Speaker 1: This is Master's in Business with Barry rid Hoolds on
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 2: This week on the podcast, I have a pair of
Speaker 2: extra special guests. Ben Klember took an buyout offer from
Speaker 2: UBS in two thousand and eight, right in the middle
Speaker 2: of the financial crisis, and said, I know what I'm
Speaker 2: gonna do. I'm gonna launch a site about watches, which
Speaker 2: has been my hobby and see where this goes. And
Speaker 2: that was fifteen years ago and it's turned into one
Speaker 2: hundred million dollar business with incredible investors and just a
Speaker 2: huge brand on the Internet. Jeff Fowler has been CEO
Speaker 2: of the company for just about two years. This really
Speaker 2: is a fascinating discussion. First, if you're interested in watches,
Speaker 2: it's amazing to talk to guys who have known so
Speaker 2: much and are so plugged into what's going on in
Speaker 2: the industry and really are right in the middle of
Speaker 2: what's become a speculative boom in time pieces. But also
Speaker 2: this is a story of starting a small media outlet,
Speaker 2: a small web presence, and recognizing that there's business potential
Speaker 2: here and how to slowly grow that into something that's substantial.
Speaker 2: How do you hire people, how do you go out
Speaker 2: and find investors. When do you do that? When do
Speaker 2: you take this to the next level? When do you
Speaker 2: as founders and CEO say hey, I need somebody who
Speaker 2: can scale this and I'm going to step back and
Speaker 2: become chairperson and bring in a professional CEO to run
Speaker 2: the site. So there are a lot of different ways
Speaker 2: to look at this. I found the conversation to be
Speaker 2: absolutely fascinating. I could have gone for another two hours
Speaker 2: with no further ado my conversation with Hodinky's Ben Klember
Speaker 2: and Jeff Fowler's let's talk a little bit about how
Speaker 2: a blog becomes a business. I know a little bit
Speaker 2: about that. Twosand and eight you launched a blog after
Speaker 2: you leave UBS in the midst of the financial crisis.
Speaker 1: Yeah, first, what were you doing at UBS? So I
Speaker 1: was basically the lowest of the low man on totem poles.
Speaker 1: I was twenty four. I was working at UBS in
Speaker 1: wealth management. And it's funny, actually, before I even get
Speaker 1: into that, coming to Bloomberg is actually my favorite place
Speaker 1: to go because it is the only location that I
Speaker 1: visited pre hoad Inky and post hod Inky. Oh really so, actually,
Speaker 1: when I used to visit here, your systems used to
Speaker 1: pull up the original photograph ever taken of me as
Speaker 1: a guest, and it was me at twenty four years old,
Speaker 1: no beard, dressed head to toe and Joseph A. Banks. Legitimately,
Speaker 1: I'm not dressing that anymore, thankfully, and it was just
Speaker 1: an amazing flashback. Anytime I come here, I've been here
Speaker 1: a few times for other shows, and so this is
Speaker 1: one of the few places really in the world that
Speaker 1: kind of unites my pre hoad inky and present day world.
Speaker 2: That's really interesting. So post Ubs, yes, you're doing this
Speaker 2: just as a hobby, started as an interest.
Speaker 1: Started for fun. So I was a kid. I was
Speaker 1: in wealth management at Ubs, and this was two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight when Leven collapsed and the world effectively imploded,
Speaker 1: certainly for people of my age who had no authority
Speaker 1: at all. I mean, we had no cloud whatsoever in
Speaker 1: a giant company like at Ubs. And they said basically like, look,
Speaker 1: you're probably going to get laid off. Will you take
Speaker 1: a severance package and get out of here? And I said,
Speaker 1: oh no, what hell? Yeah, absolutely, And keep in mind
Speaker 1: I had nothing. Both my parents are public school teachers.
Speaker 1: I mean, I didn't come from a world of luxury
Speaker 1: or finance or anything like this at all from Rochester,
Speaker 1: which is not anywhere near Westchester, you know, a really
Speaker 1: dramatically different world. And I said, you know what, like finance,
Speaker 1: this version of finance is just not for me at all.
Speaker 1: I always fancied myself a writer. My grandfather, who was
Speaker 1: kind of a mentor not kind of. He was a
Speaker 1: mentor to me. He was still alive at the time,
Speaker 1: and he was an entrepreneur. He gave me his Omega Speedmaster,
Speaker 1: which is a really nice watch, when I was sixteen
Speaker 1: years old. Is my only nice watch.
Speaker 2: So wait, you're I'm trying to do the math if
Speaker 2: you were twenty four and eight. So you got this
Speaker 2: watch in two thoy ninety nine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, around there, I would say.
Speaker 2: And he purchased it twenty thirty years before he.
Speaker 1: Actually purchased it. He purchased it in the early nineties.
Speaker 1: It was a later speed Master. He bought it when
Speaker 1: he was in his probably sixties or seventies, so it
Speaker 1: wasn't like something he had throughout his entire lif but
Speaker 1: still it's what I remembered him wearing. And one day
Speaker 1: he just literally slid off his wrist and said, I
Speaker 1: want you to have this, which is unbelievable to me, obviously,
Speaker 1: and that was his daily drug, that was his daily driver.
Speaker 1: That and a gold Rolex Day eight as well, which
Speaker 1: now my father has. And it was just something so
Speaker 1: impactful to me. And he was really my hero. I mean,
Speaker 1: he represented something that that I didn't really see much
Speaker 1: of in Rochester, New York, which was a self made
Speaker 1: you know, truly self made to a material degree. Was
Speaker 1: interested in the world, interested in how things are made,
Speaker 1: nice cars, nice watches, et cetera. And had very little
Speaker 1: to do with the cost of things, but really appreciated
Speaker 1: how things were made. And it was always critical that
Speaker 1: he made me understand why in Omega would be two
Speaker 1: thousand dollars instead of two hundred, or Mercedes would be
Speaker 1: sixty thousand dollars instead of six thousand.
Speaker 2: But really quite interesting. So so you have this cash
Speaker 2: out from UBS.
Speaker 1: If you can call it that. I think it was
Speaker 1: a grand total of around nine thousand dollars, all right
Speaker 1: for me, Hey call it.
Speaker 2: One thousand and eight. That was not nothing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And look, and I was twenty four, I was
Speaker 1: living with my girlfriend at the time, and so just
Speaker 1: kind of goofing around. So I'm like to be able
Speaker 1: to pay my you know, I think my share of
Speaker 1: the rent each month was around nine hundred dollars, so
Speaker 1: like that paid.
Speaker 2: Hey, but your years were almost the year's worth and.
Speaker 1: Rent exactly right, so allowed me to take my time
Speaker 1: and write with that. With that time, I ended up
Speaker 1: freelancing for the likes of GQ for the Financial Times
Speaker 1: How to Spend It, you know, great really great publications,
Speaker 1: mostly about watches, but other men's lifestyle things, cars, you know, whatever, restaurants.
Speaker 1: Ended up applying to journalism school here in the city
Speaker 1: at Columbia for a master's degree. I went to undergrad
Speaker 1: for finance and computer science, so dramatically different field, and
Speaker 1: I said, look, I'm going to be in media, and
Speaker 1: I wanted to be a true journalist, like a real
Speaker 1: Bloomberg style journalist. I wanted to do it the right way.
Speaker 1: So I applied to Columbia, somehow got in using my
Speaker 1: blog about watches as the foundation of my application, and
Speaker 1: ended two years of a master's degreeyet at Columbia, while
Speaker 1: I continued to blog every day about watches.
Speaker 2: And the site was called to Dinky it was.
Speaker 1: It was called Houdinky from the start Hodinky with a
Speaker 1: y and it means wristwatch in check of all things.
Speaker 1: Everyone asked, I'm actually not check, but I was just
Speaker 1: kind of goofing around and googling Google translating what wristwatch
Speaker 1: was in different languages, and and you might remember. But
Speaker 1: like so in two thousand and eight, Google was the
Speaker 1: hottest thing on earth, and Google was like, really kind
Speaker 1: of it's on its ascent, and the double vowel kind
Speaker 1: of like stuck with me. And another site that launched
Speaker 1: around the same time had a double vowel, and it's
Speaker 1: called Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's lifestyle site. So the double vowel,
Speaker 1: for some reason, really was popular with Internet domains.
Speaker 2: You can't get you can't get a domain, right, I
Speaker 2: literally wrote down what was the inspiration for using the
Speaker 2: check word for watch? But I know if you go
Speaker 2: to register a company or haven't forbid register a dot com,
Speaker 2: every word, every two letter, three letter four letter combination
Speaker 2: has been taken, every common word in the dictionary. Somebody's
Speaker 2: squatting on. So yet really have to get creative.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so we we. I'm still used to saying we
Speaker 1: as if it was more than me. It was just me.
Speaker 1: But I always used to use the royal weed to
Speaker 1: pretend like we were biggert we are now actually having
Speaker 1: the people here, which they were a huge company you
Speaker 1: wouldn't understand. So but back then, even more than that,
Speaker 1: I was already a of the tenuous relationship tenus it
Speaker 1: best relationship that watches and luxury had with the Internet.
Speaker 1: And so the first people to sell watches on the
Speaker 1: Internet or even list watches on the Internet were what
Speaker 1: we call gray market dealers, guys that had no legal
Speaker 1: right to sell watches.
Speaker 2: So people that we well, I'm guessing eBay was pretty
Speaker 2: big in the early Absolutely still is eBay is the
Speaker 2: largest watch strow on Earth.
Speaker 1: Oh is that true? Absolutely absolutely, much to the chagrin
Speaker 1: of the Swiss, but it is the largest seller of
Speaker 1: watches on Earth. And look, I mean it's just it's
Speaker 1: just reality. But I mean, forget eBay. eBay is a
Speaker 1: real publicly traded you know, has has business practices that
Speaker 1: we all hold in the high regard. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: there are other other sellers.
Speaker 2: Out let's put a little asterisk on that one big circle.
Speaker 1: That's a good one. But the there were a lot
Speaker 1: of other purveyors of watches that really were not super
Speaker 1: super ethical folks, little shady a little bit. And so
Speaker 1: the Swiss and the and the Europeans at large were
Speaker 1: really kind of reticent to to to get involved with
Speaker 1: watches on the Internet at all, and that includes evening
Speaker 1: even a covering them. So when I would go to
Speaker 1: Switzerland and say, hey, Rolex Pa Tech, whoever Omega smaller brands,
Speaker 1: can I photograph your watches from write about them? They say, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, we don't really want coverage on the internet. Truly.
Speaker 1: That's how it was like in the early forward tech exactly,
Speaker 1: very forward thinking. There's a famous line that I've told
Speaker 1: in a few other podcasts and a few other stories
Speaker 1: where a very very prominent i mean one of the
Speaker 1: most prominent CEOs of one of the largest Swiss luxury
Speaker 1: groups in the world told me to my face in
Speaker 1: twenty ten that he thought the internet was for poor people,
Speaker 1: that nobody would ever make a buying decision based on
Speaker 1: anything published on the Internet. And keep in mind, this
Speaker 1: is what I was doing for a living back.
Speaker 2: That's you know, if someone would have said that in
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety nineteen ninety five, I would have said, all right,
Speaker 2: their a little backwards looking, but by twenty ten.
Speaker 1: Yes, Amazon is immense.
Speaker 2: All these companies had migrated. Jeff, what were you doing
Speaker 2: in twenty ten?
Speaker 3: I was working on Louis Vuitton at the time, and
Speaker 3: it was actually Jeff who said it to me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, Lesbie, they have a pretty robust online presence.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean at that time it was likely the
Speaker 3: case that Louis Euton's dot com store, if you want
Speaker 3: to call their online presence, was likely the biggest store
Speaker 3: in any of their regions globally, certainly in the US.
Speaker 3: Louisviton dot com for the US region was well on
Speaker 3: its way to becoming the biggest site for any sales
Speaker 3: for Louis Vuitton. So yeah, was well established at that point.
Speaker 3: But Ben's right, I mean even across the broader luxury
Speaker 3: categories of fashion shoes. I mean, luxury was late to
Speaker 3: the game, saw it as more of a branding and
Speaker 3: marketing activity, and the watch industry in particular was very,
Speaker 3: very late to I think understand the true impact and potential.
Speaker 2: Of And when did you first first become aware of
Speaker 2: this little blog called hode.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I was at LVMH for a number of years,
Speaker 3: mostly with Louis Vuton for the first few years and
Speaker 3: Louis Euton has a watch business and division, and then
Speaker 3: within lvmhor I moved to Taghoyr, which is a pure
Speaker 3: watch business within the broader luxury group. It was really
Speaker 3: kind of in the Taghoyr timeline for me career wise
Speaker 3: that it became aware of Ben and of Hoodinky, And
Speaker 3: as he stated earlier, in my mind, Houdinky was this
Speaker 3: huge operation. It was, you know, dozens of writers and
Speaker 3: journalists simply because the influence that they already had at
Speaker 3: that point, this is twenty twelve twenty thirteen, was enormous
Speaker 3: in the industry. There would always be someone from Hoodinky
Speaker 3: at a precedent or press junket.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: The site was getting a huge amount of appeal and
Speaker 3: building a community. So we were well aware of their impact.
Speaker 3: But I hadn't met Ben yet. I was heading up
Speaker 3: retail for Tag Hoyer for North America, so I was
Speaker 3: sort of traveling around from market to market, store to store.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I was very aware of Hudinky's impact.
Speaker 2: So I'm going to jump to the end of the
Speaker 2: story and then we'll backfill what took place between eight
Speaker 2: and twenty twenty two. You join as CEO last year.
Speaker 2: How did that transition take place and why were you
Speaker 2: excited about stepping into the chairman's role.
Speaker 1: So for me, Hoodinky has been my life's work truly.
Speaker 1: I mean, I have a child now, but I kind
Speaker 1: of think of it as my firstborn. And you know,
Speaker 1: like any child, you know, things tend to grow up
Speaker 1: and mature. And I think, you know, if there's one
Speaker 1: thing i can say about myself, it's that I'm acutely
Speaker 1: aware of my strengths and weaknesses. And as my strengths
Speaker 1: are that I've got the vision, the idea. I think.
Speaker 1: I think I'm a solid writer. I've got, you know,
Speaker 1: the creative mind to to build something that other people
Speaker 1: wouldn't see. If I may say, where I'm not super strong,
Speaker 1: honestly is running a business at scale constitution is tough,
Speaker 1: sure is to come to find out, you know. And
Speaker 1: so you know, when we closed our Series B in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, which as you mentioned, include lvmh in in
Speaker 1: a minority share, there's no there's no majority holder. Just
Speaker 1: to be clear, TCG, Tom Brady, Tony Fidel, John Mayer.
Speaker 1: I mean, like all these mean, that's a crazy list.
Speaker 1: That's a crazy people don't know who Tony Fiddell is.
