999, Jacques Bordier, a manager at a multinational company in Paris, has a dream: to become an entrepreneur. To realise it, he mandates a company which identifies several potential candidates for purchase. One of them intrigues him in particular: Cobra, a group based in Franche-Comté specialising in the design of leather straps for watches.

Founded in 1954 and the result of several mergers, the group enjoyed strong growth and even came to be quoted on the Lyon Stock Exchange. During the 1990s, it became the world’s number one leather strap manufacturer, producing 10 million straps a year and some 500 models. But, unable to compete with new competition from Asia despite a production site on Mauritius, and having lost its main Swiss client, in 1999 it was forced to file for bankruptcy.

Anaïs Bordier has joined her father Jacques Bordier in the family business.

“Although I knew nothing about watch straps, I felt like a kind of knight in shining armour,” Jacques Bordier reminisces. “I just couldn’t let such special know-how disappear. I brought in several financial partners and we submitted a takeover plan.”

Manufacture Jean Rousseau, near Besançon. The company also owns a production site in Hungary and is planning to build a new site in Troyes.

With the takeover bid accepted, the new owner decided to do just the opposite of the strategy previously pursued: rather than volume, he opted for luxury, the high end of the market, quality, consistent with company know-how. But reputations aren’t changed at the flick of a wrist: the clients they met did not associate Cobra with luxury.

Cobra was listed on the Lyon Stock Exchange in the late 1980s. At the time, it was a major watch strap manufacturer. Its problems began during the following decade.

©Archives Europa Star

A complete change of corporate identity was called for. Any business not related to actual strap production – in particular retail, which was the result of the previous team’s desire to diversity – was abandoned to focus on that core know-how. The former owner had introduced a range of luxury products called Jean Rousseau, a tribute to one of the company founders. It was exclusively this line that the company planned to continue from now on. It renamed itself “Manufacture Jean Rousseau”.

Under Jacques Bordier’s management and ownership, the company was renamed Jean Rousseau and shifted its focus to luxury watches. An advertisement published in Europa Star in 2006.

©Archives Europa Star

©Archives Europa Star

It took time, but the first active luxury-segment customers were enchanted. The period was propitious: the early 2000s saw a resurgence of fine mechanical watchmaking. Demand for quality straps boomed.

A satisfying reversal of the situation came for the brand when China, whose cheap straps had forced Cobra into bankruptcy, became the driver for the new segment chosen by Jacques Bordier with its strong demand for luxury watches. “I’ve had seven lives, and in one of them I spent a while in the luxury industry, with a group that later became LVMH,” he explains. “I had this intuition that the high end of the market was the path the company should follow.”

The Cobra brand itself was sold to another strap company, the Mauritius site placed in the hands of local entrepreneurs, and a new start was made in the early 2000s at the company’s historical headquarters near Besançon, with 45 people who still had the leather-working know-how. A whole new production business had to be built up. At the same time, they opened a new site in the European Union – in Hungary, to be able to cover several price ranges – under the supervision of training staff from Besançon.

Jean Rousseau’s Paris store. The brand has also opened flagship stores in New York, London and Tokyo.

To add the crowning touch to its brand image, Jean Rousseau inaugurated a boutique in Paris as early as 2001 to display its craftsmanship to the public at large, but also – literally – to showcase its expertise to potential clients in the world of luxury goods. Today, the manufacture has flagship stores also in the UK, Japan and the United States.

“Since we work for the big brands, we can’t cite the names of our clients,” says Jacques Bordier. “So a store is a great vector for communication. Moreover, the market for private customers is also worthwhile. My vision hasn’t changed since I took over the company: basically, our focus is on quality of service, both B2B and B2C. Very often, our clients come to see us with issues and it’s up to us to find the appropriate solutions, but they also want us to assist and cater to them directly in their main markets.”

For example, on strategic markets Jean Rousseau has set up a 24-hour, fast-track service for products that might otherwise take months to order from Switzerland. It also recently embarked on a partnership with the brand IWC which has equipped some of its stores with strap configurators, offering its customers a broad choice.

But the lion’s share of Jean Rousseau’s business – around 80% – consists, as ever, in supplying straps to Swiss brands, and around ten major accounts in particular. But the company intends to diversify more, with its stores actively catering to private customers and a whole range line of leather products other than watch straps: handbags, wallets, card-holders, etc. – like for many other suppliers, a means of not depending wholly on the state of the Swiss watch industry.

