MB&F stands for Maximilian Büsser & Friends, and it was founded in July 2005 in Geneva by Büsser himself, a Swiss executive who walked away from a corner-office career to make watches that look like they fell out of a comic book. The company calls itself a horological laboratory rather than a brand, which is exactly the kind of sentence I would normally roll my eyes at, except in this case it is mostly true. The first watch, the Horological Machine No.1, arrived in 2007, and since then MB&F has built a catalog of machines that look like frogs, jellyfish, fighter jets, and, as of 2026, a robot you are supposed to hang out with on your desk.
The Man and the Friends
Maximilian Büsser started in watchmaking at Jaeger-LeCoultre in 1991, which is about as serious and traditional an entry point as the industry offers. He moved on to Harry Winston Rare Timepieces, where he ended up running the operation for seven years and started the Opus series, a set of collaborations with independent watchmakers like FP Journe and Felix Baumgartner of Urwerk. The Opus project did two things for him: it taught him that he could run a watch company under extreme pressure, and it showed him that he did not actually want to run one that way. So in 2005, in what the company’s own materials cheerfully admit was his Geneva apartment, he founded MB&F with a specific model in mind. He would supply the ideas and the money, and the actual watchmaking would be done by his “Friends,” a rotating cast of independent watchmakers, designers, and engineers that over the years has included Peter Speake-Marin, Jean-François Mojon, Laurent Besse, Stephen McDonnell, and Kari Voutilainen. The Friends part is not marketing decoration. The company has stayed deliberately tiny, about 48 employees as of 2023, and it outsources the actual building of its most complicated work to the very independents Büsser used to admire from the Harry Winston corner office.
Key People and Ownership
Büsser’s long-time business partner is Serge Kriknoff, who runs the commercial side of the company and holds a 15 percent stake. For nearly two decades MB&F was fully independent, which in the watch business mostly means underfunded and one bad year away from disaster, and to Büsser’s credit he never added a revenue target to the mission. In 2024 that independence was partially traded away: Chanel acquired a 25 percent stake in the company for an undisclosed sum, leaving Büsser with 60 percent and Kriknoff with 15. The official line is that the investment preserves the brand’s creative freedom, and Chanel’s horology division has a good track record of buying into independents and leaving them alone. It is worth noting anyway, because a partial buyout by a luxury conglomerate is the moment a lot of small watch brands quietly stop being small watch brands. So far MB&F shows no signs of that, but the file stays open.
The Horological Machines
The first era of the company is the Horological Machines, the wild science-fiction watches that gave MB&F its reputation. HM1 landed in 2007, a figure-eight-shaped case with separate hour and minute dials, a central tourbillon, and a winding rotor modeled on a weapon from a Japanese anime robot, which tells you everything about who this watch was for. Then came the frog (HM3, 2010, the brand’s best-selling model by a distance), the HM4 Thunderbolt (2010), a piece that looked like a tiny fighter plane crashed onto the wrist, and a string of increasingly confident experiments: HM6 (2014, with a flying tourbillon under a retractable shield), HM7 Aquapod (2016, a jellyfish), HM8 (2016, a Can-Am race car with the time refracted sideways through an optical prism). The series keeps moving. HM11, called the Architect, arrived in 2023 as the company’s 21st caliber: a four-chambered titanium case inspired by the bubble houses of 1960s postmodern architecture, wound by rotating the entire case on its base. In 2026 the company launched HM12, the Guardian, a watch that comes with a 38-centimeter robot companion built with L’Epée, priced at CHF 280,000 for 36 pieces. I have read about a lot of watch launches. None of them have included a robot.
The HM3 Frog (2010), MB&F’s best-selling model. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The Legacy Machines
In 2011 Büsser did something nobody expected: he launched a line of round, classic-looking watches. The Legacy Machines were pitched as the watches MB&F would have made if the company had existed in the 19th century, the golden era of traditional watchmaking. LM1 debuted in 2011 with a huge balance wheel suspended above the dial on a towering polished bridge, two independent time displays, and the world’s first vertical power reserve indicator. It was co-created with Jean-François Mojon and Kari Voutilainen, two of the most respected traditionalists in the trade, and in 2012 it won Best Men’s Watch and the Public Prize at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève. The line grew from there: LM101 (2014) introduced the company’s first in-house caliber, LM Perpetual (2015) featured a novel perpetual calendar designed by Stephen McDonnell that MB&F later patented in 2018, and LMX (2021) marked the collection’s tenth anniversary. The Legacy Machines matter because they proved MB&F could do restraint as well as chaos. The floating balance wheel became one of the most copied design ideas of the 2010s, and LM Perpetual remains one of the most interesting perpetual calendars ever built.
The LM101 in platinum (2014), the first Legacy Machine with an in-house movement. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The M.A.D. Universe and Current Status
Around 2011 Büsser opened the M.A.D. Gallery in Geneva, billed as the first gallery in the world dedicated to mechanical and kinetic art, and it has since become a second business line for the company: art objects, clocks, and co-creations with the likes of L’Epée, Reuge, and Caran d’Ache. Then in 2021, after years of saying an affordable watch was impossible, Büsser made one anyway. The M.A.D.1 launched as a side project under the M.A.D.Editions label, priced around CHF 2,900, with the time shown on rotating cylinders around the case edge and a Miyota movement underneath. It was first offered to MB&F’s friends, clients, and suppliers by email; public editions (the Red in 2022, the Green in 2023, the slimmer M.A.D.1S in 2024) were sold by raffle and were instantly oversubscribed. The M.A.D.2 followed, a jump-hour watch inspired by 1990s club culture, also at CHF 2,900 and also nearly impossible to actually buy. Today MB&F is a strange and mostly healthy animal: roughly 350 watches a year at the high end, clocks and art objects through the M.A.D. Galleries, and a budget line whose budget price is theoretical for most of the people who want it.
The Sherman, a robot table clock from MB&F’s Performance Art line. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Why it matters
MB&F matters because it proved a tiny independent company could invent a new visual language for watchmaking and survive on it for twenty years, something the industry’s big players had quietly assumed was impossible. The collaborative model, the science-fiction machines, the Legacy Machines proving Büsser could build a traditional watch with the best of them, all of it widened what a watch brand is allowed to be. The honest drawbacks are real, though. Almost everything MB&F makes is priced like art (six figures is the starting point for most machines), produced in quantities of dozens, and designed to be looked at more than worn. Some of the machines read as brilliant; some read as expensive toys, and there is no objective test that settles which is which. And the M.A.D. watches, for all the goodwill behind them, are sold by lottery to a waiting list of tens of thousands, which makes them an idea of accessibility more than the thing itself. None of that cancels out the achievement. It just means the MB&F story, like most good stories, comes with fine print.
Official site: mbandf.com
Thanks for reading this.