Speaker 1: He is essentially the guy who created the iPod and
Speaker 1: then said I need to do something out and then
Speaker 1: goes out and creates nests. Yes exactly, I mean talk about.
Speaker 2: A design you know, legacy, amazing.
Speaker 1: He's he's a legend, and he's of all the people
Speaker 1: in my in professional life that is mentor, he would
Speaker 1: be the one. And actually it was he who decided,
Speaker 1: or he who influenced me not to sell the business.
Speaker 1: I had the opportunit need to sell the business in
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen, and he said, do not sell this thing.
Speaker 1: Let me help you raise money. So he actually invested
Speaker 1: as early as to us.
Speaker 2: And I know from having seen him on talking watches. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 2: he's been a watch geek forever because the you know,
Speaker 2: it's funny, we briefly touched upon what your grandfather said,
Speaker 2: but the elements of design and precision craftsmanship come together
Speaker 2: and watch in a way very few things do. Perhaps
Speaker 2: the iPod and nest are good example.
Speaker 1: That's exactly that, and so so Tony Fidel. A guy
Speaker 1: named Kevin Rose who sorted dig and is now in NFTs.
Speaker 1: He was actually he stepped in and invested as well,
Speaker 1: and was actually our CEO for a while. Tony Conrad,
Speaker 1: who's big and trueventures he did Peloton and Blue Bottles
Speaker 1: really great, you know Silicon Valley names that were all
Speaker 1: friends and we all kind of connected. They all kind
Speaker 1: of helped me shepherd in this new version of what
Speaker 1: Hodingki could be, which was that of a retailer and
Speaker 1: that of somebody who had this amazing influence. Editorially speaking,
Speaker 1: we had done limited editions where we designed them. I'm
Speaker 1: actually wearing one right now. Let's say this is an
Speaker 1: IWC that we did, sure, so you know, this is
Speaker 1: a seven thousand dollars watch. We did five hundred sold
Speaker 1: out and I think four minutes. Wow. So you know
Speaker 1: it was it was with their help and their product
Speaker 1: that we said, hey, this could be something much bigger
Speaker 1: than I don't want to say just an editorial platform,
Speaker 1: but we can do real content to commerce. And that
Speaker 1: was really not a model that existed anywhere.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about that. I want to loop Jeff
Speaker 2: into this part of the conversation. So you start out
Speaker 2: as essentially a non professional media outlet, evolve into a
Speaker 2: media outlet, and then eventually add e commerce when you
Speaker 2: think about Hodinky today, and I'll direct this to Jeff
Speaker 2: who joined in twenty twenty two, is it media first?
Speaker 2: Is it e commerce? Or is there no bright line
Speaker 2: between the.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I get that question often, and in
Speaker 3: fact I get that question often even from new joiners
Speaker 3: to Hoodinky people that have come aboard. Perhaps it's that
Speaker 3: we've hired them into the commercial side of the business.
Speaker 3: Perhaps we've hired them into the editorial side of the business.
Speaker 3: And it's not long before they ask, well, which one
Speaker 3: are we are?
Speaker 2: We?
Speaker 3: Are we an editorial sort of content business? Are we
Speaker 3: a commercial business that sells things? And I sort of
Speaker 3: reject the premise that it has to be an or
Speaker 3: rather than an end. But I think it's the end
Speaker 3: aspect that really makes us unique, that really sets us
Speaker 3: apart as a pioneer. And I'm going to quote actually
Speaker 3: someone totally not connected to our business, but recently at
Speaker 3: a conference for CEOs tech executives, the global president of
Speaker 3: Shopify was speaking and was on stage and behind him
Speaker 3: in his slideshow, he presented the logo of Hodinky, and
Speaker 3: a friend of ours was in the audience. It was
Speaker 3: quick on the trigger and pulled up his phone and
Speaker 3: recorded you know this otherwise private conversation happening with CEOs,
Speaker 3: and the gentleman from Shofai said, does anyone know who
Speaker 3: Hodinky is?
Speaker 1: And what year was this? This was last year.
Speaker 3: I remember we're talking maybe six months ago. They don't
Speaker 3: know who Hoadinky is. A bunch of hands I presume
Speaker 3: got you know, put in the air because we were
Speaker 3: just listening to the audio. Says for those who aren't aware,
Speaker 3: if you want to watch, talk to me later. And
Speaker 3: then he proceeded to say, Hodinky is the greatest watch
Speaker 3: retailer on the planet. Here's why, And he said they
Speaker 3: spent the first better part of ten years just writing
Speaker 3: about watches, just pursuing the knowledge of watches, furthering the
Speaker 3: knowledge of watches, building a huge community, and then and
Speaker 3: only then did they start to actually sell things, at
Speaker 3: which point there was a captive audience of people ready
Speaker 3: to convert, which you know, at the end of the
Speaker 3: day is really important if you're running an e commerce business,
Speaker 3: you know, conversion is the key to all of that.
Speaker 3: And I think, you know, we and again we get
Speaker 3: asked this often is like, you know, are you editorial
Speaker 3: or commercial? Isn't there a conflict. Isn't there some sort
Speaker 3: of like mixed sort of motives there, And we reject
Speaker 3: the premise. Again, we simply say, we write about things
Speaker 3: that we love, we sell things that we love, and
Speaker 3: in some ways this there's an intellectual honesty to that.
Speaker 3: You know, there's there's editorial choices being made at every stage,
Speaker 3: whether it's on the content side, whether it's on the
Speaker 3: commercial side, and it just so happens that a content
Speaker 3: to commerce model, if done effectively, is an incredibly efficient model.
Speaker 1: A little secret.
Speaker 3: We don't sort of always say this, but something that
Speaker 3: we love to brag about is there wasn't until twenty
Speaker 3: twenty one that Hodinki spent its first dollar on marketing, right,
Speaker 3: A lot of businesses have to spend a ton of
Speaker 3: their revenue on marketing in order to get that next
Speaker 3: customer in the door. Really is the editorial side of Hootinky,
Speaker 3: That really is what gets people interested, keeps them interested,
Speaker 3: keeps them engaged. For many people, it's their daily read
Speaker 3: on their morning commuter, their afternoon commute, you know, And
Speaker 3: that's really the secret, the secret sauce.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and just to put just quickly, to put a
Speaker 1: fine point on that, just add further context. So Jeff
Speaker 1: is exactly right. We hadn't spent a dollar marketing, and
Speaker 1: literally not a dollar on marketing until April of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one when we heard it for CMO. We were
Speaker 1: doing about thirty million dollars a year in revenue at
Speaker 1: that point. So we've gotten from zero to thirty million
Speaker 1: dollars a year roughly, you know, give or take without
Speaker 1: a dollar spent on acquisition costs. Wow, that's impressive.
Speaker 2: So since you mentioned the media focus on what you
Speaker 2: really love, let's talk about what you guys write about.
Speaker 2: It's often about the history and the narrative surrounding a
Speaker 2: specific watch, the brand, the background why a watch is important,
Speaker 2: even if you don't like it, here's why it's significant.
Speaker 1: There's a lot.
Speaker 2: I mean, obviously I'm a fan for a long time,
Speaker 2: but discussing the in depth background of each watch. When
Speaker 2: you started doing that, yeah, I mean other than a
Speaker 2: p industry professional red a trade publication, nobody was doing
Speaker 2: anything like that online.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think if there's one
Speaker 1: thing that I'd say we got right early, which was
Speaker 1: this the idea of taking this thing that really could
Speaker 1: be perceived as pretentious or complicated or certainly expensive, you
Speaker 1: can't deny that, and explaining it in a way that
Speaker 1: is incredibly digestible for the average guy like you or
Speaker 1: me or a Jeff, and also doing it online in
Speaker 1: a broadcast mechanism. There were some people discussing the finer
Speaker 1: points of high and watch making inforums, but you had
Speaker 1: to register the comments, I moderated. If you weren't part
Speaker 1: of the gang, you basically had no cloud at all.
Speaker 1: And I said, that just doesn't feel democratic at all,
Speaker 1: Like I love this stuff in such a sincere way.
Speaker 1: I want to basically share what I'm learning to as
Speaker 1: many people as possible, and then people can read it
Speaker 1: or not, they can comment or not. That's okay, and
Speaker 1: I think that is really what made us different from
Speaker 1: everyone else. And we did it in a way that
Speaker 1: was style. And something that I've always really focused on
Speaker 1: is ensuring that the presentation of our of our media
Speaker 1: is really beautiful. And so the first dollars I ever
Speaker 1: spent at Hodinky were to actually have double engraved business cards,
Speaker 1: which literally cost me thousands of dollars. We were exactly
Speaker 1: you know, back in the day when business you.
Speaker 2: Got that nice nine thousand dollar ubs exactly.
Speaker 1: I've probably spent a third of it on business cards, truly,
Speaker 1: But this idea of like presenting something that was just
Speaker 1: so much more thoughtful than anyone else out there. And
Speaker 1: yes we were a blog, and yes we had a
Speaker 1: silly name, and yes we were online, but I cared
Speaker 1: in such a way that was so different than everybody else.
Speaker 1: And a lot of the journalists, and certainly not here
Speaker 1: at Bloomberg, but elsewhere in the world, a lot of
Speaker 1: journalists in the luxury space are there for the good wine,
Speaker 1: the pretty girls or guys, the free travel sometimes on
Speaker 1: these junk kids, and these amazing experiences. And I get that, like,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to knock people that are there for that.
Speaker 1: I wasn't. I didn't know that existed. I wasn't there
Speaker 1: for any of that. I was there for the product
Speaker 1: and there to share the product with as many people
Speaker 1: as well.
Speaker 2: And full disclosure, Bloomberg republishes ho dinky columns on occasion
Speaker 2: it goes incas Yes, in the Wealth or Pursuits section
Speaker 2: of Bloomberg. I didn't mention that earlier, but I want
Speaker 2: everyone to understand you and I have never met before
Speaker 2: the strictly in armslong conversation, but there is a relationship
Speaker 2: between Bloomberg and Hodinky. But let me go back to
Speaker 2: spending three thousand dollars on business cards on a zero
Speaker 2: like of course, law, when did it dawn on you
Speaker 2: that hey, this is could be a business and maybe
Speaker 2: generate a profit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, I mean early on we had advertisers, and
Speaker 1: back then, I mean the cost of running hoodinky was
Speaker 1: my time, which was effectively free, and then hosting fees
Speaker 1: on squarespace and elsewhere. So we'll say, what we're using
Speaker 1: for software was so tip it or Tumbler for the
Speaker 1: first six months, and then Space and Squarespace, and I
Speaker 1: love those guys. They were really instrumental to the growth
Speaker 1: of Hordinky allowed me to design my own website in
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine till probably twenty twelve or thirteen
Speaker 1: when we got a professional upgrade and really like without
Speaker 1: them and the interface that we put forward and everybody
Speaker 1: was using WordPress and other you know other a really
Speaker 1: frankly more rudimentary at the time products and Squarespace. Squarespace
Speaker 1: was incredible, I mean really allowed. It was almost like
Speaker 1: Shopify in a way, like really open up a whole
Speaker 1: new world to me to to preduce something that was
Speaker 1: really beautiful.
Speaker 2: What were you using before square space tumbler? All right,
Speaker 2: so let me explain how old I am sure when
Speaker 2: I launched my blog it was on GeoCities, which means
Speaker 2: that you had to do HTML coding. You learn and
Speaker 2: when six apart came out with uh, I'm sorry, is
Speaker 2: it movable type came out with trying to remember the name.
Speaker 1: Of it, I can't even remember anymore. Uh.
Speaker 2: Six apart was a movable type where it was old
Speaker 2: wizzywig where you didn't have to code indent or pictures
Speaker 2: or wait, I could just drag a picture there. This
Speaker 2: is astonishing.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So you went from an hour of writing in two
Speaker 2: hours of coding to an hour of writing and five
Speaker 2: minutes of formatting it was that was three Yeah, that
Speaker 2: was a game changer. So when you go from four
Speaker 2: space to whatever was next, what we're using is.
Speaker 1: The So we were in squarespace until probably twenty we
Speaker 1: did a super custom version of scareespace and just on background,
Speaker 1: I was a coder like I in high.
Speaker 2: School graduated, I said, you were college finance.
Speaker 1: So I was doing I was banging out coat for
Speaker 1: a good chunk of time there in college and before
Speaker 1: I built my first website when I was probably fourteen,
Speaker 1: so you know, it was something that that I really
Speaker 1: took a lot of pride in. And then in twenty
Speaker 1: thirteen fourteen, an agency that that actually Jeff knows what
Speaker 1: called Wondersauced a great name, I know, they approached us
Speaker 1: and said, hey, we love what you're doing. Your content
Speaker 1: is unreal, like, can we help redesign your site? And
Speaker 1: I was like, I don't have any money, but sure,
Speaker 1: you know, And it was this probably twenty twelve.
Speaker 3: Okay, at that point in the nine thousand zeverance was gone.
Speaker 1: Right, so four years later it was long but yeah,
Speaker 1: so taking a step back. So we we hadn't been
Speaker 1: making money with advertising, and advertisers came quickly because we
Speaker 1: had represented we represented.
Speaker 2: Anybody else was in that space.
Speaker 1: You had it to yourself all online. And on top
Speaker 1: of that, our audience was wrapped. I mean, audience was
Speaker 1: obsessed with what we were doing. The young and they
Speaker 1: were They might not be wealthy now, but they probably
Speaker 1: they probably were going to be, you know, And so
Speaker 1: we had average Our first big advertiser was Automarpi Gay
Speaker 1: We had Ptec as a no kid. We had Rolex
Speaker 1: as an advertiser, frankly in a different way than we
Speaker 1: do now. Even it was really special because we weren't
Speaker 1: selling anything. We were just there to promote the industry.
Speaker 1: And what change for me was after a few years
Speaker 1: of making a good living and I own the whole thing,
Speaker 1: so it was like a nice little living for me.
Speaker 1: I said, hey, like, I'm getting these emails that person
Speaker 1: X or woman why is buying this protect filip or
Speaker 1: Rolex whatever because of the content we're creating And here's
Speaker 1: the proof, Like, here's an email, And I would take
Speaker 1: that to brand X and I would say, hey, isn't
Speaker 1: this cool? Do you guys want to advertise more? And
Speaker 1: they say, oh, no, we're good, But like you want
Speaker 1: to come to per Se for dinner? And I was like,
Speaker 1: per Se is lovely, but like you know, that doesn't
Speaker 1: that doesn't pay for my rent, It doesn't allow me
Speaker 1: to grow this business. And I said, man, our audience
Speaker 1: is really special. And we started doing these surveys, internal
Speaker 1: surveys where hey, what do you want from Hoodinki? The
Speaker 1: number one response every single time to this day is
Speaker 1: for Hoodinki to sell things. Because they trust us.
