Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo is excited to announce The Geneva Sessions, Fall 2024, online auction, taking place from 12:00 PM CET, Tuesday, March 5, to 2:00 PM CET, Tuesday, March 12. Featuring more than 80 different high-end luxury wristwatches, the sale covers everything from A. Lange & Söhne and F.P. Journe to Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe. It even includes the Behrens Perigee (lot 57) seen here.
– By Logan Baker
One of the most interesting new watches I’ve seen this year was released in late March at a Geneva trade show. It wasn’t at Watches & Wonders, and I didn’t know much at all about the company who made it. The Behrens BHR303 20G took me completely by surprise.
Ultra-thin and ultra-light, the BHR303 20G does exactly what it says on the tin and weighs only 20 grams without its attached rubber strap. In case you're wondering, the titanium Bulgari Octo Finissimo Automatic, a watch that is no slouch in the lightness department, weighs approximately 75 grams. Behren's anticipated price for you to get those 20 grams on your wrist? A cool USD $7,500.
You might be thinking right now: How is that possible? Or, more importantly, who – or what – is Behrens?
I know. I had the exact same questions a few weeks ago. We’ll cover both those topics below, in addition to everything else you should know about one of the most exciting independent upstart brands in years.
The Backstory
The reason you likely haven't heard about Behrens from the usual sources yet is due to where they’re based: China.
I hope you’ll pardon me for burying the lede there, but I wanted to start this story by focusing on one of their watches that blew me away, rather than focusing exclusively on where it was produced.
It’s unusual for PHILLIPS to feature a Chinese-made watch, not just editorially but also in the catalog for the Geneva Sessions, Spring 2024, Online Auction. There’s a reason Behrens is there.
The company was founded by four Chinese watch lovers in 2012. Eric So, Behrens’ International Business Development Manager, was the person I spent an extensive amount of time speaking with during Geneva's Time To Watches exhibition. After a career in engineering, he spent two decades running Spiral, a Hong Kong-based watch magazine, as its editor-in-chief and publisher.
One of Eric’s longtime industry friends and colleagues, a man named Lin Bingqiang, is Behrens' CEO. He opened a watch production facility in Shenzhen more than 15 years ago, which is where the Behrens’ design and engineering team is based. Currently, Behrens has a staff of 48 people, including designers, engineers, machinists, as well as more than 20 dedicated watchmakers. The Shenzhen team is now able to produce most watch components themselves, all the way up to sapphire crystals.
Eric, Lin, and their two business partners started Behrens out of their shared for the worlds of mechanics and horology. The name, Behrens, actually comes from Peter Behrens, a prolific German architect who designed a number of clocks and clocktowers during his career in the early 20th century.
“The brand started with a few of us who loved watches and always wanted to create our own brand with all the directions and concepts taken from purely a watch lovers’ point of view,” Eric says. “We wanted to design and build something that we, as watch lovers, would like ourselves. We wanted to build something that is unique and non-traditional, while staying at a more affordable price point.”
Although Behrens was officially founded and registered in 2012, Eric, Lin, and their teams spent the first few years of the business focused entirely on product development. After about five years of work, the first few Behrens watches were released in 2017.
Those watches were primarily built using sourced ébauche base movements from Japan's Miyota, with in-house modules attached, enabling unexpected complications, such as the three-dimensional globe on both the Star Trek and Navigator that serves as a worldtime display. The following year, a watch named the Astronomer was released using a Miyota base with an in-house wandering hour display, similar to Audemars Piguet’s Star Wheel. As you can tell, astronomy has been a frequent inspiration for the Behrens team.
“Within our group, we often share ideas and concepts,” Eric says. “For example, Mr. Lin will come up with some ideas and share them. Those ideas will then be sent to the design and engineering teams who will use high-tech software to create renders and to determine the calculations needed to mill the components. Our prototype will then be produced in-house using technology such as 3D printing and CNC machines.”
Gradual Growth
Behrens began to introduce watches on a more regular basis in 2019 and 2020. A breakthrough came in the latter year with the release of the Apolar and Rotary watches. They both ended up being nominated for GPHG awards, in the Calendar & Astronomy and Challenge categories, respectively.
