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Dear Friends,
Happy New Year! From the entire MB&F team, our very best wishes for 2016.
By the way, 2016 is a leap year, so we get an extra day… a total of 366 days! As you may have noticed, we recently launched the perfect Machine to help you keep track of that: our Legacy Machine Perpetual will automatically add that extra 29th day to February, every four years. More about the LM Perpetual below!
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Believe it or not, the genesis of the LM Perpetual goes back to the very origins of MB&F. Most people don’t know this, but back in 2007, I was developing with Peter Speake-Marin and Laurent Besse our first Machine – HM1 – and we ran into a major crisis. To make a long story short, the company Laurent was working for was sold in the middle of the development, and the new owner informed us they would not be able to assemble the HM1 movement as promised. With only 6 months’ worth of cash to go, my dream collapsed… but fortunately I was saved by two British watchmakers!
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The first saviour was Peter Speake-Marin, who called his watchmaker friends to the rescue. One of those friends would turn out to play a key role in saving HM1: Stephen McDonnell, a watchmaker from Northern Ireland, at the time the head instructor at the WOSTEP watchmaking school in Neuchâtel. Peter, Stephen and their friends brilliantly accomplished what was literally Mission Impossible: the first HM1s were delivered 6 months later and MB&F was saved… Stephen has been a trusted and respected friend ever since.
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Fast forward to early 2012. We had just created a bit of a surprise by launching our first Legacy Machine, LM1 – a more classic take on watchmaking, compared to our previous Horological Machines. And we bump into Stephen again… who tells us about a crazy idea he’s been toying with for some time, an idea which could fit perfectly in the Legacy Machine line. In a nutshell, Stephen wants to entirely rethink that most classic of complications, the Perpetual Calendar.
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Stephen convinced us by making two rather bold statements: first, he believed that perpetual calendars had not been conceived optimally for the last two centuries… And second, he declared that a standard month should not be 31 days – an unwavering watchmaking convention – but 28. Why 28 days? Because every month has 28 days, the common denominator across all months.
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That simple but totally revolutionary approach has given birth to a perpetual calendar mechanism that resolves all the problems linked to conventional calendars: inaccurate date display, complicated date adjustments and – worst of all – very fragile movements, easily damaged by their owners who involuntarily jam their delicate gears.
The LM Perpetual is user-friendly – all dimensions of the calendar can be easily and quickly adjusted by hand – and fool-proof: you cannot damage it through faulty manipulation. In fact, the movement protects itself by automatically disconnecting the correctors during critical adjustment times! The varying length of each month is calculated by a patent-pending “mechanical processor”, which adds the extra days required on top of the default 28.
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The good news doesn’t stop there. Stephen’s ground-breaking movement architecture fuses the usual three-layer sandwich (base movement + calendar module + display) into a single, fully integrated movement. The display itself is actually part of the mechanism – which explains how the LM Perpetual offers that breathtaking, dizzying view into some of the 581 components that make up its revolutionary calibre.
Check out the short video to see what I mean – and read the full story about the LM Perpetual on our website.
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You’ll be able to see the LM Perpetual next week at the SIHH watch fair in Geneva, along with other recent launches like the LM101 Platinum (by the way, we just won an International Watchstars award for the LM101!).
Indeed, you may have missed the news: for the very first time, MB&F will be exhibiting within the prestigious walls of SIHH this year. In a rather unexpected move, the very exclusive ‘Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie’ has decided to invite a hand-picked selection of 9 independent brands to the fair, alongside its 15 prestigious and well-established brands. If you are attending SIHH and would like an appointment, please contact us right away. The agenda is almost full but we’ll be happy to find a slot for you!
Our first participation in SIHH also marks the perfect moment for MB&F to become a brand-partner of the prestigious Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie (FHH) – officially announced just last week.
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If you don’t plan on attending SIHH but would like to get a glimpse of what goes on inside, follow us on our new Snapchat account (mbandf). As you certainly know by now, we’ve been pretty active for quite some time on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter – but Snapchat is new to us. We’ll be experimenting with this fast-growing social network over the next few months, so stay tuned!
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Once again, I wish you the very best for this New Year. If you own one of our Horological or Legacy Machines, don’t forget to become a member of ‘The Tribe’, our new owners’ club. Among other benefits, you’ll get an extension of an additional 2 years on top of your existing warranty – so a total of 4 years. And even if your Machine is older than 2 years, we’ll give you an additional 2 years starting with your registration.
Hope to see you soon !
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With my best regards,
Maximilian Büsser
Owner & Creative Director
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