MB&F: A Decade of Dream Machines

MB&F Marked the Start of its second decade in November as it unveiled the Legacy Machine Perpetual, a perpetual calendar it re-imagined from scratch with assistance from independent Irish watchmaker Stephen McDonnell. Acclaimed almost immediately as both a technical and aesthetic success, the watch is the firm’s fourth Legacy Machine, MB&F’s sole round-cased watch series that complements its primary collection of decidedly non-round avant-garde Horological Machines. The Legacy Perpetual Calendar also features MB&F’s eleventh original caliber.

Just a few months earlier MB&F released HMX, a series of automotive-influenced Horological Machines, to officially mark its tenth anniversary. Anyone who has followed the MB&F story at all during the past ten years won’t be surprised to learn that the eighty-piece HMX series sold out almost immediately after that summertime release. Timed to coincide with the firm’s incorporation in July 2005, HMX was wrapped in a thank you from MB&F founder Maximilian Büsser, who said he priced the watch below what the firm’s usual markup would demand.

We said if we survived these ten years it is because of our customers, Büsser explains. Also the watch had to be linked to sports cars, since I dreamed as a kid of being a car designer.

Thus, the HMX is a louvered driver’s watch with an aerodynamic case shape that can be read by a driver without removing his hands from the steering wheel. What’s more, the supercar-inspired dual rocker covers on top of the movement each feature genuine chrome oil filler caps. These oil caps are not just design elements, but are fully functional oil caps that the watchmaker flips open to oil the jeweled bearings for the indication discs.

HMX’s thank you pricing was $30,000, which Charris Yadigaroglou, MB&F chief communications officer, adds is still an expensive timepiece of course, but at that price it’s a real MB&F Machine…not an industrial mass-produced product. Thus, rather than producing a precious metal special edition collection to celebrate a major anniversary, as is often the case elsewhere, MB&F did the unexpected by releasing its least expensive watch ever.

Unexpected

Büsser has been paving his own path in the watch industry ever since he left Harry Winston to start MB&F in 2005. Some might say he actually began veering from expected watch design norms when he launched the Opus series at Harry Winston in 2001.

Not content to retread existing watch designs, Büsser says MB&F allows him the freedom to both indulge what he calls his inner child, the automobile-obsessed sci-fi fan, and to lead a company fueled by creativity.

A creative adult is a child who survived, says Büsser. This phrase is so important to Büsser that he had it emblazoned onto the gold Tenth Anniversary HMX rotor.

I was a super creative kid who became a super-boring adult. It made me think how come all children are creative, and then eighty to ninety percent of them become boring adults.

What happens, he explains, is that parents and educators tell children to not make mistakes. By impressing upon children that being wrong will hurt them, adults stifle creativity, he says.

At MB&F, Büsser’s creativity has been key to its success, and while the company has had numerous missteps, most occurred in the first few years of its existence, and none has thus far derailed the firm’s unorthodox watch company trajectory. While the firm’s designs are not to every collector’s taste, few would argue that MB&F is one of the most admired independent Swiss watch companies.

Missteps

But despite reaching the start of its second decade in an enviable position with strong sales, especially amid a largely stagnant global watch market, there were a few difficult periods among the past decade’s successes that nearly set Büsser and friends into a galactic tailspin.

The first came just as MB&F was working on Horological Machine No. 1. The world fell apart for us, Büsser recalls. Our main movement supplier was sold overnight to a brand, which didn’t want to sell to other companies. The lead watchmakers enlisted Stephen McDonnell, who designed the new LM Perpetual, to finalize the HM1 movement, and together the entire team completed the project by June 2007.

That year, MB&F was still operating in the red. Despite the fact that six early MB&F retail customers had paid for their timepieces well in advance of production, the fledgling company was essentially delivering its timepieces at cost to customers.

By 2008, after two years of this, we saw light at the end of the tunnel, Büsser explains. I hired Serge Kriknoff, our incredible technical director, who now has twenty percent of the company. He has enabled me to be where we are today. I create and he transforms my creations into working realities.