Speaker 2: Really very interesting. I'm intrigued by how you guys have
Speaker 2: grown own. I'm familiar with a few parallel stories, but
Speaker 2: I don't know of anybody that's taken it to the
Speaker 2: level that that Hodinky has.
Speaker 1: I appreciate that.
Speaker 2: Ben Kleimber is the founder of odinky, one of the
Speaker 2: world's most fascinating and well read watch sites. Jeff Fowler
Speaker 2: is the company CEO. A couple of years ago they
Speaker 2: launched whodinky shop is what its current name is. I
Speaker 2: don't know if it was called something else.
Speaker 1: It's Hodinky. I mean the shop was, you know, it
Speaker 1: was basically, you know, to get into breast haacks. It
Speaker 1: was a subdomain powered by Shopify, so we did shop
Speaker 1: at hoodinky dot com. But it's hodinky.
Speaker 2: It's all one company, all right, and it now does
Speaker 2: sells over one hundred million dollars worth of watches, which
Speaker 2: is not too shabby. So so let's talk a little
Speaker 2: bit about the wacky world of watch retailing, starting with
Speaker 2: why can't I walk into a Rolex shop or a
Speaker 2: bushera Tourneau or any retailer and say, Hey, that Daytona
Speaker 2: is pretty nice, and that Batman Jubilee bracelet. Let me
Speaker 2: take those too. Why can't we do that?
Speaker 3: I mean, the simple answer is just supply and demand.
Speaker 3: You know, there's well more demand than there is supply
Speaker 3: of these products brand new at retail. You know, it's
Speaker 3: estimated that Rolex produces around a million watches something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: give it, give or take a million watches a year.
Speaker 3: No one knows the real answer for exactly how many
Speaker 3: they could sell if they had, you know, the amount
Speaker 3: of supply to meet demand. But it's got to be
Speaker 3: in the millions, so you naturally get this issue of constraint.
Speaker 3: I don't believe it's a managed constraint. I don't think
Speaker 3: it's one where they're like intentionally trying to come some
Speaker 3: million units under the demand. But of course, like you know,
Speaker 3: only Rolexs would be able to answer that question at
Speaker 3: the end of the day. Scaling up in this industry
Speaker 3: is not terribly easy. I mean, you know, they're roll handmade,
Speaker 3: They're very intricate. Some of the nicer watches are five hundred,
Speaker 3: seven hundred nine hundred teeny tiny little pieces. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: I often say that, you know, leading aside of the
Speaker 3: brand on the dial of the watch, the most important
Speaker 3: thing on the dial of a Swiss mechanic watches these
Speaker 3: two tiny words Swiss made usually around the six o'clock marker.
Speaker 3: And for that to be the case, it's got to
Speaker 3: be totally manufactured, assembled, quality controlled. Every step of the
Speaker 3: process is to take place in Switzerland. And I'm sure
Speaker 3: you visited Switzerland then, and I have been there many times.
Speaker 1: I have, it's on my list.
Speaker 3: It is a teeny tiny country, right, It's like I
Speaker 3: always say, for most parts of Switzerland, if you just
Speaker 3: pick up your eyes and look at their eyes, and
Speaker 3: you're probably looking.
Speaker 1: At another country.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: You know, the tiny villages in the mountains, you know
Speaker 3: the historical you know, cradle of watchmaking is all there,
Speaker 3: and a lot of people in those parts of the
Speaker 3: country are affiliated to the watchmaking industry. But they're making
Speaker 3: one tiny subcomponent, teeny tiny part, and it all comes
Speaker 3: together in one glorious supply chain that ultimately becomes these watches.
Speaker 3: But it isn't as though you can just scale that.
Speaker 2: Up very quiet and to put some flesh on the bones.
Speaker 2: So if Rolux is doing a million million, two Paddock
Speaker 2: is doing sixty thousand, Yeah about that, And Lango is
Speaker 2: doing five thousand, Yeah, five six seven in that right,
Speaker 2: I mean are just insane numbers. Yes, it's seven thousand
Speaker 2: of anything is Yeah, you know that. That's how many
Speaker 2: must and convertibles sell. Yeah, that's and good good luck
Speaker 2: get it. They cost about the same. You could walk
Speaker 2: into a Ford dealer in order must end convertible. You
Speaker 2: can't walk into a language now. To be fair, a
Speaker 2: lot of these places they're like perpetual calendars that are
Speaker 2: a buck fifty. You could probably go in and get one, yeah,
Speaker 2: if you, if they like you, maybe maybe, And I
Speaker 2: like those seem to be more available than the Yeah.
Speaker 1: Look I think that the average I mean just to
Speaker 1: get you know, the Rolex question is one we get
Speaker 1: a lot obviously because every guy in the street. Look,
Speaker 1: I love Rolex, I own several, but everybody when you.
Speaker 2: Were a UBS, did you notice that, like every kind
Speaker 2: of shady stockbroker had a Submarner. Yes, I mean I
Speaker 2: know everybody loves that. I have a problem with that
Speaker 2: watch because I just associate it with you know, junk
Speaker 2: stocks and heart selling.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I get that, and like the whole like used
Speaker 1: car salesman guy where it's like that has that has
Speaker 1: dissipated quite a bit, and now people want Rolexes.
Speaker 2: You know, when I was, well, they're not the Rolex,
Speaker 2: just the sub mariners got it. Like the senior guys
Speaker 2: had gmts and Daytona's, but the junior guys all were
Speaker 2: wearing subs and people kind of looked a stancy.
Speaker 1: He used to be able to go in and get
Speaker 1: it whenever you said, yeah, exactly. And the world has
Speaker 1: just changed. And look, I would never take or we
Speaker 1: should not take all the credit. But like sites like
Speaker 1: ours change the demand flow in such a way that
Speaker 1: Rolex or any brand just couldn't keep up with it.
Speaker 1: And then COVID everything changed, you know, Dict Covid, Covid.
Speaker 2: We'll talk a little bit about Covid, but so let
Speaker 2: let's talk about a couple of other smaller brands. I'm
Speaker 2: a fan of some of the h. Moser and Company.
Speaker 2: Grooble four S seems to have exploded. NB and F
Speaker 2: is next level Jacob and Company. Yeah, and that's before
Speaker 2: we get to artisans, the Geneva who have decided give
Speaker 2: us your Rolex and we'll slap one hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 2: worth of labor on it and make it one of
Speaker 2: a kind. Like this sort of thing start in the
Speaker 2: car industry on a very very small level. You can
Speaker 2: personalize your car, put stripes on it. But to take
Speaker 2: a thirty thousand dollars Rolex and turn into a six
Speaker 2: figure product pretty amazing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, Rolex is should be viewed differently than
Speaker 1: almost every other watch brand market shared to the giant.
Speaker 1: I mean in the US they're one half of all
Speaker 1: luxury watches, is that true?
Speaker 2: I know, globally it's twenty something, and.
Speaker 1: It's just enormous in this country. And you know, look,
Speaker 1: there are big if you go to India, if you
Speaker 1: go to Asia, there are brands such as Omega, Launjeans,
Speaker 1: et cetera that that could rival Rolex in terms of popularity.
Speaker 1: But in the US, this is Rolex country for sure.
Speaker 1: But they are they should be viewed separately from almost
Speaker 1: everybody else in the industry. As I said, the demand
Speaker 1: mechanism that they have is just so robust. It's like
Speaker 1: people don't even know why they want a Rolex, they
Speaker 1: just do. And almost no other brand in the luxury
Speaker 1: space and watch his car as anything really benefits from that.
Speaker 2: So quick funny story, I have a guest a couple
Speaker 2: of months ago, and he's wearing a reverse Panda, which
Speaker 2: is the Daytona chronograph with the white face and the
Speaker 2: black dials. And I don't remember what I was wearing.
Speaker 2: Was probably my my yacht Master is my daily driver.
Speaker 2: And I just happened after we'd done, I happened to
Speaker 2: mention it to him, and he said, about twenty years ago,
Speaker 2: when we first launched the firm, him and his partner
Speaker 2: got one and then went to their local ad and said,
Speaker 2: I need thirty of these.
Speaker 1: This is twenty years ago.
Speaker 2: And there why he goes every time we make someone
Speaker 2: a partner, we give them a daytime.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like talk about it was a good investment.
Speaker 2: By the way, he's in private equity, he's got a
Speaker 2: good talk about spotting value before anybody else did.
Speaker 1: But that sort of thing could never happen.
Speaker 3: Well, no, Barry, you don't have to go that far
Speaker 3: back in time to get to a moment where it
Speaker 3: was possible to go into many of the brands you
Speaker 3: just named and asked for a discount. I don't watch
Speaker 3: how they have it available. You'd be able to get
Speaker 3: it for a discount ten years ago, five.
Speaker 1: Years ago, I mean, if you're talking about MBNF Moser
Speaker 1: three years ago, pre COVID.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was looking at the torb On and the
Speaker 2: Mosar and just couldn't wrap my head around the price,
Speaker 2: and I couldn't pull the trigger. And now I regret it.
Speaker 2: Not because I'm a flipper. Every watch I've ever bought
Speaker 2: I still have unless I've given it away, but just
Speaker 2: the thought of like, oh, I'd love to have that
Speaker 2: for half of what that's gone for.
Speaker 1: Yeah, once you break that, this is going to sound awful,
Speaker 1: but here we are. You know, once you break one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars market, it becomes a lot easier. Do
Speaker 1: it once and you can do all the time.
Speaker 2: A lot of demand, limited supply. I couldn't help but
Speaker 2: see Bloomberg headline last week Rolux and Protect investment beats
Speaker 2: S and P five hundred gains over the past five years.
Speaker 2: In other words, if you went out and bought a
Speaker 2: bunch of rollies and a couple of paddocks, you outperform
Speaker 2: the market. Is this what's driving the speculation in the
Speaker 2: watch industry.
Speaker 1: I think it's part of it.
Speaker 3: And again I think to really trace the history what
Speaker 3: got us here, you'd have to go back to again.
Speaker 3: You know, if I may say, sites like cud inky
Speaker 3: that really helped to kind of encourage more curiosity about
Speaker 3: this industry, build a community of people, more and more
Speaker 3: of whom are interested in this in this product category.
Speaker 3: I think you can can't ignore the impact of the
Speaker 3: Apple Watch, if I may say, I mean this was
Speaker 3: why is that? Well, this was meant to have been
Speaker 3: the nail and the coffin of the mechanical watch.
Speaker 2: So let's let's back that up a little bit, because
Speaker 2: I like where you're going with this so quartz crisis.
Speaker 2: You had all these cheap Japanese quartz watches using to
Speaker 2: maintain battery precise to seconds a year. And why do
Speaker 2: I need a complex, expensive mechanical watch when I get
Speaker 2: a cheap.
Speaker 3: Oh, we've seen we've seen this story before. This was
Speaker 3: meant to have been the end of the Swiss the
Speaker 3: mechanical watch industry in particular. Obviously, you know there there
Speaker 3: were some incredibly talented, committed executives at that time, any
Speaker 3: of whom are in particular you want to mention anything
Speaker 3: the one who probably gets and maybe deserves a must
Speaker 3: graviouldn't you grade is probably Jean lab there, Nick Kayak
Speaker 3: as well, you know.
Speaker 2: The designer of the uh Autemar Piget Oak and the.
Speaker 1: Jarl.
Speaker 2: Jenta has to get a lot of credit for saving
Speaker 2: the watch industry, right is yeah, where do you put
Speaker 2: these three guys in?
Speaker 1: If I got in? Yeah, it slightly different. So Jenta
Speaker 1: was early nineteen seventies and he was just a designer.
Speaker 1: So it's like saying, hey, like, design me a coffee cup.
Speaker 1: Here's a coffee cup. That's it. We're done now. You
Speaker 1: know what Ap and Petak and others did with Genta's
Speaker 1: design is really what allowed them to kind of continue
Speaker 1: to grow. But I think what what Jeff is referring
Speaker 1: to is really a decade later when courts really kind
Speaker 1: of came in, and to be clear, courts won. Like
Speaker 1: if you look at how many watch probably ninety nine percent, right,
Speaker 1: So just to be clear, like courts won. That doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that this that the Swiss didn't have its own
Speaker 1: little kind of pocketive influence and pocket of growth growth potential.
Speaker 1: But as Jeff is saying, Jean club Beaver, who revived
Speaker 1: blan Pond and then Omega in the nineties, he was
Speaker 1: the first one to sign James Bond and Sydney Crawford
Speaker 1: to Omega. Huge deal, mister Hyak who designed the Swatch, right,
Speaker 1: I mean that is a Swiss made watch for back
Speaker 1: then was probably what twenty five probably yeah, thirty.
Speaker 2: Bives and that's a giant right. People collected them like
Speaker 2: beanie babies.
Speaker 1: Swash in the eighties was as big than anything today.
Speaker 1: I mean just cannot be kind of surmised or can
Speaker 1: really understood today here, Swatch in the eighties was everything.
Speaker 2: It's because they turned watches into fashion.
Speaker 1: Exactly exactly that you still have a few tricks up.
Speaker 2: Their sleeve, right, Well, we just saw what they did
Speaker 2: with Omega, had.
Speaker 3: People lining up around the block to get to get
Speaker 3: a watch.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: We've done five collaborations with Swatch, right, I mean Judikia,
Speaker 1: We've collaborated with Amez, with Laika, with Omega. I mean really,
Speaker 1: you know, high end brands, and we did with Swatch.
Speaker 1: And the guys that are buying our sixty thousand dollars
Speaker 1: of astron or whatever are also buying our swatches.
Speaker 2: Really absolutely so, I totally get the appeal of Asiko
Speaker 2: for three, four or five six hundred dollars you get
Speaker 2: a really well made watch. Question that looks pretty good,
Speaker 2: tells pretty good time. And if one of your nephews
Speaker 2: says something, oh you like it here, Yeah, it's not.
Speaker 2: It's I don't know if I would do that with this,
Speaker 2: but I certainly would do that with anything from Seiko,
Speaker 2: even some of the nicer divers that are experienced. But
Speaker 2: Swatch always, maybe it's my age, watch always struck me
Speaker 2: as kind of like a fun fashioning not a serious
Speaker 2: time people.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, look, first of all, Swatch owns Blanc Pond, Brigue, Omegan.
Speaker 2: Oh the company I'm talking about the Schwatch watch exactly.
Speaker 2: The company is massive.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I would argue though that does it does it need
Speaker 3: to be something complicated, in something serious, because for some
Speaker 3: people that gets in the way of just the enjoyment
Speaker 3: of wearing the watch.
