,” he said, “but we need to find something a little bit different.”
Thierry Nataf, the president and chief executive of the Luxury Consulting Company and a former president and chief executive of Zenith, said that the original Eberjax operation had been “successful with the famous panda watch, which has two counters at three o’clock and at nine o ‘clock and in a cushion type of box.” Panda is a watch industry nickname for a chronograph with a light-color main dial and black sub-dials that resemble a panda’s face, and he was referring to a case in the shape of a pillow cushion. (His company has five Eberjax watches in its archive.)
But a new twist would be key to the success of the revived brand, he said: “It’s easier to create a new brand with new value that reflects a new era than trying to bring back a watch from the past.”