You know you’ve done something right when Max Büsser, the founder of MB&F and the man I consider the grand architect of independent watchmaking culture, wants to buy your watch. It happened as Max and I were on the escalator in Geneva’s Globus department store. We’d just had lunch, and Max was there to purchase a plant for his office. I was there to buy pillows, as the ones in my friend Eleonor Picciotto’s apartment where I was ensconced, were not adequately fluffy for Shanghainese princess-like sensitivity. I showed Max the design of my very first Grail Watch, a collaboration between Alain Silberstein and Ressence in a 36-piece limited edition. He scrutinized it for a moment, then turned to me and said, “Save piece number one for me.”
Wait. Freeze frame. What did he just say? Holy shit. Mind blown. In order to understand how massive a moment this was for me, you need to know just exactly who Max Büsser is. And unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past 20 years, lifting rocks with your balls, howling at the moon engaged in transcendental meditation, you’ll know that when it comes to independent watchmaking, Max Büsser is THE mother**cking man.
Like Malcom McLaren did with the Sex Pistols, Büsser assembled a group of quirky, insular rebels and made them stars. In his capacity as CEO of Harry Winston Timepieces, he put them on stage, shined a spotlight on them with his Opus Project and changed the world forever. You could say that the success today of the entire independent watch industry would not have happened without Max and Opus. But that was just Part One of the magnum opus that is Büsser’s life. Because, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, he contains multitudes. In Parte Deux, he created his own brand, MB&F,