Speaker 2: I think, you know, I'm aware when I wear a
Speaker 2: very nice watch, I'm aware. Oh gee, am I going
Speaker 2: to get on the subway with this?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Very true, very true. We'll talk about what AP
Speaker 1: is doing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, with a Swatch, he probably wouldn't have that concern
Speaker 3: for sure. And I think you know there we talked
Speaker 3: about Gerald Genta, I mean his impact was surely from
Speaker 3: the design angle he's watched. One thing they've done incredibly
Speaker 3: well is just design great looking watches and design watches
Speaker 3: for different people with different appeals. It was in Paris
Speaker 3: recently they did a really cool collaboration with Cafe to Floor.
Speaker 3: We've talked about the Moon Swatch. I mean, ours our
Speaker 3: beautiful watches and are the ones that we've collaborated with
Speaker 3: Swatch on. So design something to watch is no firm.
Speaker 3: For some people, it's a it's fashion, you know, it's
Speaker 3: something that they put on in their part.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about the Apple Watch. Yeah, when when
Speaker 2: the Apple Watch comes out and it starts just selling
Speaker 2: crazy numbers, what was going on in Geneva?
Speaker 1: What would people think? They were terrified and really like
Speaker 1: here we go again, Oh my god. I mean it
Speaker 1: was the end of the end of time, right and
Speaker 1: in full transparency, I was consultant on the Apple Watch,
Speaker 1: like I helped. I helped them and Johnny I was
Speaker 1: on our second cover of our magazine. I mean, well,
Speaker 1: and so you know, I'm a lover of Apple Like
Speaker 1: I was just a designed guy. The guy who's spending
Speaker 1: money on business cards when he had no money, Like
Speaker 1: what Apple does is just remarkable. So it was honored
Speaker 1: to work on that project. And so I was actually
Speaker 1: the only person from the watching industry to attend the
Speaker 1: launch of the original Apple No kidd. And that story
Speaker 1: that I wrote, which was totally unbiased, Like even though
Speaker 1: I helped kind of work on it, it was like
Speaker 1: what they were doing with the Apple Watch in terms
Speaker 1: of materials and in terms of the way that the
Speaker 1: bracelets snapped on and off. I mean like it was
Speaker 1: miles ahead of Switzerland, miles and these things were four
Speaker 1: hundred dollars and that really really terrified the Swiss. And
Speaker 1: the Swiss are there there. They can be persnickety, for sure,
Speaker 1: and they really thought that anybody that was supporting the
Speaker 1: Apple Watch was an enemy, including us for a time,
Speaker 1: No kid, truly and we we still to this day.
Speaker 1: So Apple Watch more were proud to sell it. But
Speaker 1: it really got people to think about the wrist as
Speaker 1: real estate again, which they had not gone in a decade.
Speaker 2: The wrist as real estate. Yeah, huh, that's really interesting.
Speaker 2: So I noticed you're not wearing an Apple Watch, not today,
Speaker 2: and you're not wearing an app I was this weekend.
Speaker 2: I consider it a great privilege to not be notified
Speaker 2: about anything.
Speaker 1: Like to me, to me an Apple watch, an Apple watches.
Speaker 2: Wait, I'm tied into I'm getting Slack notifications, I'm getting
Speaker 2: Twitter notifications, I'm getting email and text leave me at
Speaker 2: the long Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's kind of get it.
Speaker 2: And I know a lot of people that you know,
Speaker 2: if they lost their roll ups, they'd be upset, but
Speaker 2: they couldn't go a day without their look, their Apple.
Speaker 1: The Apple Watch, you can make whatever you want it
Speaker 1: to be. So I wear it solely when I go
Speaker 1: to the gym and when I play off, that's it.
Speaker 1: That's the only time that I wear Historically, I used
Speaker 1: to win a few versions ago. I had one that
Speaker 1: was selled, and I would leave my phone at home
Speaker 1: when I would go driving, and I might need a
Speaker 1: vintage car to kind of escape. But so I use
Speaker 1: it for two things, working out and really working out,
Speaker 1: and that's it's But I do not have notifications of emails, texts,
Speaker 1: et cetera. It's really for me giving input to it.
Speaker 1: How many steps did I take, what kind of calories
Speaker 1: have I burned? Et cetera.
Speaker 2: And you you don't want to wear a nice watch
Speaker 2: when you're golfing anyway, because the little pistons that hold
Speaker 2: the face in place will snap if you're wearing a watch,
Speaker 2: yeah and swimming the golf or good. Yeah, you could
Speaker 2: always buy a reshard meal. Yeah, I mean that's probably
Speaker 2: the most responsible thing to do, exactly. You know, we'll
Speaker 2: get those financially response, get the one, the rough m
Speaker 2: the dolarwares. Yeah there, but it's on his other hands,
Speaker 2: isn't it.
Speaker 1: It's not on his uh but but Bubba Watson has
Speaker 1: his own reshard meal and he wears it every time
Speaker 1: he plays. No, kidd is it's pink, right, it's pink
Speaker 1: now is originally white, but yes, funny and a pink
Speaker 1: three million his was when it launches around six fifty.
Speaker 1: I would guess now probably run a million.
Speaker 2: Right, So so forget strapping a BMW two your wrist.
Speaker 2: That's a very nice three bedroom condo. Oh yeah, yes,
Speaker 2: place two bedroom condo with yeah, yeah, exactly. And you
Speaker 2: know that not everybody is going to be comfortable, or
Speaker 2: even the people who can afford it. A lot of
Speaker 2: people look at Watchnista's for lack of a better word,
Speaker 2: and like.
Speaker 1: You guys are crazy. Yeah, And I think to some degree.
Speaker 1: Everyone that's passionate about anything is a little bit crazy. Sure,
Speaker 1: But I think also if you look at I mean,
Speaker 1: the other thing that I'm interested in like you is cars.
Speaker 1: And so if you look at the running costs of
Speaker 1: a great car, Let's say you buy a car and
Speaker 1: watch both fifty thousand dollars right right, own it for
Speaker 1: on them both for ten years, get the ing German
Speaker 1: for both for ten years, to watch you. Basically, if
Speaker 1: you want to have insurance, you can. You don't have
Speaker 1: to have a storagees nothing, put it in a drawer,
Speaker 1: a safety deposit box. Cars, insurance, maintenance, parking cars are
Speaker 1: so much more expensive you want to maintain as a
Speaker 1: collectible assets. So it's remarkable and I do both, so
Speaker 1: I know. But watches they can do so much more
Speaker 1: than cars.
Speaker 2: Eight you're wearing. You're wearing them right now, so am I,
Speaker 2: so is Jeff.
Speaker 1: And these are things that like these are real almost
Speaker 1: Housman's for for for people's lives, and so like when
Speaker 1: my daughter was born in December twenty twenty one, I
Speaker 1: gave my mother, my mother in law, and my wife
Speaker 1: a watch each to celebrate the birth of her. And
Speaker 1: those watches are hers and like, you know, for until
Speaker 1: until the day that she dies, you know, hopefully long
Speaker 1: far away, those watches of hers and she'll remember that
Speaker 1: that these were given, you know, the day that.
Speaker 2: She was a milestone.
Speaker 1: And I think you know the omega that my grandfather
Speaker 1: gave me. That watch changed my life. I can wear
Speaker 1: it every day. When my daughter was born, I was
Speaker 1: wearing that watch. And when I asked my wife to
Speaker 1: wear to marry me, I was wearing that watch.
Speaker 2: And what'd you get married? In?
Speaker 1: A ptec A Protect fifty two seventy all right?
Speaker 2: Because you weren't fooling around. This was a serious that
Speaker 2: was Yeah, we were not messing around. We were in
Speaker 2: Rome and yeah, it was. It was.
Speaker 1: It was a good one.
Speaker 2: When you travel, do you travel with multiple watches either?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it depends on where I'm traveling to. Recently, we're
Speaker 3: in Geneva for Watches and Wonders, the big international trade
Speaker 3: show of watches. I think I had nine watches for
Speaker 3: that event.
Speaker 1: Really so different. Watch twice a day.
Speaker 3: Yeah, multiple times, multiple watches in this same day. Sometimes,
Speaker 3: you know, your meeting with a brand partner you want
Speaker 3: to represent. Sure, sometimes I'll bring one watch if I'm
Speaker 3: going or two watches usually as a minimum. If I'm going,
Speaker 3: you know, on a golf trip, I'll bring a watch
Speaker 3: I wear golfing. I'll bring another watch that's sort of
Speaker 3: like a daily wear, usually something that can kind of
Speaker 3: go with different types of looks and outfits and activities.
Speaker 1: But and just for the record, Ben.
Speaker 3: Mentioned you know you don't have to ensure what you
Speaker 3: should ensure your watch, especially if you're traveling with it,
Speaker 3: especially if you value it. Inside note, we offer insurance
Speaker 3: hooting and.
Speaker 2: We're going to talk a little bit about that. But
Speaker 2: as since you brought it up, someone asked me this
Speaker 2: question the other day. I said, I don't know the answer,
Speaker 2: but I know the guys that do you have a
Speaker 2: writer on your home insurance with a number of watches
Speaker 2: listed you travel with that watch? Is that covered under
Speaker 2: your homeowner's insurance or do you need to have a
Speaker 2: separate policy on them.
Speaker 3: There are lots of questions like that that you could
Speaker 3: ask when discussing how a homeowner's insurance policy could cover
Speaker 3: the value of a loss or stolen or downage watch.
Speaker 3: I would just say ignore all those questions because, to
Speaker 3: be honest, the best way to ensure your watch is
Speaker 3: not to attach it or assign it to your homeowners policy.
Speaker 3: Itated Yeah, I mean, we've had stories from people who
Speaker 3: had to make a claim on a damage or lost
Speaker 3: watch while it was a part of their homeowners insurance.
Speaker 3: Then their homeowners insurance got canceled and they couldn't get
Speaker 3: homeowners insurance. Again, it's just not a situation when we
Speaker 3: want to find yourself.
Speaker 2: I total de car at five miles an hour, I
Speaker 2: got t boned, and I had that exact same thing
Speaker 2: happen right the homeowners and the umbrella was canceled and
Speaker 2: you had to scramble to replace it. Because it's easy
Speaker 2: enough to get homeowners an umbrella is a little more complicated.
Speaker 1: Yeah. In twenty twenty one, we actually launched our own
Speaker 1: insurance program that that myself and a job with Job
Speaker 1: So Chubb is the underwriter, but we conceived this product ourselves.
Speaker 1: This is a totally unique product designed for watch collectors,
Speaker 1: so it has nothing to do with homeowners, nothing to
Speaker 1: do with anything else. And you can dynamically and really
Speaker 1: retroactively assign and unassigned insurance attachments to any watch, so
Speaker 1: like you're out of the house right now, you could
Speaker 1: ensure that watch when you go home tonight and put
Speaker 1: in your safe, turn it off, do it all on
Speaker 1: your phone. And so it's all in the hood Inky app.
Speaker 1: It's underwritten by chub, so you know, best in class.
Speaker 1: It's really an amazing thing that truly like, Like I
Speaker 1: can say, you can critique Codnky for anything you want,
Speaker 1: but our insurance product is better than anybody else's by far.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna take a look at that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a little bit interest.
Speaker 2: And by the way, you guys did a very nice
Speaker 2: job on the app.
Speaker 1: Oh thank you.
Speaker 2: I'm still waiting for Bring a Trail at a roll
Speaker 2: On and I don't.
Speaker 1: And they did a billion.
Speaker 2: Dollars in sales. I sold one hundred thousandth car.
Speaker 1: Amazing.
Speaker 2: They definitely need to uh but but this is something
Speaker 2: you guys were Internet.
Speaker 1: Although so were they?
Speaker 2: Yeah right, didn't they start out as Yeah?
Speaker 1: So I've known Randy who started Bring a Trailer for
Speaker 1: ten plus years. We used to do a column called
Speaker 1: bring a Loop that was very much inspired by Bring
Speaker 1: a Trailer. Know those guys super well. I mean they've
Speaker 1: done amazing things that abstoually sold to hurst in look
Speaker 1: Covid and good on them. I mean they've they've got
Speaker 1: a great thing going. I mean, they really you know,
Speaker 1: we admire a lot about what they do. I know
Speaker 1: that they admire a lot about what we do, but
Speaker 1: they've been able to to really own the collectible car
Speaker 1: category in an amazing way.
Speaker 2: You guys talk about what you were doing during the pandemic.
Speaker 2: I know a lot of people with streaming Netflix, bring
Speaker 2: a trailer and ho dinky is what kept me occupied out?
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and you know, to the detriment of my
Speaker 2: bank account, but to the betterment of my wrist and garage.
Speaker 2: So it was. And I mean I was into this
Speaker 2: sort of stuff long before, but it's just amazing.
Speaker 1: How gee, I'm not commuting.
Speaker 2: I'm getting so much work done from home in my pajamas, unshowered.
Speaker 2: We had a rule in our house you had a
Speaker 2: shower once a week, whether you need to or not.
Speaker 2: I mean, it was just you know, and occasionally get
Speaker 2: out of your pajamas. But it was just really easy
Speaker 2: to say, I'm done with everything, now let me wordle
Speaker 2: and then oh dinky, and then bring a trailer. It
Speaker 2: was it kept everybody entertaining, all right. So let's talk
Speaker 2: a little bit more about retailing. You launched the shop
Speaker 2: in twenty twelve. You're now doing one hundred million plus
Speaker 2: in revenue. Yep, congrats, that's a real number. It is.
Speaker 2: Thank you, But you guys are also expanding that you
Speaker 2: bought Crown and Caliber and tell us a little bit
Speaker 2: about the thinking of behind the purchase. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So twenty twelve, the first Shopify site was set up
Speaker 3: to sell some straps and related accessories. At the time,
Speaker 3: I think Ben and the team would would pop up
Speaker 3: at occasional you know men's men's wear flea markets things
Speaker 3: like that were always sort of like scrappy and you know,
Speaker 3: trying to connect you know, lovers of watches with products
Speaker 3: that they love. Limited editions, as Ben mentioned, was a
Speaker 3: big push towards the commercial side. That was around twenty fifteen.
Speaker 3: The first watches. The first one was was a Max
Speaker 3: buser Watch MBNF, so beautiful, beautiful, limited edition collection. And
Speaker 3: then it wasn't until twenty seventeen. And I say twenty
Speaker 3: seventeen I emphasized that because that's not that long ago
Speaker 3: that Hoodinky was the first online only authorized retailer of watches.
Speaker 3: So that, yeah, that reticence to kind of move online
Speaker 3: and really see online as a channel as a commercial channel.
Speaker 3: I mean that that that sort of ail wasn't pierced
Speaker 3: until twenty seventeens. And Hoodinky was really the trailblazer, launched
Speaker 3: with eight brands as authorized retail partners up and now
Speaker 3: we're up to about forty brands, so, you know, not
Speaker 3: a nice list of brands, it's a great list of brands.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know for some of them where they're
Speaker 3: only online authorized partners, so Arimez, Apple, Omega. You know,
Speaker 3: for those three brands, the only other retailer besides themselves
Speaker 3: who sells their watches as an online only channel is Hoodinky.
