Movado Group Sells 95% of Ebel for $66.5 Million: A Great Swiss Name Finds a New Architect
6 min read
Movado Group has agreed to sell a 95% interest in EBEL for $66.5 million to a buyer group led by Geneva-based Montres Journe SA - the company behind F.P. Journe, with Chanel and Swiss industry veteran Pierre Jacques participating. Movado will retain the remaining 5%, while Jacques is set to become Ebel’s chief executive officer.
It is an unusually consequential transaction for a brand that once stood at the very center of Swiss watchmaking’s cultural imagination. Ebel is not merely being sold, it is being handed to owners whose combined credentials, high-end independent manufacturing, global luxury stewardship, and deep operational experience, suggest a deliberate attempt to restore a once-formidable Maison to relevance.
The Deal, In Plain English
Under the binding agreement announced by Movado Group, the buyer group will acquire 95% of Ebel for $66.5 million, subject to customary purchase-price adjustments and closing conditions. Movado Group will retain a 5% minority stake and provide transition services after closing to help ensure continuity for customers and business partners.
The transaction is expected to close within the next few months. At closing, Ebel’s trademarks, other intellectual property, inventory, and certain assets principally devoted to the brand - including the celebrated Villa Turque, Le Corbusier’s modernist house in La Chaux-de-Fonds, will be transferred into a newly formed Swiss subsidiary of Movado Group. The buyer group will then acquire 95% of the equity in that subsidiary.
For Movado, the rationale is straightforward: the company intends to concentrate resources on its core accessible-luxury and fashion watch and jewelry portfolio, which includes Movado, MVMT, Olivia Burton, Concord, and licensed brands such as Calvin Klein, Coach, Tommy Hilfiger, Hugo Boss, and Lacoste. For Ebel, the sale provides something it has lacked for years: dedicated ownership, capital, and a leadership team with an unambiguous luxury-watch mandate.
Why This Buyer Group Matters
The composition of the acquiring group is the most compelling part of the story.
Montres Journe SA, founded in Geneva in 1999 by master watchmaker François-Paul Journe, is the manufacturer behind F.P. Journe, one of the most respected independent houses in contemporary haute horlogerie. Its involvement signals that Ebel’s revival, if it succeeds, will not be built primarily on licensing deals, distribution scale, or marketing spend. It will be expected to stand on product.
François-Paul Journe’s own comment distilled that ambition with characteristic bluntness: “Like Michelangelo and so many others after him: the product, the product, the product.” For a brand whose historical reputation was built on distinctive design, unusually ambitious mechanics, and exceptional bracelets, that is more than a soundbite. It is a statement of intent.
Chanel’s participation adds another layer of significance. The French luxury house brings global brand-building experience, an established watches and fine jewelry platform, and a long-term perspective on craftsmanship and creative identity. Frédéric Grangié, President of Chanel Watches & Fine Jewelry, described Ebel as “one of the great names of Swiss watchmaking,” emphasizing both its heritage and its potential for future growth.
Then there is Pierre Jacques. A widely respected figure in the Swiss watch industry, Jacques will lead Ebel as CEO following completion of the transaction. His appointment matters because brand revivals are rarely rescued by capital alone, they require someone who understands both the emotional architecture of a heritage brand and the hard commercial mechanics of rebuilding distribution, product cadence, pricing, and consumer trust.
A Brand Built By A Husband And Wife
Ebel was founded in 1911 in La Chaux-de-Fonds by Eugène Blum and his wife, Alice Lévy. The company’s name itself is a family cipher: Eugène Blum et Lévy. From its earliest years, Ebel positioned itself at the intersection of technical competence and refined design - an idea that would become central to its identity.
The firm remained a family business through much of the 20th century. Its most transformative modern chapter began when Pierre-Alain Blum, the founders’ grandson, took control in the early 1970s. Under his leadership, Ebel became one of the great commercial and creative success stories of the quartz era, even as much of the Swiss industry struggled to respond to inexpensive Japanese quartz watches.
Blum’s Ebel did not simply survive the Quartz Revolution, it turned it into an advantage. The brand became a leader in Swiss quartz watchmaking and, through a relationship with Cartier executive Alain-Dominique Perrin, helped produce Swiss-made quartz watches for Cartier, including the emerging Must de Cartier line. That partnership gave EBEL both financial momentum and the confidence to pursue a bolder design-led strategy.
From Family Ownership To Movado
Ebel’s family era ended at the close of the 20th century. The brand subsequently changed hands before Movado Group acquired it in 2004. Under Movado’s ownership, Ebel continued to emphasize Swiss craftsmanship, feminine elegance, and its signature wave-link bracelet design, but it no longer occupied the same cultural and collector-facing position it had enjoyed during the Blum years.
That is not a criticism of Movado so much as a reflection of a difficult strategic reality. Ebel arrived at Movado as a heritage brand with a powerful design vocabulary but an increasingly crowded competitive landscape. Movado’s portfolio priorities naturally favored brands with clearer positions in accessible luxury and fashion watches, while Ebel’s potential as a true Swiss luxury Maison required a different kind of investment: product development, high-end distribution, storytelling, and patience.
The sale therefore looks less like an abandonment of Ebel than an acknowledgment that the brand needs a dedicated platform. Movado Chairman and CEO Efraim Grinberg framed it exactly that way, describing the transaction as an example of portfolio discipline and resource allocation while placing EBEL with owners able to take a long-term view.
What Ebel Is Today
Today, Ebel remains a Swiss luxury watch brand founded in 1911, known for distinctive design, craftsmanship, and heritage. Its contemporary identity is still closely associated with refined, often feminine timepieces and the iconic wave-shaped bracelet links that helped define the brand’s visual language.
Yet the brand’s greatest untapped asset may be its archive. The Ebel of the late 1970s through the 1990s produced some of the most distinctive integrated-bracelet sports watches, high-beat chronographs, and complicated mechanical watches of its generation. Collectors have increasingly recognized the quality of those watches, even as market values have generally remained far below those of more visible contemporaries.
A revival does not need to replicate the maximalist glamor of the 1980s. But it could draw intelligently from Ebel’s genuine design codes: the five-screw bezel, the fluid case geometry, the wave and link bracelets, and the brand’s unusual willingness to treat a watch as an architectural object rather than a conventional round instrument.
A Second Chance For “The Architects Of Time”
Ebel once called itself “The Architects of Time,” and acquired Le Corbusier’s Villa Turque in 1986 to give that idea a physical home. The fact that the villa is included in the assets transferring to the new Ebel structure is a quietly powerful detail: the new owners are inheriting not only a trademark and inventory, but a tangible piece of the brand’s intellectual and cultural history.
The $66.5 million price may not make Ebel the most expensive brand transaction in recent Swiss watchmaking, but price is not the measure of this deal’s importance. What matters is whether Montres Journe, Chanel, and Pierre Jacques can convert a dormant but authentic heritage into products that collectors, retailers, and consumers genuinely want to wear.
If they succeed, this will be remembered as more than a portfolio divestiture by Movado Group. It will be the moment Ebel stopped being a nostalgic footnote in Swiss watch history - and began, once again, to build.
