This week I am in Mexico City for the SIAR.  This is one of my favorite cities in the world, but unfortunately I will not get to see much more than the inside of the Four Seasons this trip. The show officially runs from Tue-Thurs, and the lineup this year is fantastic.  Some of the brands showing include: Audemars Piguet […]

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 […]

The WatchTime events in NY and Philadelphia this week were great.  Again, to be able to give collectors an opportunity to hold and try on the pieces is something really special for us. Surprises: – The amount of people who knew of MB&F and have seen our pieces in magazines or on the internet.  I know our visibility has increased, […]

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 […]

One of the biggest challenges I have in my job is that I almost never have watches to show anyone!  MB&F has one extra collection of watches to show to press and at events, but the collection lives in Geneva.  I think we do a pretty good job of getting people interested in our pieces, but since we have only […]

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 […]

This week, Kanye West had a much publicized outburst on Twitter (@KanyeWest).  Among his tweets was this one which I found particularly interesting: These tweets have no manager, no publicist , no grammar checking… this is raw While I’m not sure that the world needs Kanye West to be any more raw, his point is as raw as can be. […]