MB&F, M.A.D.Editions and a Rather Different Approach
Vincent Calabrese, M.A.D.Editions and the curious business of doing things differently
Usually, winning a raffle means somebody gives you something.
A bottle of wine. A hamper. Perhaps, if fortune is particularly kind, a car.
M.A.D.Editions offers a rather stranger prize.
The right to buy a watch.
You still have to pay for it.
You haven't won a discount.
Your name has simply been selected from thousands of others and, as a consequence, you are allowed to become a customer.
It sounds faintly absurd.
And yet the more you look at the people behind the latest M.A.D.Editions watch, the more appropriate the whole thing begins to feel.
Because very little about this particular story followed the conventional route.
The Trouble With Making Something People Want
What do you do when more people want something than you can make?
Watchmaking has found plenty of answers.
Waiting lists. Allocations. Purchase histories. Relationships with dealers. First-come-first-served online releases where thousands of people discover just how fast their internet connection really is.
All are methods of deciding essentially the same thing:
Who gets the watch?
M.A.D.Editions eventually settled upon chance.
Register during the allotted period and a random draw decides whether you receive the opportunity to buy one.
Most people won't.
But they don't miss out because somebody else has a better relationship with a retailer or has spent considerably more money over the previous five years.
They simply weren't drawn.
It's an unusual solution to scarcity.
To understand why it exists, though, we need to go back to another problem entirely.
A Watch His Friends Could Afford
M.A.D.Editions grew from a frustration felt by MB&F founder Maximilian Büsser.
The mechanical creations being produced by MB&F had reached a level where members of his own family and close friends couldn't afford them.
Could some of that same creative freedom exist at a considerably more accessible price?
The idea had been around for years, but it was during the disruption of 2020 that it finally resurfaced. Rather than creating another conventional brand, with all the expectations that would bring, the project could simply be an Edition.
Something freer.
The first M.A.D.1 appeared in 2021 and wasn't offered to the wider public at all. Around 500 suppliers and longstanding collectors — MB&F's Friends and Tribe — were thanked for their support with the opportunity to buy one.
Then photographs escaped onto social media.
People rather wanted one.
By 2022, the M.A.D.1 RED opened the idea to the public and M.A.D.Editions introduced the raffle system it still uses today.
An experiment was becoming something larger.
A Publishing House That Makes Watches
There is a lovely idea within M.A.D.Editions' own philosophy.
It wasn't conceived as a conventional watch brand with a fixed design language and an endlessly expanding collection.
Instead, the analogy is a publishing house.
Different authors.
Different stories.
Different creative worlds.
What holds them together is an editorial spirit rather than a requirement that everything looks the same.
We rather like that idea.
Especially here.
Because a publishing house needs authors.
And M.A.D.3 introduces a particularly interesting one.
Vincent Calabrese.
The Troublemaker of Watchmaking
Calabrese is 82, and describing him simply as a watchmaker doesn't quite tell the story.
Born in Naples and moving to Switzerland as a teenager, his route into watchmaking wasn't the carefully mapped path one might expect from somebody who would eventually become so influential.
Independence seems to have come rather naturally.
In 1985, alongside Svend Andersen, he co-founded the AHCI — Académie Horlogère des Créateurs Indépendants — helping create a platform for independent watchmakers long before today's enthusiasm for independents existed.
He developed the movement architecture that became Corum's remarkable Golden Bridge and spent his career exploring wandering hours, tourbillons and unconventional ways of displaying time.
More than forty patents followed.
But perhaps the most revealing description is one Calabrese has used for himself:
the troublemaker of watchmaking.
Not because rebellion was the objective.
He simply seems to possess that useful habit of asking:
Does it really have to work that way?
Why Must an Hour Jump?
A conventional jumping-hour watch does exactly what the name suggests.
One hour ends.
The display jumps.
The next begins.
Calabrese didn't like that.
Because actual time doesn't behave that way.
