Jonathan Brinbaum, Managing Director of the Watch Division at Bvlgari, belongs to that rare category of people who do not confuse trajectory with career. For the past decade, he has grown within the Roman Maison not out of professional strategy, but genuine attachment. “I fell in love with the brand,” he tells Eyes Magazine. A love inseparable from one city: Rome. French by origin and Swiss by adoption for several years now, he recalls discovering the Italian capital around fifteen years ago and embracing it instinctively, almost immediately.
Within Bvlgari, Brinbaum found what he had been searching for intuitively: the freedom to push further. “There has always been this ability at Bvlgari to work with symbols, to push creativity, and to create things other brands simply don’t do,” he says. It is a thread that has followed him since day one, whether in fragrance in the past or watchmaking today.
For Brinbaum, however, watchmaking was never a late-found passion. It is rooted in childhood, passed down from his father and ritualised through the yearly anticipation of receiving a watch. Today, he recreates those moments with his own son, and time itself becomes a bond. “There’s something about watchmaking — its sense of permanence, its sense of tradition — that has always spoken to me,” he explains.
Brinbaum’s Bvlgari vision of watchmaking is, above all, about remaining surprising while staying true to its identity. “Bvlgari was built on disruptive innovation,” he says. Whether through the Finissimo collection and its record-breaking achievements, the development of women’s watches that merge jewellery with high horology, or the deliberate blurring of masculine and feminine design codes, every creation follows the same philosophy: crafting watches that feel unexpected, in places where no one anticipates them, while never losing sight of the Maison’s Roman heritage.
Though, Brinbaum does not speak of his work with the maison in terms of career. He speaks, instead, of loyalty — the kind that binds a man to a house and its evolution. “For a long time, Bvlgari was a jeweller that made watches. Today, we are a jeweller-watchmaker.” It is a transformation he has helped shape, guided from the very beginning by emotion, a city, and a vision.
