The Second Time Around

When watch collector Pascal Raffy bought the venerable Swiss brand Bovet, he reinvented the company—and himself

- Roberta Naas

By the age of 36, Pascal Raffy, a French pharmaceutical executive, was enjoying early retirement, and keeping an eye out for investments. Knowing Raffy was a passionate watch collector, with hundreds of vintage timepieces, an investment banker friend would often tempt him with opportunities in the watch world. Each time, Raffy would decline—until one day his friend insisted Raffy do a blind touch test with a timepiece.

“My friend put it, with several of my other watches, under a cloth,” Raffy recalls. “One by one, I felt those watches, and when my hand fell on one of them, I knew it was truly different. I felt the crown at the top of the strap and realised this was a watch with its own identity. Then I looked at it, and in a nanosecond it talked to me. I took my loupe and saw that it was a beautiful piece of horology. It had substance. I was interested.”

And he had the means to make a significant investment. At 25, Raffy bought into a family-run French pharma company, where, after a merger, he became head of the firm Synthélabo. After several successful years in France, Raffy expanded Synthélabo into North Africa, where he began the production of drugs and built facilities for marketing and distributing them on the continent.