Like Malcom McLaren did with the Sex Pistols, Büsser assembled a group of quirky, insular rebels and made them stars. In his capacity as CEO of Harry Winston Timepieces, he put them on stage, shined a spotlight on them with his Opus Project and changed the world forever. You could say that the success today of the entire independent watch industry would not have happened without Max and Opus. But that was just Part One of the magnum opus that is Büsser’s life. Because, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, he contains multitudes. In Parte Deux, he created his own brand, MB&F, which has since become one of the hottest independent watch brands on the planet. And I mean scorching. Seriously. Want empirical evidence? Last year, Büsser released the M.A.D. Edition 1, a 2,000-Swiss-franc watch that was meant to be a thank you to his friends and family. Despite its modest original price tag, in November, a unique piece that Büsser had donated to my breast cancer charity auction, The Pink Dial Project, fetched USD 172,000. Today, a standard M.A.D. 1 retails for around USD 30,000 on the secondary market. Perhaps most impressive of all, MB&F is the only brand I know that has two totally legit polar identities: ultra modern and avant-garde as represented by his Horological Machines, and sublimely old school as expressed by his Legacy Machines. This is what I mean by multitudes.

Ressence and Benoît Mintiens

I had long admired Ressence from afar. I vividly recall at the 2010 Basel fair, returning time and again to the “Palace” — the fancy name for the independent watchmakers’ tent — to look at one of the three functional prototypes that Mintiens was demonstrating. The buzz around him was incredible. I mean, everywhere I went, people would ask, “Have you seen Ressence? Who is this guy Benoît?” The baffling thing was that Mintiens was not from the Swiss watch industry; instead, he was an industrial designer from Antwerp, Belgium. But the thing about what he had created was that it went so far beyond a superficial reimagination of time telling that you would expect from an outsider. His watch was devastatingly original, utterly captivating and yet, at the same time, deeply horological. Why? OK, let me explain Ressence to you.

A traditional watch features a fixed dial with pinions where you place the hour, minute and seconds hand. Each of these revolves on its own axis at a different pace and is read off a fixed track. Now, in the period between 2000 and 2008, we saw the rise of a multitude of innovative and different ways to read the time, from Ulysse Nardin’s Freak which used the barrel cover to indicate the hours and a bridge bearing the balance wheel to read the minutes, to the three-dimensional spinning hour satellites in Urwerk’s Opus V. These are great watches, but by 2008, we were beginning to suffer fatigue from an opportunistic overabundance of whirling, spinning, alternative methods of telling time. There were even watches with floating magnets instead of hands. It was all a bit too much. So much so that with the onset of the 2009 financial crisis, the world instantly retreated back to classical watchmaking, leaving these kinds of watches in the dust, at least for a while. So, in 2010, when Mintiens presented Ressence, it was a total anomaly to have someone trying to present a totally novel way of representing time.

The reason that Ressence was such a critical success was that it was elegant, meaningful, intelligent and joyful at the same time. Firstly, rather than the massive oversized behemoths, Mintiens’ prototype, which would become the Type 1, was wearable and relatively slim. Secondly, the way time was represented was just so damn clever! Mintiens used a planetary gearing system to create a display that worked like this: the hour, running seconds and days of the week all appeared in small subdials that sat inside the main dial, which bore the minute indicator and completed a revolution each hour. This assured that all subdials would revolve around the main dial once every hour. But then, indicators on each of the subdials revolved around their respective axes at different speeds. Imagine one of those amusement park fun rides where every car is not only fixed to a rotating platform, but also rotates on its own axis at a different speed. Meaning, the hour would advance serenely when the minute hand on the main dial completes a full revolution. In contrast, the seconds indicator would blaze away a full 3,600 times and complete 60 full revolutions with each full one-hour revolution of the main dial. And of course, the day of the week would change each time the minute hand completed 24 full revolutions.

Indeed, you could even call Ressence’s signature display pragmatic, as depending on which sector the day of the week indicator is in, you can distinguish AM from PM. The brilliance of Mintiens is that he incorporated the stunningly different, yet somehow brilliantly logical system for reading time that he calls the ROCS or Ressence Orbital Convex System into a 107-part module that sits on top of a base caliber. This was originally an ETA-2824 in the first series of his Type 1 watches. He then switched over to a slimmer 2892, which in combination with a closed caseback, enabled him to make the Type 1 significantly slimmer, reduced from 13mm to 11mm in the latest version.

