Yesterday the show here officially opened and the response has already been great.  Thomas Mao, founder of The PuristS is here and posted a brief write-up of his time so far. Yesterday, at a lunch with the MB&F collectors, I was struck with how pure the love for watches is here.  This is a city where you cannot wear a […]

Companies have been trying to build tablet computers for years.  I remember playing with an Apple Newton nearly 20 years ago and thinking it was the future.  Finally, with the tremendous success of the iPad, it looks like tablets are here to stay. Yesterday, RIM unveiled their Playbook.  Luckily for RIM, it looks like a worthy alternative.  In addition, multiple […]

My taste in watches is pretty clear: MB&F, URWERK, DeBethune – this high end, creative approach to watchmaking is what really gets me going.  However, there are plenty of nice watches that aren’t shaped like spaceships with six figure price tags.  Recently I posted about a Seiko that I like.  Eventually I’ll post about the vintage Rolex (yes, Rolex) that […]

The ability for internet content to “go viral” is one of the most powerful marketing tools ever.  Indeed it is like a marketing atomic bomb. While it is difficult to achieve a truly viral effect with a watch that appeals to such a small percentage of people, we do see network effects with our releases.  For example, we create our […]

“Are you still doing the watch thing?” After a week of traveling, countless meetings, and presentations at two shows for hundreds of people, my brain was starting to get overloaded with watches.  On Friday I took the train from Philadelphia to Baltimore to visit my family.  The question above was the one I fielded the most often from my family […]

Today I have some free time in Philadelphia and am going to use it wisely.  There are only a few things in the US that I desperately want to see and still have not – Philly happens to have one of them.  Actually, I should say Merion, PA as what I’m referring to is not actually in Philadelphia. In the […]

The finance world has a concept called “the elevator pitch”.  The idea is that if you want to raise money for your company, you should be able to clearly explain it in the span of an elevator ride. I get put to roughly the same task at these public events.  To properly tell the story of MB&F and sufficient background […]

Today on Tech Tuesday, let’s look at a bold move from Google, one of my favorite companies in the world. It is easy to take Google for granted.  Their search engine has become ubiquitous, the stark homepage iconic, and their algorithms better and better behind the scenes.  It is almost unthinkable that a company whose products are almost all free […]

When people hear what I do, inevitably one of their first questions is how has the economy affected my business.  I think what they want to hear is a percentage change in sales revenue with the expectation that it be considerably down.  On the contrary, MB&F was actually ~20% up or so in 2009 and will be up again this year […]

Last week, Harry Winston celebrated the 10th anniversary of their Opus series.  Created under the leadership of Maximilian Büsser, who later went on to create MB&F, I believe the Opus project was the undertaking most singlehandedly responsible for the state of Contemporary Horology today. Ironically, perhaps the most important piece was the project’s biggest failure: Opus 3.  Created with Vianney Halter, one […]