At 10:59, the eleventh hour isn't waiting behind a curtain for permission to appear. We are already travelling towards it.
His Baladin concept therefore approached the display differently.
Instead of changing instantaneously, the hour indication progresses as the minutes continue their journey.
The transition itself becomes visible.
Time doesn't jump.
It travels.
It's an elegantly simple thought.
Which, as often happens in watchmaking, creates a rather complicated mechanical problem.
Taking an Idea Apart
Büsser and Calabrese had known one another for years. There had been conversations, lunches and previous thoughts of collaborating, but nothing had quite found its moment.
Then M.A.D.3 began to make sense.
The intention wasn't to reproduce an old Baladin or create a vintage reissue.
It was to take the idea and bring it into another world.
That meant taking something originally created in an intensely artisanal way and working out how it could be produced reliably while preserving the characteristic that made it Calabrese's in the first place:
the progressive wandering hour.
The M.A.D.Editions technical team therefore had to redevelop the mechanism rather than simply reproduce it.
And this is where the photographs tell the story better than specifications ever could.
A numbered disc.
A minute ring.
A wandering-hours mechanism.
Individual pieces that look almost disarmingly simple when laid out separately.
Put them together and an entirely different way of reading time emerges.
The Watch
At first glance, M.A.D.3 looks almost restrained by M.A.D.Editions standards.
Then you try to tell the time.
Minutes are read conventionally around the outside of the dial. The hour, however, appears through the travelling aperture above it, progressively making its way from one number to the next.
Underneath sits a specially optimised La Joux-Perret G111 automatic movement, beating at 28,800 vibrations per hour with approximately 55 hours of power reserve.
And then the lights go out.
Suddenly the minute track and wandering-hour indication illuminate and the mechanical idea becomes almost diagrammatic.
You don't merely read where the hour is.
You can see where it's going.
A Message Hidden in the Movement
Turn the watch over and there is another piece of Calabrese hiding inside.
Around the mechanism is a sentence:
Il est assez aisé de plaire aux autres, bien plus ardu d'être fier de soi…
Its sentiment is essentially that pleasing others is relatively easy.
Being proud of yourself is considerably harder.
The phrase was chosen because it says something about Calabrese himself.
And the designers didn't simply print it somewhere convenient.
The movement of the rotor progressively conceals and reveals it.
So the back of the watch becomes another wandering display.
Not of time this time, but of an idea.
A little mechanical portrait of the man behind it.
And Then There Is the Raffle
Two launch versions of M.A.D.3 exist.
The Pink edition is reserved for M.A.D.Editions' Friends and Tribe.
The Blue is the one offered through the public raffle.
Which takes us back to where we began.
You enter.
Chance decides.
If your name is selected, congratulations.
You've won the right to spend your own money.
There is something wonderfully contradictory about it.
But perhaps the raffle and the watch aren't as disconnected as they first appear.
Calabrese questioned why an hour had to jump.
Büsser questioned whether MB&F-style creativity had to remain beyond the reach of most enthusiasts.
M.A.D.Editions questioned whether a watch project had to behave like a conventional brand.
And when demand exceeded supply, they questioned whether the conventional waiting list had to be the answer.
Different questions.
The same instinct.
Does it really have to be done that way?
When Chance Feels Fair
A raffle doesn't solve scarcity.
There still aren't enough watches for everybody who wants one.
Nor does randomness make disappointment enjoyable.
But it does make the mechanism unusually simple.
You don't need a purchase history.
You don't need to know the right dealer.
You don't need to have bought three watches you didn't particularly want before being offered the one you did.
You put your name in.
So does everybody else.
Then chance gets the final word.
Perhaps that's why a system that initially sounds faintly ridiculous starts to feel rather sensible.
The prize isn't a watch.
It's access to one.
And in a corner of the watch world where access can sometimes be considerably more complicated than the watches themselves, losing randomly can feel remarkably fair.