Alain Silberstein

The second individual involved in this first Grail Watch is none other than the legendary Alain Silberstein, who is our very first artist in residence. In 1987, the watch world was still struggling back to its feet following the ravages of the Quartz Crisis. Whether a long established brand like Patek Philippe or a new upstart like Blancpain, everyone was still looking back at 19th century watch history for inspiration. Into this world, like a lightning bolt of contemporary electricity, came Alain Silberstein. He was French. He didn’t come from the watch industry but was an interior architect. But he injected into the industry the sense of renewal, energy and joy that it was badly in need of. Obsessed with a love for Picasso, Miró and Kandinsky, Silberstein created a design language that consisted of vivid primary colors and striking geometric forms.

Says Büsser, “As a young man, I was absolutely enamored with Alain’s watches. They were so daring and new, but at the same time, created a new design language of their own that endured.” Silberstein is experiencing a current wave of adulations with an all-new audience connecting viscerally with his designs. This is thanks to two collaborations. The first is with Max Büsser who created two watches with him — the MB&F Horological Machine 2.2 Black Box in 2009 and the Legacy Machine 1 Alain Silberstein in 2016. Says Büsser, “When I started thinking of my very first collaboration, I immediately thought of Alain Silberstein. What can be better than to create something together with your childhood hero?” The second collaboration that placed Silberstein emphatically back on the map are his watches with Louis Erard and Manuel Emch. These consist of a black PVD-treated Le Régulateur model from 2020 that won the 2021 Red Dot Award for Product Design. And the amazing Le Triptyque, a collection of three watches — a regulator, a chronograph and a day of the week watch — each in a new titanium case designed by Silberstein. All of these watches are now trading for massive premiums on the secondary market.

Grail Watch 1

A year ago, I started with the idea to create Grail Watch as a company that was dedicated to the most ambitious collaborative limited edition watches in the world. When I understood the power of a Ressence and Alain Silberstein project, I knew that this had to be the watch that would launch Grail. It was everything that I wanted to achieve. It pushed boundaries, it was ambitious, and it allowed me to work with people I genuinely liked and sincerely admired. When Alain Silberstein sent me the first drawings he had made for the watch, I actually stood before it in slack-jawed awe. I had, of course, been expecting him to use Mintiens’ Type 1 and add his signature geometric-shaped hands in different primary colors. Already that idea was incredibly compelling. To be honest, I was sold on it. But what Silberstein designed was entirely different, so much better and — if you will allow me — insanely cool.

“Alain, this is devastatingly cool. But what the hell is it I’m looking at?” I asked.

He chuckled and replied, “One of my favorite paintings is the still life by French artist Philippe de Champaigne. In English, it is known as Vanitas, Still Life with Tulip, Skull and Hour Glass, though in French, it has the much more poetic title, Vanité, ou Allégorie de la vie Humaine. You see on the table a tulip that will wither with time, a skull reminding us of our mortality and an hour glass that shows us that time is passing. This is what is called in classical art a ‘memento mori,’ a reminder that time is fleeting and that the passing of each second is something we never get back. So how shall we react? What shall we do when faced with a reminder of our own mortality?

Gob-smacked and head reeling, I showed the design to Mintiens who replied, “I love the poetic message that underlies the design. It is in some way unconventional because Ressence was created to be a minimalistic brand, one that expressed the Japanese concept of shibui, which is apparent simplicity created by underlying complexity. But the iconography he’s created works within the design of the Type 1, because everything is thought out and is meaningful. It is by far the most extroverted and visually daring watch we’ve created, but I love the message. Because if it was not for my belief in seizing the day, I would never have had the courage to start Ressence. So let’s do it!”

Said Silberstein when I told him about Max Büsser buying piece Number One: “It gives me great pleasure to know that Max is the owner of the first piece of our collaboration. Firstly, I owe him a debt of gratitude for reminding the world about me with our collaborations in 2009. Secondly, I cannot think of a person that represents the aphorism of ‘Carpe Diem’ better. I hope that every person that wears this watch will, like Max, feel emboldened to ‘seize the day,’ to live every day, every hour and every second to its very fullest, to never be defeated by challenges, and to love with all your heart. This is a watch to uplift and to inspire you all your life.”

Tech Specs

Grail Watch 1: Ressence × Alain Silberstein “Carpe Diem”