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It was this experience that inspired Büsser to break out of the confines of corporate watchmaking 11 years ago to create his own brand, Maximilian Büsser & Friends (MB&F), as an artistic concept lab of sorts to experiment with ideas that push the technical limits of watchmaking.
The friends in question? Hyper-creative, independent watchmaking wunderkinds who lend their technical prowess to co- create MB&F’s insanely avant-garde horological machines that never ever tell the time in a straightforward fashion. Early collaborators include watch makers Peter Speake- Marin and Kari Voutilainen, from the UK and Finland, respectively, both active members of the MB&F tribe.
“At MB&F, the journey is as important as, or even more important than, the creations,” Büsser says. “The creations are just the corol lary consequence of the story, and our story isn’t just 11 years old but 50 — because most of the inspiration for the horological machines comes from my childhood.” The Aquapod, however, is different; its inspiration comes from a holiday Büsser took with his wife in the United Arab Emirates four years ago. “When we Swiss go to the sea, we run into it because we are so sea-deprived. I saw my wife running into the water, and then I saw her running out even faster because it was full of jellyfish!” shares Milan-born Büsser, who grew up in a multicultural family in Lausanne, Switzerland, with a Swiss diplomat father and an Indian mother. “Jellyfish are very fascinating creatures, so I started wondering... Could we make a mecha nical jellyfish?” he recalls. Büsser picks up an Aquapod on the table and starts schooling me in its technical intricacies. I take one look at the watch’s spherical, high-domed case and tell him it looks like another spaceship. Apparently, I’m not the first person to say that. “Even when I try to escape it, I create a spaceship. It really looks like a 1950s’ spaceship,” he acknowledges with a laugh. But upon closer inspection of the Aquapod’s profile, the jellyfish begins to take form: The dome is the head, with the rubber straps, moulded in aircraft-grade fluorocarbon, looking like a cascade of tentacles. The similarities do not stop there; they are evident in both the aesthetics and engineering. Büsser flips the Aquapod over to show me a tentacle-like automatic winding rotor carved from a solid block of titanium that feeds power to the concentric vertical movement architecture above it — just like how the jellyfish generates power from food caught in its tentacles.
So why did Büsser stop short of making a watch one can dive with? Ever the aesthete, he explains that to do so, the Aquapod would need a screwdown crown instead, which would have added another 2mm to its diameter, making it “unwearable and ugly”. So meticulous is Büsser that six months into the development of the watch, he pressed the reset button on the entire project. The team had to go back to the drawing board because he decided that the Aquapod needed to have two crowns for symmetry, as everything else on this horolo gical incarnation of the jellyfish was symmetrical. “I’ll always remember the look on their faces. They were like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding, right?’ Because that [would] change everything and suddenly you have to rearrange everything in the movement to accommodate it,” he explains.
Part of Büsser’s creative process involves sitting in his garden in Dubai, where he lives with his wife and four-year-old daughter, to “just think” for half an hour each day. “I let my mind wander… it can be interesting giving yourself the luxury of following your thoughts,” says Büsser, who regards MB&F as his “autobiography” and part of his “psychotherapy”. He then tells me about the four chapters in MB&F’s 11-year history that brought the company to the brink of bankruptcy. In 2007, the company’s prime supplier was sold to a brand, thereby creating production, logistics and other major problems. Two years later, it was hit by the global financial crisis. In 2012, issues related to “opportunistic” retailers (one of the reasons for his no-growth mandate) surfaced. Then, in 2014, Büsser was struck by “god complex” and decided to create two new movements a year. “Revenue and sales were great but our cash flow was a nightmare. It was, financially, absolutely impossible for us to do that,” he recalls. “It’s a great thing that we had those four years because now, at 50, I have never been as serene because I know I’ve overcome those tough [times],” says Büsser. “There will be more tough years; I may not know where the missile will come from, but I know it’s going to [strike].” Like a judoka, he knows he will fall because somebody is going to push him. “But the point is, how do you fall down without hurting yourself? And how do you get back on your feet as fast as possible?” And what might the next 10 years be like for MB&F? “I haven’t got a clue. And that’s fantastic,” Büsser adds with a smile. Jamie Nonis is a lifestyle writer who specialises in luxury watches, wellness and wanderlust This article appeared in Issue 777 (May 1) of The Edge Singapore.