The Rotary used a Swiss-made Sellita SW200 ébauche with a custom in-house module indicating the passage of time via a pair of stacked triangles that mimicked the layout and design of the rotary engine originally found inside the Mazda 787B Group C race car. Similar in look and feel to the memorable 2013 collaboration between MB&F and Urwerk, the Experiment ZR012 "Nitro" ZR11092013-1, the Rotary executed the same overall format at a price point under $5,000.
The Apolar, meanwhile, featured a large three-dimensional globe at the very center of its dial space, with a smaller ring surrounding it. Positioned on top of the smaller ring is a three-dimensional moon, which rotates around the globe at the correct intervals to indicate the 28-day orbital relationship between the Earth and its Moon.
The timekeeping display, on the other hand, is based on the rotation of two small discs, one indicating the passing hours, and the other, the minutes. Instead of each disc having its own individual hand, there's a pair of red triangle markers on the lowest visible plate of the dial, so as the discs spin independently, the exact time can be read by wherever the two red markers point. It’s a similar approach to the original “Time Writer” chronograph mechanism developed by the French clockmaker Nicolas Rieussec more than 200 years ago. All of this was executed on the Apolar using an in-house module attached to an otherwise conventional Sellita SW200.
Neither the Rotary or Apolar took home any prized at the GPHG three years ago, but the event still served as a coming out party for Behrens within the Western world.
The following year, Behrens continued to embrace the unconventional with the wandering hour Da Vinci code, and the Project One, featuring a digital time display and large, three-dimensional representations of the Earth and Mars. While the Earth on the Project One completes a full rotation every 24 hours, the Mars rotates on Mars time, completing its rotation once every 24 hours and 37 minutes. The Project One was a limited edition of 200 pieces and cost USD $9,125, which made it the most expensive watch from Behrens yet.
Breaking Through
A new year came with the release of the Perigee, featuring the manual-wind BM01 caliber inside. This was the first movement created by Behrens completely in-house, the result of a two-year development process.
“We sourced movements from elsewhere at the beginning,” says Eric. “But with our accumulated experience over the years, plus the time we’d spent developing, an in-house movement was no longer just a plan for us but a reality.”
The Perigee features an orbital Earth-Moon system that’s similar to what was used in the Apolar, but the Perigee introduces additional complexity in the form of a chain-driven system that displays the hours and a retrograde minutes counter. The three-dimensional globe that represents Earth is in the middle of the chain system, and the three-dimensional Moon has increased its path of travel, taking up the whole circumference of the dial now.
The chain has ruby bearings and completes a full rotation once every 12 hours, thanks to a pair of skeletonized gears that drive it and that are visible from the caseback. Speaking of, if you flip the watch over you’ll be greeted by the BM01 caliber’s impressive movement architecture, which runs at 2.5Hz and offers a power reserve of 45 hours.
One look at the design of the BM01 caliber and it’s clear the movement is a unique creation. I was particularly impressed by its layering and skeletonization when I handled it a few weeks ago. The layout almost looks like something that could have come out of Romain Gauthier’s headquarters in the Vallée de Joux.
“The design process for the Perigee took a few months,” Eric says. “The reason why we combined the lunar orbit display with the chain system was because it was a challenge. It was something new to the market. We also wanted to keep it at a reachable price.”
The Perigee supplanted the Project One as the most expensive Behrens watch to date, with a price tag of USD $13,500 and a production run of 200 pieces. It’s not cheap, but it’s also difficult to think of another watch – from anywhere – offering the same degree of in-house production and that is as mechanically novel.
Based on the success of the Perigee, Behrens is going to continue to lean into its in-house capabilities, but they don’t plan to abandon the ébauche system entirely. Behrens released a number of new models in 2022 using the combination of an ébauche base with an in-house module, such as the Navigraph, the Constell, and the Starship II.
“We will continue to obtain and use other movements,” Eric says. "We will diversify the use of different movements in our watches, and the ratio of in-house movements will certainly be increasing over the next few years.”
An International Collaboration
At the end of 2022, Behrens announced an unexpected partnership with the Russian watchmaker Konstantin Chaykin. The two companies had created a series of three timepieces that both evolved Chaykin’s popular Wristmons series of character watches with a new style and seconds display. It was priced significantly less than what Chaykin typically charges.
