Haute Time: Inside Maximilian Büsser & Friends with Maximilian Büsser At Basel World

During Basel World I got the chance to sit down with another powerful man in the watch industry, Maximilian Büsser.

Maximilian Büsser is the creator of Maximilian Büsser & Friends, also known as the MB&F watch brand. My meeting with him was one of the most exciting all week. His company is very unique and all his watches, priced at $100,000 and up, are designed “outside the box.” On the MB&F website, the brand refers to itself as a “creative label.” Maximilian says it is not actually a brand at all, but a loose collective of artists that get together every year and create what they call “horological machines.” His company’s philosophy is to deconstruct existing movements and reconstruct them as 3-D machines.

In our meeting, he showed me a number of MB&F products. He introduced me first to the Legacy Machines, based on an idea of what they would have created if they lived 100 years ago.  He explained that the 19th century was the era of the first flying machines and skyscrapers and everyone was crazy about the idea of defying gravity. He realized that nobody had ever done a flying balance wheel, which is a suspended balanced wheel floating on top of the dial.

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