Straps in alligator skin account for the major part of its production, ahead of calfskin. “Wherever our watch straps end up, all the raw materials pass first of all through the parent company, here in Franche-Comté,” explains Jacques Bordier. “And all our subsidiaries, wherever they are in the world, have artisans who were trained here initially. Wherever a strap is designed or ordered, you’ll find the same quality and service everywhere.”

Jean Rousseau is also a family business, as Jacques Bordier’s daughter, Anaïs, joined the company as marketing manager in 2015 (incidentally, this is also an extraordinary family story, with the discovery via the social media of the existence of a twin sister on the other side of the world – a life-changing story about which a beautiful documentary has been made and that we warmly recommend. Watch the trailer here!).

“In a way, I started following in my father’s footsteps as soon as he took over the company, because he’s a working-from-home pioneer,” Anaïs Bordier remembers. “So as a young girl at home, I was a witness to all of that. My mother was also very much involved from the start, especially in the development of the store/workshop concept. Our mealtime conversations were always about Jean Rousseau!”

She was initially drawn to the tanning side, especially the multiple colour trials of the different leathers. Studying design, then fashion, then marketing, she did internships in the family business before quite naturally going on to join it full time.

The leather strap sector is not immune to social and cultural upheavals, in particular the controversies about the use of materials from animals. “What has always astonished me is the strength of the different cycles in watchmaking,” remarks Jacques Bordier. “There are periods when leather straps are in favour, then steel, then rubber. Today, the brands seem to be trying to use alternative, non-animal materials whenever they can, but what we’re seeing in our stores is that alligator skin is still very popular with watch collectors and watch lovers.”

Nevertheless, in response to this demand for alternatives, Jean Rousseau launched a collection of straps without animal leather back in 2014. But in relation to overall demand, these models are marginal. “Among the products we’ve developed, we have a partner who recovers fish skin, and don’t forget that even with alligators, the whole animal is used. The leather goods sector is basically about recovering leftover material,” Anaïs Bordier explains.

Her father adds: “Most alternatives don’t yet offer the same performance as traditional leather, or they’re treated with undesirable chemical products. But some interesting solutions are being developed: for example, we’ve already used Alcantara, but we’ve also used cork and Cordura-type fabrics.” They have even signed a partnership with a specialist in Japan to recover used traditional kimono belts!

One interesting avenue currently being explored is Serycine, an eco-responsible material produced by silk worms (which can crawl one kilometre in three days!). “An agricultural supply chain has been recreated in France, in the Cévennes, with excellent results,” says Anaïs Bordier. “The material is already in use for watch dials, and we’re looking into how we can work it in the same way as leather, but with other properties.”

If you had not already guessed, R&D is of strategic importance at Jean Rousseau. The company, which posts sales of around 25 million euros, employs more than 400 people – a figure which is set to rise with the construction of its new site in Troyes. The main business here will be the production of leather goods over and beyond watch straps, again with a view to diversifying the manufacture’s sources of income, given the ever shorter cycles in the watch industry.

“The long-term objective is to stabilise our income between watches and our other business,” says Jacques Bordier. “We want to avoid bearing the brunt of a rapid rise in demand we might not be able to cope with, followed by a sharp fall in orders.” After years of unprecedented development, fine watchmaking is currently experiencing a rapid downturn, which is impacting the entire supply chain.

Having succeed in saving, then for the past 25 years reinventing, a whole quality leather watch strap supply industry in the region, the entrepreneur is sure of one thing: “The real source of wealth is the men and women who work for the company and are the depositories of all this knowledge. It’s absolutely disastrous to lose artisans for economic reasons, because afterwards you have start recruiting and training all over again and that takes years. Even during Covid, we never laid anyone off for economic reasons. We try at all costs to preserve the skills and spirit of the company, whatever the ups and downs of the economy.”

He shares another wish of his – that watch straps might emerge from their cloistered obscurity. “Our job doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves in the watch industry. But collectors make no mistake in placing such importance on them. It’s also that kind of recognition that will enable these craft skills to survive the test of time. My dream is that a maximum number of brands will talk about the Manufacture Jean Rousseau as a quality guarantee for their watch straps. After all, in the automotive sector you see Pirelli tyres bannered on supercars!”