The so-called "Ace of Spades" series by Konstantin Chaykin and Behrens utilized the same eyeball-based wandering hour and minutes system to indicate the passage of time, but the seconds display took an entirely new format. You’ll notice the printed Arabic numerals spread out in intervals of ten, from 10 to 60, inside each of the mouths on the dials. A tongue-shaped seconds hand extends from the center of the watch and constantly rotates around the mouth in an oval shape, gliding across the entire space once per minute.
Behrens calls this the “wonder seconds,” and it’s driven by a cam placed in the middle of the dial (slightly above the nose on the face) that moves the seconds hand in its irregular orbit rather than a standard circle. The Behrens watchmakers developed this display system specifically for the Ace of Spades series. The entire process of working together took approximately one year of back and forth before the watches were ready.
“The project was the result of a shared sympathy between our two brands,” Eric says. “We treasure Chaykin’s work, and he likes ours.”
The three models in the Ace of Spades collection were identical outside the case material and the color and texture of the dial. All were produced in a run of 200 examples each, but the models in black DLC-coated titanium and natural titanium were restricted to Asian market customers exclusively. The crystallized titanium example was opened to international customers at a price of USD $9,696.
Ultra-Light Beam
Finally, this is the watch that blew me away in Geneva earlier this year.
The remarkable BHR030 is constructed almost solely out of titanium. Yes, both the curved 42mm × 38mm × 5.2mm case and the bridges used in the in-house movement inside are crafted out of the lightweight metal. The watch has a closed caseback, I assume to support the movement architecture, which forms a visible latticework of bridges and gears.
The case and the movement have a soft inward curve, enhancing the watch’s on-the-wrist wearability. The challenge with adding any sort of curve to a movement design is how it reduces the contact point between gear teeth, which are slanted at a 15-degree angle in the BHR030. The Behrens watchmakers had to make ensure the position of the gearing was in the perfect position to ensure a stable transmission of timekeeping energy. As you can imagine, the tolerances in working on an ultra-thin movement like this are infinitesimal.
Although the example I handled during the Time To Watches exhibition in Geneva was a nonworking prototype, I couldn’t help but be fascinated at the result of Behren’s progress. It only weighs 20 grams! And it’s barely thicker than the Octo Finissimo, while potentially wearing better thanks to its curved profile.
Behrens hopes that the production example of the BHR030 20G will be released by November of this year, and they expect the final price tag for the watch to be approximately USD $7,500.
And if all goes well with the BHR030 20G release, the Behrens team teased a possibility to me of the release of an even lighter watch in the near future.
What’s Next
Behrens currently expects to produce around 3,000 watches total this year across all its different models, with consistent year-over-year growth. They plan to keep building out their team, eyeing a total headcount of between 70 to 80 people within the next two to three years, including the creation of a new department dedicated to hand finishing and polishing.
“We don’t want to grow too fast but progressively, so that everything internally can match up with expansion,” Eric says. “We started with a very small production team and have had to move twice over the last five years. We have just moved to a new office, centralizing the assembling and quality control department, where we can continue to improve. We have been buying new high-tech machinery, and we have been internally training new people to ensure that we have the perfect team.”
One of the big focuses for Behrens in 2023 is expanding their footprint in the U.S. market. For now, your best bet at acquiring a Behrens watch is to check the brand’s official website to see what’s currently available in your region. But in the future? Anything is possible.
“We think big, but don’t take us the wrong way, we’re not trying to be number one,” Eric says. “We want to continue improving and developing our company, and we want to become more international. We will expand and explore new markets, step-by-step, from Asia to the Middle East, to the U.S. and Europe.”
You can learn more about and register to bid on the Behrens Perigee (lot 57) featured in this story by visiting the online catalog for the PHILLIPS Geneva Sessions, Spring 2024, Online Auction.
About Phillips In Association With Bacs & Russo
The team of specialists at PHILLIPS Watches is dedicated to an uncompromised approach to quality, transparency, and client service. Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo holds the world record for the most successful watch auction, with its Geneva Watch Auction: XIV having realized $74.5 million in 2021. Over the course of 2021 and 2022, the company sold 100% of the watches offered, a first in the industry, resulting in the highest annual total in history across all the auction houses at $227 million.
About Logan Baker
Logan has spent the past decade working in watch-focused media, reporting on every aspect of the industry. He joined Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo at the start of 2023 as the department's Senior Editorial Manager. He splits his time between New York and Geneva.
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