Speaker 2: But then Omega is probably second second substantial oh yeah,
Speaker 2: substantial watch elo with hundreds of models, it seems.
Speaker 1: Ye oh yeah. I'm look, they sponsor the Olympics, they
Speaker 1: sponsored James Bond. I mean this is a global, global brand. Yep.
Speaker 3: So, but at that point in time, Hoodinky is still
Speaker 3: new watches, limited edition projects, which you're not doing them
Speaker 3: every week or sometimes not even every month. We do
Speaker 3: about a dozen a year. Uh, And then vintage watches,
Speaker 3: which you know, there's always a market for collectors who
Speaker 3: want a vintage watch. Really a one of one define
Speaker 3: vintage typically defined US a watch that's before nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: Okay, you know when.
Speaker 2: Did the modern US watches start showing up on hote King?
Speaker 1: When did you decide to do modern use?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that would be the pre owned category as
Speaker 3: pre owned distinct from vintage, and that they're both pre
Speaker 3: owned technically, but vintage will be nineteen nineties and before, yeah,
Speaker 3: and pre owned would be you know again, a modern
Speaker 3: IT eighty could actually be a watch that someone else
Speaker 3: has just purchased and is flipping. They've never worn it.
Speaker 1: It's in its.
Speaker 3: Original box with original papers. That was with the purchase
Speaker 3: of Crown and Caliber, which was the business that we
Speaker 3: acquired that you mentioned. That was in February twenty twenty one.
Speaker 3: I think, you know, looking back as an outsider, I
Speaker 3: was not involved with the business at that time. An
Speaker 3: incredibly shrewd decision because basically online at this point, you
Speaker 3: still have very very few brands that have meaningfully moved
Speaker 3: their new watch sales online, some not at all. So
Speaker 3: Rolex doesn't sell online, ap doesn't sell online, Paddock doesn't
Speaker 3: sell online. Even authorized dealers of those watches are not
Speaker 3: allowed to sell the watches online. You can see the
Speaker 3: reference information. Then it will say visit a retailer, and
Speaker 3: then and a local retailer. The only way you can
Speaker 3: buy those watches online is to buy them pre owned
Speaker 3: and pre owned, which you know, as Ben mentioned earlier,
Speaker 3: used to be quite a wild West sort of shady
Speaker 3: business online certainly not something that you would kind of
Speaker 3: you wouldn't use catchwords like trust or authority or authenticity.
Speaker 3: It was really kind of buyer beware situations. The online channel,
Speaker 3: you know, really had a lot of opportunity to be
Speaker 3: cleaned up. And I would say that Crown and Caliber,
Speaker 3: a business that's been around now for a decade or so,
Speaker 3: is one of those business that was doing a very
Speaker 3: good job of playing the game in a clean way.
Speaker 3: They were buying the watches that they were selling, taking
Speaker 3: ownership of those watches, which I think says a lot
Speaker 3: because it means that they were willing to vouch for
Speaker 3: those watches in terms of their authenticity, the quality. They
Speaker 3: had invested in a true watch shop in Atlanta, Georgia,
Speaker 3: where the business was found in its base. So you have,
Speaker 3: you know, watchmakers who have graduated from the likes of
Speaker 3: the Rolex School watchmaking, the Reachmont Technical Center in Dallas,
Speaker 3: Texas to have real, real train skilled artisans that are
Speaker 3: able to repair and service walk to make sure that
Speaker 3: when those watches are being sold to the next owner
Speaker 3: that they're in as good a condition as that when
Speaker 3: they were originally sold. That Basically, the acquisition by Hoodinky
Speaker 3: allowed Hoodinky you kind of fast forward its way into
Speaker 3: being a player in the pre on space, which is
Speaker 3: a larger market than the new watch market online about
Speaker 3: thirty percent of pre on watches are sold online versus
Speaker 3: only about five percent of new watches that are sold.
Speaker 2: Thirty percent. That's an amazing statistic. I never would have
Speaker 2: guessed it was that large. You mentioned authenticity there. There
Speaker 2: are lots of replicas out there. What do you guys
Speaker 2: make of the super replicas that without a loop? Certainly
Speaker 2: from a risk distance, it's hard to tell. Like in
Speaker 2: the old days, you would see a fake Rolex Chinatown,
Speaker 2: twenty five bucks.
Speaker 1: With a ticking secondary right.
Speaker 2: Exactly, Yeah, no sweep and it would jingle and you
Speaker 2: know its the best twenty five bucks you could spend
Speaker 2: in the world. Watches and kept pretty good time today,
Speaker 2: pretty impressive, yeah, now, and they're pre sophisticated counterfeit pieces
Speaker 2: out there China mostly right, Some that you know, go
Speaker 2: so far as to include all like manufacture original parts
Speaker 2: on the outside of the watch. And it's only when
Speaker 2: you get inside into the movement that you understand that
Speaker 2: the movement has some parts or the original movement has
Speaker 2: been swapped out. You're telling me Rolux doesn't come with
Speaker 2: a twelve dollars Chinese.
Speaker 1: They don't don't do that.
Speaker 3: No, No, that's not the case that.
Speaker 2: By the way, the new transparent case back on the Daytona.
Speaker 2: Is this something that we're going to start to see
Speaker 2: more of as an anti counterfeit or that just happens.
Speaker 1: To be a pretty titanium watch. My my guess. Look,
Speaker 1: I don't know it all, to be clear, and I
Speaker 1: really mean that, I don't think that has anything to
Speaker 1: do with anti counterfeit, and I think it's more celebratory
Speaker 1: and they want to show off the new movement, et cetera.
Speaker 1: And to be clear, it's only in the platinum Daytona.
Speaker 2: Which, even which is unfortunate. The one of the nice
Speaker 2: things about Langa is every one of their watches has
Speaker 2: a display case back, which is quite This is.
Speaker 1: Really one of the I mean look, every not ivy Omega,
Speaker 1: but a lot. I mean, so does scant Acos. I
Speaker 1: mean it's it's it is uncommon for a high end
Speaker 1: watchman to not today, but it wasn't always the case. Sure,
Speaker 1: yeah right yeah.
Speaker 2: So so how big of an issue are these super counterfeits?
Speaker 3: I mean, for us, they're not a major issue. And
Speaker 3: that's again down to the fact that we've had we
Speaker 3: have an investment in people that are able to sort
Speaker 3: of sess them out. And that's even before we get
Speaker 3: them in our possession. We have pretty good you know tracker.
Speaker 2: You can eyebowl something on it just a photo. Some
Speaker 2: of the sock ex selling Sneakers has a counterfeit division, yeah,
Speaker 2: because they were getting so many fake nikes coming in.
Speaker 1: We we have a staff of authenticated yeah, truly. And
Speaker 1: then the benefit of us being us is we have
Speaker 1: direct relationships with brands and we can say, hey, bright
Speaker 1: Ley and grand Seiko, whoever was this watch born with
Speaker 1: a black dial or blue? We can track the serial
Speaker 1: number two and not not many people on the pre
Speaker 1: own side can do that. And as Jeff said, I
Speaker 1: think you know much credit to Hamilton Powell, who's the
Speaker 1: founder of Credit Caliber the business that that we now
Speaker 1: that we now own. You know, he really wanted to
Speaker 1: do stuff that is like, buying a watch is one thing,
Speaker 1: but selling a watch is actually brutal. And if you've
Speaker 1: ever tried to sell a watch, which doesn't really sound
Speaker 1: like you have, it's awful. And so if you want
Speaker 1: to do it, either go to Corona twenty four and
Speaker 1: it may never sell. You go to auction. They're gonna
Speaker 1: take twenty percent. With crownic Caliber and now Hoodinky, we're
Speaker 1: gonna tell you what we're gonna pay then and there
Speaker 1: you're gonna send in the watch. We're gonna send you
Speaker 1: a check.
Speaker 2: That's it.
Speaker 1: You're done.
Speaker 2: So I tell I'll tell you that sounds like a
Speaker 2: lot of fun. So you take them on consigned, we
Speaker 2: owne that you buy that we're cutting your check.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no kidding. So one of the few I.
Speaker 2: Didn't realize that think it's big. That's a big difference.
Speaker 3: Instant quoting about eighty percent of the watches as well.
Speaker 3: So again you go on to Crowncaliber dot com, Hoodinky
Speaker 3: dot com. You type in the reference number, some information
Speaker 3: Rolex Batman, etcetera, ask a couple of clarifying questions you
Speaker 3: get a quote right then and there, and if you
Speaker 3: like that quote, you send the watch in. We authenticate,
Speaker 3: inspect that, make sure that it is as it was described,
Speaker 3: send you a check.
Speaker 1: You'll have a check right away. So my brother has
Speaker 1: a Vacheron.
Speaker 2: I forgot the model. It's one of their more globe
Speaker 2: trot or something popular.
Speaker 1: Overseas, overseas, overseas, but they came.
Speaker 2: Out with a black dot and he has a blue dial,
Speaker 2: and I've never seen a blue dial else.
Speaker 3: That's a classic fashionround color. That blue dial is gorgeous.
Speaker 1: And very deep.
Speaker 2: I literally have never seen that anywhere else in blue.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna send him over to you guys, because he
Speaker 2: wants to sell it, and I had no idea you
Speaker 2: guys would would cut a check like that. So we're
Speaker 2: talking about online retailing, but I'm gonna throw one of
Speaker 2: your quotes back at you, which is physical retail will
Speaker 2: always have a home in luxury and watches. Of course,
Speaker 2: I think in everything, in everything, So sometimes like one
Speaker 2: of the things I like about the yacht Master is
Speaker 2: it has a hef You feel it. Yeah, when I
Speaker 2: Baltic makes some nice watches, you put him on your
Speaker 2: wrist you're unaware you're wearing. And even this has a
Speaker 2: little bit of a half which is mostly the pink gold.
Speaker 2: But you know, how easily can you buy a watch
Speaker 2: that you've never had on before?
Speaker 1: Pretty easily. We do about one hundred million dollars year
Speaker 1: worth of it. Yeah, okay, so let me rephrase that.
Speaker 1: How how comfortable can so if you know what you want? Right?
Speaker 2: So? The Moser tor me on in vans of black
Speaker 2: kind of an interesting watch. I've had it on in
Speaker 2: the in the ice blue and the dark blue. I'm
Speaker 2: not sure which way I would pull the trigger in that,
Speaker 2: but I've worn it and I'm like, Okay.
Speaker 1: I'm comfortable with this watch.
Speaker 2: But if I've never tried a watch on before that
Speaker 2: the new ice blue Daytona with the brown bezel, if
Speaker 2: you're going to drop, you know again an S class
Speaker 2: on your wrist. Can you do that online or do
Speaker 2: you want to go in and experience it?
Speaker 1: Well, everyone's different for sure. To be clear, Rolex doesn't
Speaker 1: sell online anywhere with anybody, not not with us, not
Speaker 1: with not even themselves. So no Rolex New can you
Speaker 1: buy online?
Speaker 3: Just right here?
Speaker 1: But like, let's use a brand that that we sell
Speaker 1: because this happens every day. A brand new Omega speed Master,
Speaker 1: which is about a seven thousand dollars watch that fire
Speaker 1: case back, great manly wound, iconic thing. We sell those
Speaker 1: all day long, and if people don't like it, they
Speaker 1: can return it, right and so.
Speaker 2: Thirty days so longly you give them to Yeah, I
Speaker 2: think it's fourteen days.
Speaker 1: Two weeks. You know, we can't like I've been wearing
Speaker 1: it around. You try it on. If it's not for you,
Speaker 1: you send the book. I think you know what we
Speaker 1: did with with the Hodinky Shop in twenty seventeen, we
Speaker 1: took I look, the brands that I hold in high
Speaker 1: regard are no.
Speaker 2: Surprises, and they're not unique to me. It's it's Apple,
Speaker 2: it's Nike. I mean, I wear air Maxes almost every day.
Speaker 2: If I if I like the air Maxes.
Speaker 1: I get those are good ones.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: If I like the air Maxes that come in the
Speaker 1: mail to me, I keep them. If I don't, I
Speaker 1: send them back. I got my I got a refund
Speaker 1: in three days or five days. And that's fine. And
Speaker 1: so taking these very normal twenty fourst century e commerce
Speaker 1: practices and applying them to watches is not that crazy,
Speaker 1: but we were the first and still we remain one
Speaker 1: of the few who does it far fetch does it?
Speaker 1: Mister porter does it? Great etailers like that.
Speaker 2: You're you're out of far fetched. How did that experience
Speaker 2: translates to Hodenky.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's interesting because I talked earlier about when I
Speaker 3: first encountered Hodinky. And you know, sometimes if you if
Speaker 3: you go away from a thing and you don't go
Speaker 3: back to for a while, and that was the case
Speaker 3: for me. I was really busy with my career. My
Speaker 3: wife and I were having three boys in three years,
Speaker 3: so we were pretty busy. I hadn't paid super close
Speaker 3: attention to everything that was going on in the world
Speaker 3: of hood Inky until it was contacted by a recruiter,
Speaker 3: until I got a chance to meet Ben, and I couldn't.
Speaker 3: I just couldn't believe how much had evolved at the
Speaker 3: business because in my mind it was still, yeah, the
Speaker 3: pre eminent watch blog, but I had no idea watch blog,
Speaker 3: yeah retail exactly, all the retail like, the way that
Speaker 3: the business set of all was enormous. Me the fact
Speaker 3: that it had launched its own insurance product, I mean,
Speaker 3: it was incredible and sort of I think what I
Speaker 3: saw was I had just spent almost six years at
Speaker 3: far Fetch starting when you know, the primary business of
Speaker 3: Farfetch was then and remains a marketplace, but so much
Speaker 3: it evolved at Farfetch as well. I mean, we had
Speaker 3: launched a platform services business which was taking all of
Speaker 3: the core technology and making it available for other retailers
Speaker 3: like Herod's and the likes. We had acquired a few businesses.
Speaker 3: I was involved in the acquisition of Stadium Goods, a
Speaker 3: pre owned sneaker marketplace. So just seeing kind of how
Speaker 3: that business has grown and evolved and I've kind of
Speaker 3: grown up in my career with it. I saw a
Speaker 3: lot of similarities with hodigiva'm on. It's a foundation of
Speaker 3: things that were there that one of our investors likes
Speaker 3: to say, are they close to maturity or are they
Speaker 3: like ten percent? And I'd say lovingly, they're closer to
Speaker 3: like ten percent, meaning like there's so much upside, there's
Speaker 3: so much still growth and evolution in front of us
Speaker 3: and in different ways that we can kind of push
Speaker 3: this business forward. And just being able to work alongside
Speaker 3: Ben as a founder of somebody who's who's I think
Speaker 3: truly one of the most influential people in this industry
Speaker 3: just was like an opportunity. I simply I would I
Speaker 3: would have never forgiven myself if I didn't go for it.
