Welcome to MB&F

As strange as it may seem, the last three years have been our most extraordinary yet. You want figures? Well in 2013 I said we were going to stabilise growth at around CHF 15 million in sales against production of 280 pieces, and that’s what we’ve done. Last year’s sales came to CHF 16 million and this year we’re heading for CHF 16.8 million against production of 235 pieces. This doesn’t mean we’ve increased our prices. Rather, customers have been buying our “crazier” styles. We’ve also cut back the number of retailers that carry the brand from 41 to 27 and probably 25 by the end of the year.

By a combination of factors. On the technical side, we’ve produced no fewer than 14 new calibres in 12 years with next to no problems regarding quality. This year, for example, 70 watches came back to us for after-sales service out of the 2,200 we’ve sold in 12 years. It’s a tiny proportion. The next factor is communication. This is an important aspect given our annual communication budget of… CHF 150,000. We explain what we’re doing and we’re open about what’s going on, even in difficult times. Then there are the products themselves, which are extremely divisive: either you don’t like them because you don’t get it, or you get it and you absolutely love them! Our success comes down to transparency, creativity and independence… not forgetting the 23 extraordinary men and women who make up MB&F. If there are two qualities I can claim to have, without wishing to appear big-headed, one is that I think differently and therefore my ideas are different, and the second is knowing how to pick a winning team. If I had to sum all of that up in a single sentence, I’d say that at MB&F we treat people how we like to be treated ourselves, whether they are our customers, our friends, our staff or our suppliers. And it works!

Some of my ideas don’t go down as well as others. For example, when we made the MB&F HMX for our tenth anniversary, I was determined we should forgo our margin on these four 20-piece limited editions. Meaning a third of production for the year was to be sold at cost price. As a customer, I would have loved for a brand to take such an initiative, hence why I stood my ground against the “dissenting voices” inside the company. Ditto for the pieces we have made in collaboration with Reuge or, moreover, L’Epée. We don’t earn anything with them. I bring my ideas, MB&F takes care of the communication, but the technical development and production are down to our partners. When all MB&F’s cash is tied up in the six new calibres to come, you can legitimately wonder what is the point of making clocks. But the media love them, retailers sell them, our partners benefit from them, and they offer an alternative way of deciphering our brand. At the end of the day, it seems to me these are ideas worth defending, no?

In terms of price, MB&F isn’t a brand for millennials. Which shouldn’t stop us, as watchmakers, asking ourselves who our customers are. I remember, as a kid, being a human remote control for my dad who used to make me get up and change channels every time he wanted to watch something else. There wasn’t much choice, maybe two or three channels, but we were all happy with whatever was on. Now my four-year-old daughter already subscribes to Netflix and YouTube, and chooses her programmes when she’s allowed to watch TV. Millennials aren’t passive consumers. They’re a generation that’s used to choosing, and we’d be mad to try and palm them off with any old rubbish. This is something the big brands haven’t yet understood. They haven’t adapted their products and their communication to these new market circumstances. If we analyse how brands approach their customers according to the three main questions of “what”, “how” and “why”, we realise that 85% of watchmakers answer the first one. They explain that their watches have a silicon balance spring, a grand feu enamel dial and a shagreen strap. Then there are the 12% who go into the “how”, meaning the passion they put into their watch by entrusting it to craftsmen and women. This leaves the 3% who explain “why” that watch exists. When you’re coherent with what you do, you have no trouble explaining this and, building from that, forming a community. In times like these, now that we’ve managed to blow everything apart including family and church, people need to be able to come together. I believe that MB&F has succeeded in forming a small but tight-knit community by explaining what we do and why. I think millennials are the ones who want to know the answer to that “why”!