However less than a year later those realities included the global financial meltdown. The rude awakening was January 2009 in Geneva. We planned 175 pieces (we did 125 the previous year) but only took seventeen on order, he recalls. But once again, Büsser’s creativity won the day as his Horological Machine No. 3 (the Sidewinder, Starcruiser, and later, the Frog) debuted later that year and attracted buyers. By year’s end, MB&F had sold 143 pieces, which propelled the firm through the financial crisis.

HM3 helped get us through the crisis year—sales were amazing. I traveled over 260 days that year, Büsser says.

In 2010, MB&F debuted the piece that Büsser says most terrified me in my career, the Horological Machine No. 4—the Thunderbolt. Under construction for three years, the jet-turbine inspired HM4 was the firm’s most ambitious to date.

I thought no one would buy it because it is so extreme, Büsser says. Retailers at Basel didn’t buy any, but that summer when we launched it, the customers went ballistic. It was a tipping point, the five-year point, and it freed me creatively. It took a whole weight off my shoulders creatively. The HM4 Thunderbolt was awarded the prize for best Concept and Design Watch at the 2010 Grand Prix d’horlogerie de Genève.

At about the same time MB&F debuted (and sold out) the revamped HM3 with its new nickname, the Frog. Everyone knows about the Frog, Büsser notes. But we’ve barely done 100 pieces of it in five years. It’s funny how certain pieces become iconic when virtually no pieces were made.

Retro Futurism

After six years making deconstructed timepieces with a futuristic edge, MB&F in 2011 abruptly altered its own time-space continuum.

Throwing off the expectations of many collectors who were thrilled by Büsser’s horological science fiction, MB&F looked to the past to set the stage for its Legacy Machines. In 2011, MB&F debuted the Legacy Machine No. 1, but only after what Büsser calls probably the biggest battle I had in my own team with a product. A few Friends, he notes, wondered aloud if the round-cased Legacy Machine idea was a true MB&F design.

But the wondering quickly turned to awe as the final designs retained hints of the bravado demonstrated on the earlier pieces, notably with LM1’s flying-buttress-style balance bridge, dual dials and a bulbous crystal. The watch, utilizing the technical designs of Jean-Francois Mojon with Kari Voutilainen overseeing finishing, actually broadened MB&F’s customer base, attracting collectors who prefer more traditional case shapes to house their MB&F horological magic. What’s more, the LM1 won accolades from Büsser’s peers as it took home the best Men’s Watch and Public Prize trophies at the 2012 Grand Prix d’horlogerie de Genève.

Since then, MB&F has launched additional Legacy Machines to eager collectors, many of whom also own one or more of the MB&F Horological Machines, which now include the HM5 1970s-inspired drive watch, the biomorphic Space Pirate (HM6) and the recently debuted MB&F Legacy Machine Perpetual, seen on the cover of this issue.

The Legacy Machines and the Horological Machines, regardless of their case shape, exemplify BÜsser’s ever-expanding creative vision, which in the past three years has also yielded a series of Performance Art limited-edition timepieces made in collaboration with artists, designers and other manufacturers. This Performance Art includes sculpture-set dials, music boxes made in conjunction with Swiss music box maker Reuge and clocks made with Swiss clock firm L’Epée 1839.

Many of these limited-edition Performance Art pieces, including the recent Arachnophobia spider-shaped clock and the robotic Melchior clock, can be seen at one of the three MB&F M.A.D. Galleries, retail spaces filled with performance art and kinetic sculpture.

Nobody on my team had ever done retail or art, Büsser explains. We were so clueless that when we opened the Geneva M.A.D. Gallery (in 2011) we didn’t even have a credit card machine. I was hoping for three visitors a day, and we hit the 20,000th in three years recently, he says. Since we opened we’ve sold 1,900 pieces of art. It was a gut feeling that transformed into an amazing success.

Büsser’s decade of gut feelings has catapulted his upstart watch cooperative into orbit. But MB&F remains a relatively small independent watch company—and Büsser intends to keep it that way.

After a few somewhat frenetic years that Büsser admits were at times overambitious for such a small firm, he’s decided that instead of developing multiple new calibers per year, one new movement annually is plenty for MB&F.

In 2013 we decided we weren’t going to grow anymore, he says. We are at twenty employees– and I don’t want a twenty-first employee. Such self-regulation may run counter to conventional business wisdom, but MB&F has never been a conventional company. Predictable is boring for us, Büsser quips.

And, it seems, for many collectors.