Speaker 3: Someonelmost told me that's the kind of sign of an entrepreneur.
Speaker 3: I've never been an entrepreneur to start my own business,
Speaker 3: but I had that feeling.
Speaker 2: You've worked at companies that are I don't want to
Speaker 2: call them startups, but not that you know, there's a
Speaker 2: difference between joining Amazon and eBay today and joining h Sure,
Speaker 2: joining eBay when it's two years old, and people like, hey,
Speaker 2: we don't know if this is gonna be Yeah, I
Speaker 2: think I'm probably the guy right behind the guy with
Speaker 2: the machete.
Speaker 1: Blazing a trail to the jump.
Speaker 3: I'm with him, but you know, he's got the He's
Speaker 3: the one who's been there instead of taken that sort
Speaker 3: of initial leap of faith. I mean, it's one thing
Speaker 3: that I think you always just have to like never
Speaker 3: take for granted in a business like Hudinki. And I
Speaker 3: think Ben did a good job with this very recently
Speaker 3: for an internal meeting, was just reminding people that this
Speaker 3: thing wasn't always a given, you know, And he went
Speaker 3: back to his original email inbox from two thousand and eight,
Speaker 3: to the first emails he sent from his inbox, and
Speaker 3: they weren't to collegues. They were to his family members.
Speaker 3: It's like, can you guys believe I'm getting paid to
Speaker 3: do this?
Speaker 1: Send five dollars? Truly, So Jeff's referring to a post
Speaker 1: that I was writing about watches. I was being paid
Speaker 1: seventy five dollars a post, truly.
Speaker 3: Then the first advertising contract, which was twelve months run
Speaker 3: of sight for a price that today might get you
Speaker 3: a day, it was twelve hundred dollars for the year.
Speaker 3: So those things, now you know that that's fifteen years ago.
Speaker 3: And again remember that the first part of the first
Speaker 3: decade of those fifteen years largely was spent just developing
Speaker 3: the most important editorial presence for the world of watches.
Speaker 3: I mean, I still think it is a startup, but
Speaker 3: it's a startup where there's again there's a trail that's
Speaker 3: been blazed. My role, the way I see it is
Speaker 3: really just to kind of, like I suppose, increase the
Speaker 3: speed and certainty of execution and really help it scale
Speaker 3: and build and sort to help us realize what we
Speaker 3: think is our fullest potential as a business.
Speaker 2: So let's stay with retail. I was going to ask
Speaker 2: you who your competitors are, but really, in terms of
Speaker 2: new nobody else is really selling very much online. Yeah. Look,
Speaker 2: I mean a handful of micro brands, but sure none
Speaker 2: of the bigs are selling to the level.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, look there are a lot of and look,
Speaker 1: it's funny you say competitors like these are all our friends,
Speaker 1: Like we get coffees with them all the time. Watches
Speaker 1: in Switzerland and Torneo Booker, like these are great world
Speaker 1: class retailers. We have a lot like they do stuff
Speaker 1: that we can never do, and I think we do
Speaker 1: stuff that they could never do, you know, but there's
Speaker 1: nobody that competes with us directly in everything we do,
Speaker 1: and I think that's what makes us so so special. Frankly,
Speaker 1: Like this is a truly unique business, a piece unique,
Speaker 1: if you will. And you know, so many times over
Speaker 1: the years people said, was Houdinki the Warby Parker of watches?
Speaker 1: Which is not is it the Glossier of watches? It's
Speaker 1: none of that. It's something else entirely. And I think
Speaker 1: what the ambition is here is to become kind of
Speaker 1: really the global global leader of watches content and commerce,
Speaker 1: and like really b watches through six do we want
Speaker 1: to ensure your watches, we want to help you buy
Speaker 1: and sell them. We want to sell you straps. We
Speaker 1: want everything to exist in watches on Houdinki and we're
Speaker 1: getting there. And I think that's what's so exciting about it.
Speaker 1: And I think to Jeff's point, like I view really
Speaker 1: all brands as one or two things. Are either a
Speaker 1: challenger or you're an incumbent, right, And I think like
Speaker 1: a Torea, which is an amazing business, and one I've
Speaker 1: got a lot of love for it, like they're inn
Speaker 1: incumbent business. They've been around forever that they're now owned
Speaker 1: by Booker. We to some people are probably an incumbent,
Speaker 1: but we're not like this, as Jeff said this, I
Speaker 1: came from nothing. This business came from nothing. And the
Speaker 1: way that we view everything we do is from the
Speaker 1: mind of a challenger. We want to continue to push
Speaker 1: and continue to change things.
Speaker 2: Keep in mind the Internet runs in dog years, so
Speaker 2: you're an incumbent on the Internet. But when you look
Speaker 2: at some of the watch brands that have been around
Speaker 2: since the seventeenth century, eighteenth century, seventeen fifty five older
Speaker 2: than the country. Right, it's just absolutely so. So two
Speaker 2: thousand and eight, two thousand and nine young business in
Speaker 2: the internet, sort of middle aged.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I want to be clear, like I so
Speaker 1: the business was an immediate platform with a little bit
Speaker 1: e commerce that was basically three people until twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1: Then we raised our first venture capital. We were probably
Speaker 1: ten twenty people, and now we're one hundred and thirty
Speaker 1: hundred and forty. So it's big or now that's a
Speaker 1: real business. It's a real business. But we're still not
Speaker 1: or know, we're still not Bloomberg. We're still not you know,
Speaker 1: something like that that is ubiquitous in a great way
Speaker 1: and really has the the kind of the certainty of
Speaker 1: its future. Like we want to to continue to push
Speaker 1: and challenge what the luxury watch industry and what all
Speaker 1: industries kind of think of when they think of retailers.
Speaker 1: We are a retailer. We are immedia platform. We're a
Speaker 1: community platform, we host events. We're an insurance product. We
Speaker 1: are a strapwear brand. We make things that say hood
Speaker 1: Inky on them. We are all these things and that's
Speaker 1: exciting to me.
Speaker 2: A couple more questions about retail before we move on,
Speaker 2: got to ask about Rolex getting into the certified your
Speaker 2: own business. What's that about? Where do you think that goes?
Speaker 3: I sort of use the analogy of like the world
Speaker 3: of automotive we talked about cars earlier. I mean, for me,
Speaker 3: it would be almost like impossible to think of a
Speaker 3: world where, you know, BMWU or Mercedes didn't offer a
Speaker 3: certified pren program under their own brand, under their own market.
Speaker 2: But let's break that take that apart a second. You
Speaker 2: go and buy you want to buy a used car,
Speaker 2: but you like the advantage of having the manufacturer tell
Speaker 2: you the cars in good shape and they're going to
Speaker 2: warranty it for you know, another three years and fifty
Speaker 2: thousand miles, so you're going to pay a little bit
Speaker 2: of a premium to pick up, especially if you're looking
Speaker 2: at an expensive car or complicated, you know, any of
Speaker 2: the more sophisticated vehicles out there. It's nice to have
Speaker 2: that backdrop when you're going out and buying a GMT
Speaker 2: from Rolex. Do you what does CPO do for you
Speaker 2: other than tell you have Rolex tell you we looked
Speaker 2: at this wat we cleaned it up here.
Speaker 3: I think for some people that's worth the premium, and
Speaker 3: at the moment, at least based on the evidence that
Speaker 3: we can we can observe. You know, where Rolex certified
Speaker 3: premium programs have already started to roll out is they
Speaker 3: are pricing it at a premium. The only way the
Speaker 3: premium to a premium, to a premium, to use a premium,
Speaker 3: to use the premium to the kind of market price
Speaker 3: a pre owned so a sub mariner which we were
Speaker 3: talking about earlier. You know, ten twelve thousand dollars watched retail,
Speaker 3: usually selling for the upper teens, maybe twenty thousand dollars
Speaker 3: in the preon market, you know, the Rollck certified preon
Speaker 3: prices are going to be even higher than that, maybe
Speaker 3: in the mid to upper twenties. And so for a
Speaker 3: certain buyer that maybe is peace of mind. Maybe it's
Speaker 3: the kind of knowledge of having bought it from a
Speaker 3: Rolex authorized dealer, certified by Rolex, making sure that it's
Speaker 3: only ever been serviced by Relux. And but again I
Speaker 3: think where the comparison still holds to a certified preon
Speaker 3: program is there's a finite number of places that sales
Speaker 3: certified preon and those are the brands themselves or the
Speaker 3: authorized dealer with the brands. There's tons of places that
Speaker 3: sell pre owned cars, and there are lots of places
Speaker 3: that sell pre owned watches. I think consumers have choices
Speaker 3: to go to a trusted player in a pre owned space,
Speaker 3: or maybe you know, go buy it off of eBay
Speaker 3: from the original owner. Take your chances. Maybe you get
Speaker 3: a lemon, maybe you get something in In our case,
Speaker 3: I mean, we're I think, as trusted as it gets.
Speaker 3: The trust is unimpeachable. Never you know, never sold the
Speaker 3: non authentic piece, never sold the piece that we couldn't
Speaker 3: stand behind and vouch for in a pre owned capacity.
Speaker 3: And to the points that we were discussing earlier, the
Speaker 3: ease of selling with us is unparalleled. I think the
Speaker 3: ability to sell and transact your sale of a watch
Speaker 3: over the internet, get an instant quote at an inserprise.
Speaker 3: The way the Certified pre Owned program is working at
Speaker 3: the moment is you have to physically take your watch
Speaker 3: into an authorized dealer that is offering the Rollick CPO program.
Speaker 3: They'll inspect your watch, they'll offer you something in exchange
Speaker 3: for your watch, And then I think, then this is
Speaker 3: you know, just my own personal views. Then they have
Speaker 3: the challenge of showing the original piece side by side
Speaker 3: with the pre owned piece, right, And there's something a
Speaker 3: little off there, right, If you're selling an original sub
Speaker 3: mariner for that ten twelve thousand dollars retail price and
Speaker 3: then the pre owned piece right next to it for
Speaker 3: twenty seven twenty eight thousand. Explaining that is a challenge.
Speaker 3: But my point being that like their entry into this market,
Speaker 3: if anything, just serves as an endorsement of the pre
Speaker 3: owned market. I think it's the biggest brand of the world.
Speaker 3: Whatever they do matters a hell of a lot in
Speaker 3: this space, and I think we look at that as
Speaker 3: a good thing. It's kind of a blessing, if you will,
Speaker 3: for the pre owned space and for the importance of
Speaker 3: the pre and space in the kind of constellation of
Speaker 3: you know, how people consume and transact with watches.
Speaker 1: Huh.
Speaker 2: So let's do a compare and contrast. I'm going to
Speaker 2: mangle his name, the CEO of.
Speaker 3: Paddock Here Here Star.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So he goes out and buys modern era Paddocks
Speaker 2: on the US market to figure out who's flipping them
Speaker 2: and to call a dealer two account, Hey, why are
Speaker 2: you selling our rare watches to somebody who's just flipping
Speaker 2: them on the secondary market. Can we assume we'll never
Speaker 2: see a CPO program from Paddock that?
Speaker 1: Well, actually, I think you guys actually reported that pretty recently,
Speaker 1: that that Thiery said that.
Speaker 2: That was an interview that one of the Bloomberg reporters
Speaker 2: who were at watching exactly right.
Speaker 1: So, I mean, as of today, it seems like they
Speaker 1: will not get into CPO, and that is not surprising
Speaker 1: to me.
Speaker 2: Really, all the volume, it makes much more sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but exactly the ticket price is so much higher
Speaker 1: with Rolex in particular, I think it's important you could.
Speaker 2: Get in to a Calatrava relatively get it twenty five probably, Yeah,
Speaker 2: oh really if you can get it, Oh, that's much
Speaker 2: more than they were just a few year.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and again you can't you can't find them at retail.
Speaker 3: They're they're so more demand than supply.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but yeah, Rolex is a different thing. And I
Speaker 1: want to be totally concise here, So like when when
Speaker 1: we say Rolex CPO, like the dealers are mostly going
Speaker 1: to be doing this stuff, and the dealers set the prices.
Speaker 1: It's not like Rolex set the prices.
Speaker 2: So what's in it for Rolex versus you know, what's
Speaker 2: in it for the dealers, because there's only so much apply.
Speaker 2: I went to an event out in at the Manhassan Americana,
Speaker 2: at the big watch place over there. I'm I believe
Speaker 2: that's correct, and they have they're pushing everything except ap
Speaker 2: Rolex and Paddock. Because you want to get on their
Speaker 2: their good side.
Speaker 1: Buy some of these watches.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's they don't come out and say it,
Speaker 2: but it's wink wink, nudge, nudge. Hey, if you wanna
Speaker 2: if you want a Batman, you need to buy one
Speaker 2: of these Pistachio Brightling premieres, and then we could talk about,
Speaker 2: you know, a batgirl on a jubilee.
Speaker 1: If that that's what gets you excited.
Speaker 2: How did we ever end up in this place?
Speaker 1: Well, I mean it's it's the uniformity of taste at
Speaker 1: this point. And I'm gonna blame it on Instagram, my
Speaker 1: friends at Instagram. You know, it's just so many people
Speaker 1: posting the same stuff over and over again. And five
Speaker 1: years ago, nobody cared about the Nautilus or the Aquanat.
Speaker 1: I mean, they were good watches and we all liked them,
Speaker 1: but It wasn't a big deal at all, and people
Speaker 1: were buying what they like. And then all of a
Speaker 1: sudden people say, wait a minute, I can I can
Speaker 1: buy a p A tech at twenty and sell it
Speaker 1: for sixty, sell it for one hundred and sixty, which
Speaker 1: the Nautilus was trading at first, really fifty seven eleven A.
Speaker 1: And so that that changed the dynamic completely. It used
Speaker 1: to just be like, hey, I like this thing, I'm
Speaker 1: going to buy it. I may make money, I may not.
Speaker 1: Then it became if you're not making money, you're a fool.
Speaker 1: And that's whole a lot of people in finance.
Speaker 2: Is it just five years ago?
Speaker 1: Is it that reason? I would say, I would say
Speaker 1: pre COVID, Before COVID, it was not a concern. It
Speaker 1: really wasn't. Okay, Daytona, you knew you'd get that an
Speaker 1: awkward I'm sorry, Nautilust maybe you'd get that, but it
Speaker 1: wasn't that way. I mean. I bought my fifty seven
Speaker 1: eleven R from Tiffany here in New York in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 2: Tiffany Blue No no, No, this is a rose could one.
Speaker 1: One before the blue one, and they it was sitting
Speaker 1: in the case, and that's it and there I'll take that.
