The story of Atamian is the story of its founder Hagop Atamian, who prefers to go by the name, Mr. Jacques. Nattily dressed in a navy birdseye suit matched with a white herringbone shirt, a blue striped tie, a finely manicured white pencil moustache and a Blancpain round his wrist, Atamian sits opposite me in his shiny office north of Beirut and begins to tell me the incredible story of how he came to be one of Lebanon’s largest wholesale watch distributors. It was almost preordained that Atamian would work in the watch industry. “I was born into a watch sellers’ family and from a young age I learned the trade in my father’s repair shop in central Beirut,” he tells me. Though an accomplished student, his ambitions led him to quit school at the age of 18, as he “wanted to do something better than repairing and so on.”