Speaker 1: And that watch at its peak was probably four hundred
Speaker 1: thousand dollars. Yeah, I probably bought it. Would you pay
Speaker 1: forty five something like that?
Speaker 2: Ten X is not a bad exactly, but that's a
Speaker 2: change left ubs. Yeah, this is where So here's the
Speaker 2: crazy thing. I have slowly warmed up to the north.
Speaker 2: It's not my favorite watch. I don't some of the
Speaker 2: design I don't. I don't get the Royal Oak. I
Speaker 2: know people who are like have eight of them. I
Speaker 2: just can't wrap my head around. And I know I
Speaker 2: understand the historical significance.
Speaker 1: What what makes the Royal.
Speaker 2: Oak and the noaut you So, first of all, I'm
Speaker 2: ten years older than both you guys. So I remember
Speaker 2: the seventies as a horrific decade of all around hollester
Speaker 2: and disco. Right, that's the seventies to me, and the
Speaker 2: design ethos. By the way, I have a very contemporary house.
Speaker 2: I love mid century modern. So if you go back
Speaker 2: to the some of the designs of the I was
Speaker 2: just in Scottsdale, Arizona, at the Valley Hoe Hotel that
Speaker 2: like the rat pack should be washing it. Just that
Speaker 2: sort of design ethos it it's before I was born,
Speaker 2: But I'm like, I get it. But I remember the
Speaker 2: seventies as just like a horrific era. Maybe it's the
Speaker 2: same thing as the Samarana. I just associate it with.
Speaker 2: So I look at the Royal Oak and I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's got that kind of Remember the giant Porsche Carrera
Speaker 2: glass shirt.
Speaker 1: They were horrific And.
Speaker 2: I know the historical significance what makes the watch so special?
Speaker 1: Well, And the first of all, it was my first
Speaker 1: high end watch. I bought two roll exes and then
Speaker 1: after that I saved up when I bought a Vinta
Speaker 1: JP and a Series Royal Oak. This is probably twenty
Speaker 1: What year was the watch nineteen seventy two? It was okay, series,
Speaker 1: the first really early one, and box paper is the
Speaker 1: whole thing. And it first of all, it was the
Speaker 1: AP was the first high end manufacturer ever visited. So
Speaker 1: that opened up my eyes to what watchmaking could be,
Speaker 1: if that makes any sense. Yeah, yeah, to see how
Speaker 1: a Royal Oak is finished, polished the case, you mean,
Speaker 1: not a boutique. You went to the mids Switzerland.
Speaker 2: Really we should all get such a trip.
Speaker 1: It was amazing honestly do that.
Speaker 2: I know guys that go to Modena and do the
Speaker 2: Ferrari exactly and they come back and they say, whatever
Speaker 2: on the car wasn't enough.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna yeah, so precisely that. I know someone with
Speaker 1: a five point.
Speaker 2: Fifty just came back and bought a fourth thirty.
Speaker 1: Coues he could. Yeah, it's it's that experience, you see
Speaker 1: what it really goes into the stuff and you fall
Speaker 1: in love. And then the royal look in particular the jumbos,
Speaker 1: the thirty nine millimeter watches wear some that's hilarious, that's
Speaker 1: what they're called. Yeah, they wear so amazingly on your wrist,
Speaker 1: and it's just it really, it is just I think
Speaker 1: like the chicest, most elegant watch a man or a
Speaker 1: woman can wear.
Speaker 2: I mean I've loved them forever. I bought one as
Speaker 2: recently as a month ago, two months ago.
Speaker 1: It's just an amazing thing. And then all of a
Speaker 1: sudden they're actually cool. And I think ten years ago
Speaker 1: they were not cool, and that was kind of fun.
Speaker 1: But it's a lot more fun when they are cool
Speaker 1: and people know what they are, and people are excited
Speaker 1: to see a royal oak on your wrist. And then
Speaker 1: you got like our friend John Mayer who's very close
Speaker 1: with them, and Ed Sheeran and Kevin Hart, all these
Speaker 1: like kind of cool interesting people started to get kind
Speaker 1: of hip to the royal oak thing. And now it's fun.
Speaker 1: It's part of like a cultural phenomenon.
Speaker 2: Well, I love the idea that if you know, you know,
Speaker 2: meaning so I could I could wear any of my
Speaker 2: eclectic watches or the langa. Nobody says a word, but
Speaker 2: every now and then someone at like some event will
Speaker 2: come up and say, is that the moon face?
Speaker 1: Yeah? If anybody knows what that long it is, that's
Speaker 1: a very good sign.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because then they're like, oh, this guy, that's the
Speaker 2: real stuff. This guy's plugged into what's going on in
Speaker 2: that space. And it's not just a matter of you
Speaker 2: have money, you could go out and buy the most
Speaker 2: expensive car. It's you're picking something very very specific. So
Speaker 2: so one of the people here has this nautalis he
Speaker 2: sat on his wrist for thirty years, and it's the
Speaker 2: blue leather band and the blue face and it's not
Speaker 2: the full chrono, but it has the offset second hand
Speaker 2: calendar and I've kind of warmed up to it. Is
Speaker 2: the Every time I see it, I'm like, I just
Speaker 2: appreciate it a little more. Yeah, and I didn't feel
Speaker 2: that way when I first spotted that.
Speaker 1: The natalist in the and I'm sorry keep saying awkward.
Speaker 1: Not a lot notalists and Roy. Look, if I may say,
Speaker 1: I think they belong on bracelets. They were conceived on
Speaker 1: bracelets by drill genta. So ones on strap I've often
Speaker 1: I haven't had a super strong affinity towards, but those
Speaker 1: on bracelets I think are just fantastic. They're not They're
Speaker 1: not a rolllex like. You're not taking them swimming, you're
Speaker 1: not taking them diving. You can't go chopping wood in them.
Speaker 1: You know, Jeff and I both live.
Speaker 2: Well, you shouldn't chop wood in any so you shouldn't.
Speaker 2: But sometimes I learned the hard way. Again, I can't
Speaker 2: even throw a ball with this. That's how I the
Speaker 2: rehired meal.
Speaker 1: I always the result. I would just go back to
Speaker 1: the resharch, go straight.
Speaker 2: Off at half a million dollars when you're acting. So
Speaker 2: so as long as we're talking about specific watches, what
Speaker 2: are some of your favorites and what are your grail watches?
Speaker 2: That man, you haven't gotten, but you would love to have.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean my favorite, my favorite watch is the Omega.
Speaker 1: My grandfather gave me. No surprise there, that's the one.
Speaker 1: As I said, I.
Speaker 2: Put clearly a family emotional connection question, and all these
Speaker 2: watches have an emotional component outside of something like that.
Speaker 1: Outside of something like that. Look the Moonwatch, the hand
Speaker 1: one Moonwatch for seven thousand bucks. You can buy it
Speaker 1: on Hoodinky all day. Get it is the best watch
Speaker 1: in the world for that kind of well with the
Speaker 1: speed Mast Speedmaster, so my speedy.
Speaker 2: I just refused to get the hechs Alike because I
Speaker 2: know I the beauty of Rolex and I just had
Speaker 2: this after almost twenty years, fifteen years. I just had
Speaker 2: this repolish because I destroyed this watch. It's actually tight
Speaker 2: since they repolished it.
Speaker 1: But I this is a.
Speaker 2: Platinum yacht Master and I bought this in eight from
Speaker 2: a mortgage broker that was just liquidating everything. So that's
Speaker 2: my as I'm writing bail Out Nation, I buy this
Speaker 2: watch from a mortgage broker, So that's my emotional But
Speaker 2: you know, you could beat the crap out of these.
Speaker 2: The same thing with the Speedmaster, but the hex Al
Speaker 2: I was terrified about So I got this. I paid
Speaker 2: up for the Sapphire.
Speaker 1: Got it.
Speaker 2: Because you know, when I smash it into something, I
Speaker 2: don't have to worry about a dent, a dent scratch
Speaker 2: or whatever. So that's a great entry level sub ten
Speaker 2: thousand dollars watch.
Speaker 1: It's both an entry level and exit level, if that
Speaker 1: makes any sense. Like some of the wealthiest guys I
Speaker 1: know that have owned every paddock, every long but whatever,
Speaker 1: they end up wearing a handwab moon Watch. And I
Speaker 1: guarantee you when I retire from you know whatever, this is,
Speaker 1: that's the watch I will wear every day Handwab.
Speaker 2: Lie So when I wear so my two sub ten
Speaker 2: thousand dollar watches that I wear pretty regularly. One is
Speaker 2: the Monica with the gray face from Tag. The other
Speaker 2: is a Speedmaster, And every now and then someone will
Speaker 2: say I go speedy. Yeah, yeah, And it's just like
Speaker 2: you know, if you know, you know sort of thing
Speaker 2: it is. So let's take how about you, Jeff, what
Speaker 2: are you wearing sub ten Yeah?
Speaker 3: I mean my so my two sentimental favorite watches again
Speaker 3: both have a connection to my my family, and one
Speaker 3: is my great grandfather's pocket watch. It has his initials
Speaker 3: instead of the numbers. So it's Jay Virgil Allen and
Speaker 3: we named our third son Virgil after my great grandfather.
Speaker 3: This's got his name on it. A beautiful one hundred
Speaker 3: and twenty year old American mad pocket watch. And then
Speaker 3: I have my father Saeko, which you wore every day,
Speaker 3: and it's a quartz siko on a on an elastic strap,
Speaker 3: a little bit like this one bracelet. I should say, uh,
Speaker 3: this is a hood Inky limited edition I'm wearing today.
Speaker 3: This was under two hundred dollars, even under ten. That
Speaker 3: was under two hundred dollars time X collaboration we did,
Speaker 3: and I love it because of that that that's sort
Speaker 3: of you can't see. It's a pretty bulletproof. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 3: this is this This I literally don't have to think
Speaker 3: twice to put it on my wrist. I wear I
Speaker 3: Ben knows. I'm on a quest to kind of get
Speaker 3: as many hood Inky limited edition watches as I'm happy.
Speaker 1: To help with.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it feels like it special to me
Speaker 3: to kind of own a little piece of our history
Speaker 3: as a brand. And again we've done limited editions with
Speaker 3: everyone from time X and Cassio, g Shock all the
Speaker 3: way up to Vastron and you know crazy independent brands
Speaker 3: like Grunfeld and and and and Lauren Ferrier and others
Speaker 3: like that. I guess my, yeah, this this, this is
Speaker 3: like one that I'm wearing a lot currently, but not
Speaker 3: to copycat. But I love the will make a speed
Speaker 3: Master And again the hood Inky limited Edition speed Master
Speaker 3: is a personal thing.
Speaker 2: It was anniversary with the Snoopy. Yeah, that's a great
Speaker 2: little watch, although that's kind of going ballistic.
Speaker 1: And price also. Yeah, so if you go to YouTube.
Speaker 2: You can find the old sixties and seventies zero commercials
Speaker 2: for time X takes a looking and keeps on together.
Speaker 2: I remember they would strap it to a front of
Speaker 2: a boat with a bunch of navy seals out and
Speaker 2: the boat would be slapping the water and they'd pull
Speaker 2: the watch out and still still going. They were great commercials,
Speaker 2: and the washes last forever. So fun fact, did you
Speaker 2: know that the very first television commercial ever aired ever
Speaker 2: worldwide was a watch brand?
Speaker 1: And what was all of us?
Speaker 3: Oh, no, nineteen forty one. I want to say, during
Speaker 3: the World Series game or something like that. Nineteen forty
Speaker 3: one was nine seconds. It cost them nine dollars.
Speaker 2: That's unbelievable. So let's let's take a step up above
Speaker 2: ten grandy, what would you guys look at. I'll give
Speaker 2: you a budget ten to fifties, so easy for me.
Speaker 2: And we talked earlier about like, you know, you saw
Speaker 2: a watch, you fell in love with it. On this
Speaker 2: you decided not to pull the trigger, and then you
Speaker 2: regret it every singce it kind of got away from you.
Speaker 2: For me, it's actually it is a Lunga one, but
Speaker 2: it is a special series of long ones they did.
Speaker 3: Called the Swarre series. Swarre dial. It's a mother of
Speaker 3: pearl dial and it's this one in particular. Phillips had
Speaker 3: it in their watch auction last November. Bend, myself and
Speaker 3: another collie of ours were at the Phillips headquarters in Geneva,
Speaker 3: saw the watch before it was under the hammer, loved it,
Speaker 3: just everything what to look go for. I want to
Speaker 3: say it only went for about well only went for
Speaker 3: thirty five or forty thousand Swiss francs. So it's definitely
Speaker 3: within the budget you've just given this. But and again
Speaker 3: Lunga ones, there aren't this is not a ubiquitous product.
Speaker 3: There aren't that many of them. It's one of those
Speaker 3: if you know, you know, I love the aesthetics of
Speaker 3: the dial. I love everything about the Lunga brand, but
Speaker 3: like this one in particular, this the dial just totally CAPTU.
Speaker 3: I would look at it and I would just get
Speaker 3: lost in the dial every time i'd wear it.
Speaker 2: I Oh, so, so you didn't pull the trick, didn't
Speaker 2: pull the trigger?
Speaker 1: How about you?
Speaker 2: What what got away? Uh?
Speaker 1: Well, the stuff that has gotten away is generally a
Speaker 1: little bit higher end stuff.
Speaker 2: So I have one of those that I've never even
Speaker 2: thought about pulling the trigger on, and recently, well I'm
Speaker 2: asking you the question. But so before we get to
Speaker 2: the crazy higher end stuff, you know, under one hundred
Speaker 2: over ten, Yeah, what would you wear?
Speaker 1: Weirdly, the watch that like I really kind of hated
Speaker 1: when it came out, now I love and I'm just
Speaker 1: never pulled the trigger. As the platinum Daytona, I'm a
Speaker 1: hardcore Daytona guy. I'm with you. I just never I was.
Speaker 1: I was actually witch color combination. So the platinum one
Speaker 1: is only the ice blue with the brick the brown ceramic.
Speaker 2: Do you do you like the new I love the back,
Speaker 2: but I kind of like the face of the older one.
Speaker 1: Interesting like if I could mix those two. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: prefer the new one, honestly, and I may it's great.
Speaker 1: That one I really disliked in twenty thirteen Minut launch,
Speaker 1: mostly because I was sour. I was sour that they
Speaker 1: didn't give us the steel watch with a ceramic bezzel.
Speaker 1: That was the big thing that that came out in
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen. Got that, So that's to watch. I'm just
Speaker 1: like weirdly never owned, which is strange because I love
Speaker 1: platinum watches. I love Rolex and I love the Daytona.
Speaker 1: I just never did it.
Speaker 2: And now you know, we'll see that's really can I
Speaker 2: tell you that blue brown and again dating back to
Speaker 2: the fifty sixties sort of fashion. So my wife used
Speaker 2: to teach fashion illustration and design. She's a colorist, and
Speaker 2: you show her that light blue with the brown, and
Speaker 2: she's like, wildly underrated, perfect combinations. People miss it. And
Speaker 2: when that came out with the display case, I mean,
Speaker 2: what what can you say?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's look, it's an eighty thousand dollars chronograph.
Speaker 1: So at that level, your little price, well, look you're
Speaker 1: intil You can buy a Langa, you can buy a
Speaker 1: Pat Tack you can buy a lot of stuff for
Speaker 1: eighty dollard bucks. You get the platinum bracelet, which is
Speaker 1: expensive for sure. So it's it's a I've got a
Speaker 1: I've got a complex relationship with that watch.
Speaker 2: So let's let's talk rail watches regardless of price. What's
Speaker 2: the one that's out there that that is the killer
Speaker 2: for you?
Speaker 1: There's a there's a few, I mean there are several. Really,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't be surprised to learn a thirty four to
Speaker 1: forty eight Paddock, which is their first self winding perpetual calendar,
Speaker 1: in particular in white gold. Those were kind of trading
Speaker 1: in like the mid two hundreds for a long while. Gold.
Speaker 2: What's the face collar?
Speaker 1: It's silver?
Speaker 2: Kind of all right, because they've run the they've done
Speaker 2: the salmon, they've done the watch.
Speaker 1: So this is way earlier. This is nineteen sixties, nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy oh really, yeah, So the very first ones, those
Speaker 1: were trading the mid twies forever. The minute I could
Speaker 1: afford one, I kind of hamm them hot. And now
Speaker 1: they're trading for about eight hundred two million.
Speaker 2: So as a Daytona guy, what do you think of
Speaker 2: like the Newman Daytona's in the sixties era. They're not crazy.
Speaker 2: They're like, for the same seventy five, you could get
Speaker 2: a nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sixty three nine. I've had many of those. I've
Speaker 1: had a bunch of Paul Newman. So no, no, it's
Speaker 1: not a Grail watch. Look a sixty to sixty three
Speaker 1: Mark one Oyster Paul Newman, which is kind of like
Speaker 1: the big bad Paul Newman. I had one of those.
Speaker 1: I sold it too soon. Wish I still had that.
Speaker 1: But a gold Paul Newman I've never had that. That'd
Speaker 1: be something fun. But these are crazy watches, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean really expensive watches that I like. I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't live in Manhattan anymore. I live upstate. Those
Speaker 1: just don't fit my life all anymore. When I lived
Speaker 1: in Manhattan and it was kind of out and about,
Speaker 1: it kind of made sense. But now, as a father
Speaker 1: in particular, it just doesn't compute this terrible for chopping
Speaker 1: would yeah, you know, it always goes back to chop
Speaker 1: riding my canoe, you know, things like that. So what
Speaker 1: T Grail watched? Jeff? Money is no object? It would
Speaker 1: it would?
Speaker 3: I think I'd go with a watch that comes from
Speaker 3: a craftsman from a craftsman's hand. So I probably a
Speaker 3: Roger Smith or Philipe du four, you know, knowing that
Speaker 3: I do own a piece of art from an artist,
Speaker 3: somebody who individually made this piece by hand, put a
Speaker 3: stamp on it, saw it from birth to basically like conception.
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, that that that would be it for me.
Speaker 3: And again I think Philipe dufour is turning seventy five,
Speaker 3: not getting it oneah, and he's still making every part
Speaker 3: of the component, every piece by hand. Roger Smith, you know,
Speaker 3: kind of next generation. But yeah, Reshap, these guys who
Speaker 3: are making these watches, just you know, it's incredible what
Speaker 3: they do. It's a it's a one man operation start
Speaker 3: to finish, and I just think like something like that.
Speaker 3: It's yeah, it's like you're buying twenty watches exactly.
Speaker 1: It'd be like you're.
Speaker 3: Buying an original picassa from the man himself while he
Speaker 3: was still painting.
Speaker 1: Like and you know that Roger in particular, and I'm
Speaker 1: lucky enough to own one. I've known him forever. His
Speaker 1: story is amazing. He makes ten watches per year, Roger Smith,
Speaker 1: all by hand. He does not own one of his
Speaker 1: own watches never has because we can't give up ten
Speaker 1: percent of you know, he can't take one watch out
Speaker 1: of the line of ten per year, you know. And
Speaker 1: these watches are phenomenally expensive that you know, new and
Speaker 1: they're there worth even more kind of secondhand. But his watches,
Speaker 1: as Jeff said, are just to me. It's the ten game.
Speaker 3: It's a great story on Hood of Geek today about
Speaker 3: his second pocket watch, which there's a whole backstory to it.
Speaker 3: Basically was he made a pocket watch and presented it
Speaker 3: to his master, George Daniels, and George Daniels rejected it
Speaker 3: and said to go back and work on another version
Speaker 3: and do it better. Took him five years of his
Speaker 3: entire life livelihood creating a second pocket watch, And then
Speaker 3: Georgia said, did you make every part by hand? He said, yes, congratulations,
Speaker 3: Now you're a watchmaker. He then sold that pocket watch
Speaker 3: to a private buyer to fund the creation of his
Speaker 3: next series of watches. And that watch is going to
Speaker 3: be auctioned by Phillips and I imagine kinds of records.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, easily, for sure. I mean his wristwatches, like
Speaker 2: just generic risk watches now.
Speaker 1: Trade for about six His generic wrist watches if you
Speaker 1: can find one. I mean, Jacobs and Co. What do
Speaker 1: you do with stuff like that?
Speaker 2: There are half a million, a million.
Speaker 1: It's a different thing.
Speaker 2: He did that out thing that went for thirty million
Speaker 2: rights like these are just insane numbers.
Speaker 1: It's a different corner of the market. It's a very
Speaker 1: real corner, a really trade for sure. You know, he
Speaker 1: he tends to, he designs it, he does the setting
Speaker 1: and all the stone work. But the movement is a jeweler. Look,
Speaker 1: he's Jacob, Jacob the jeweler. He's the guy in all
Speaker 1: the rap songs. Literally, So it's a different corner of
Speaker 1: the market, but a very real one. And like you know,
Speaker 1: he is selling those watches for crazy numbers all day.
Speaker 1: Huh amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so so let's talk a little bit about talking watches.
Speaker 2: This has become a super popular segment of Oh Dinky,
Speaker 2: I know the first one was with John Mayer.
Speaker 1: How did this get started? Yeah, so kind of taking
Speaker 1: a step back in twenty twelve, when I launched Straps
Speaker 1: online to sell straps, I got an email that said,
Speaker 1: Hey John Mayer here, love what you're doing. Let's hop
Speaker 1: on the phone. And I was like, Okay, like, I
Speaker 1: wonder who this is, some guy named John Mayor, you know,
Speaker 1: some accountant in Texas named John Mayer. So got on
Speaker 1: the phone. Turns out of John Mayer, the rock star,
Speaker 1: and we just became kind of fast friends. You know,
Speaker 1: we were about the same age at the time. We
Speaker 1: were both living a really weird life. Mine was on
Speaker 1: the road, traveling around for watches, take pictures, writing. He
Speaker 1: was an actual rock star, and we just became like true, true,
Speaker 1: very close friends, very quickly. And so in twenty thirteen
Speaker 1: he called me and he's like, Hey, I'm in town
Speaker 1: doing Letterman or Leno or something like that. I've got
Speaker 1: a bag full of watches. Do you want to just
Speaker 1: like record a conversation about watches? And I said sure,
Speaker 1: and we had wait. So this was Mayor's doing his idea.
Speaker 1: I mean, we'd always talked about doing a video together
Speaker 1: some kind, but never premeditated, never storyboarded or anything like that.
Speaker 2: And I've got a bag full of watches. Sounds like
Speaker 2: he just knocked.
Speaker 1: He used to roll pretty heavy with stuff, not so
Speaker 1: much anymore, just for security reasons, but you know, to
Speaker 1: to to our credit, like the first really the second
Speaker 1: person we ever hired at Hodinki was a full time videographer.
Speaker 1: So I said, who I went to Columbia with Will?
Speaker 1: Who's still with us? I said, actually, I got a
Speaker 1: video guy right here, and so we went. We were
Speaker 1: on Verick Street. We went over to a place called
Speaker 1: Little Prince, which is a little cafe there on the
Speaker 1: Spring or Prince rather and uh. And we walked in
Speaker 1: and we said, hey, I got John Mayer coming here
Speaker 1: in twenty minutes. Can we shoot? And they were like, sure,
Speaker 1: we're not open yet. We don't really care, you know,
Speaker 1: And so we shot for an hour, one camera, one
Speaker 1: never man, and we just talked about watches, no makeup,
Speaker 1: no anything, no, you know. His assistant wasn't there, and
Speaker 1: it just became Internet magic in a bottle, as things
Speaker 1: can happen, you know, can do well.
Speaker 2: It was very authentic. Here's a guy who's who's a
Speaker 2: rock and roll star. Yeah, this generation's Eric Clapton, singer, songwriter,
Speaker 2: guitarist touring with the Dead Post Jerry.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And if you find out there's a whole nother dimension
Speaker 2: to him, is he's really into watching.
Speaker 1: Oh you you really have no idea?
Speaker 2: So when you record this, you have any idea.
Speaker 1: This is going to blow up.
Speaker 2: Now. Look whereas you're doing you're thinking, oh, this is
Speaker 2: great stuff.
Speaker 1: It's John is an amazing person. He's the most well spoken,
Speaker 1: most creative, oddist thinker of anybody Herman. I say that lovingly,
Speaker 1: like he's just got a different mind than the rest
Speaker 1: of us, truly. And you know, we were recording it,
Speaker 1: We're like, okay, like this is going to be special
Speaker 1: for us. But like there's a little watch blog. Three
Speaker 1: guys sitting in a we work, you know, sure, and
Speaker 1: uh we put her online and it blows up, I
Speaker 1: mean just explodes. And then from there J. J. Reddick
Speaker 1: basketball player who was a friend of mine at the
Speaker 1: time as well still is and said, oh, like I
Speaker 1: would do that. He was into watches. And then John Goldberger,
Speaker 1: this great collector, and then as he's I'm sorry, and
Speaker 1: Jack Nicholas and you know insert. It has just been
Speaker 1: a run of celebrities.
Speaker 2: Most recently I saw Kevin hartny six, Tobias Harris, I
Speaker 2: just saw that was really kind of yesterday Kermit the Frog.
Speaker 1: That was what I was going to say. Yesterday we
Speaker 1: had Kermit the Frog, who I think Trump's everybody.
Speaker 2: Ye.
Speaker 1: Celebrity.
Speaker 2: I can't say I've ever spotted a time piece on
Speaker 2: his off free and wrists exactly.
Speaker 1: To get them.
Speaker 2: Especially so there is a Kermit watch from Warrist that
Speaker 2: and he's out promoting exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it was part of that.
Speaker 2: So the first of every month instead of a one
Speaker 2: showing a Kermit. So so as long as we're talking
Speaker 2: about it, that was shown it Watches and Wonders twenty
Speaker 2: twenty three.
Speaker 1: What did you guys see? What'd you like?
Speaker 2: Would you think of? Uh?
Speaker 1: What took place?
Speaker 3: I mean, I'll say this, this is my second TI
Speaker 3: I'm going to watch his Wonders. I had been to
Speaker 3: previous iterations of watch shows Bazzle World and Siah. Watches
Speaker 3: and Wonders kind of was the mash up, if you
Speaker 3: will have. Bazzle World and Siah went in dormant for
Speaker 3: few years of course because of COVID. Came back in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty two, and I think it came back with
Speaker 3: a bang. It was almost like this pent up energy,
Speaker 3: pent up, like just this big release of actual release
Speaker 3: of tons and tons of watches and some really incredible watches.
Speaker 3: I think two through there were some standout watches for sure,
Speaker 3: probably less across the board just wow affect than there
Speaker 3: wasn't twenty twenty two. I think some of that was
Speaker 3: that again builds up post pandemic. I mean for me
Speaker 3: and I will say this, and he's sitting here right
Speaker 3: next to me, not trying to blow a smoke, but
Speaker 3: like for me, one of the most special things was
Speaker 3: getting a chance to walk around with Ben. I'd been
Speaker 3: working with him at that point for a little over
Speaker 3: a year. A year prior I was in my third
Speaker 3: week and he had just had his first child, so
Speaker 3: he wasn't able to attend. He was at home with
Speaker 3: the baby. But walking around with him was really special
Speaker 3: because you see a lot of people who instantly recognize
Speaker 3: Ben come off to him. These guys, well, they say,
Speaker 3: they're like, you're the guy with Kermit the Frog. Now
Speaker 3: they say some version of the reason I'm in the
Speaker 3: industry is because of you, or the reason I fell
Speaker 3: in love with a category is because of you. And
Speaker 3: that's I said something to someone later that week, because
Speaker 3: eventually it rubs off on you. I have this association
Speaker 3: with Hodinki now simply by being an employee of the brand.
Speaker 3: For the last year, we host a kind of a
Speaker 3: community meet up event on the Thursday, the last night
Speaker 3: that many of us were in town, and we just
Speaker 3: did an open invite RSVP through the website through Hodinky,
Speaker 3: so anybody who was in town was welcome to join.
Speaker 3: And I must have had a dozen people at least
Speaker 3: saying thank you to me. And I thought, I've never
Speaker 3: had never worked for a brand or a business, and
Speaker 3: I worked for some great brands, I mean Cardier, Louisvistan
Speaker 3: tac Quire. Never had someone come up to me and
Speaker 3: say thank you, and again, credit to this guy who
Speaker 3: started it all that that's the impact he's had, that's
Speaker 3: the effect he's had, and that's the effect Hodinky has
Speaker 3: had as a manifestation of all that Ben's you know,
Speaker 3: created to this point. And now I get to sort
Speaker 3: of be a part of that, to be, you know,
Speaker 3: part of in some ways like serving this broader watch
Speaker 3: community and helping to kind of continue to further curiosity, knowledge, passion, enthusiasm,
Speaker 3: and and it's it's really a wonderful feeling for someone
Speaker 3: to come up to you just be like, thank you
Speaker 3: for all that you're doing.
Speaker 1: Huh.
Speaker 3: And we don't take that for granted. I don't take
Speaker 3: that for granted, certainly. I just think that's a really special.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a rare what struck you at Watches and
Speaker 2: Wonders Besides the Oris kerrment.
Speaker 1: The Oris kerment was a fun one and I think,
Speaker 1: you know, echoing what Jeff said, it was my first
Speaker 1: time there because a my daughter was born last year
Speaker 1: and then COVID so three years, so it's been four
Speaker 1: years since I was in Swiss. You've gone to the
Speaker 1: ones before, oh for fifteen twenty years. Yeah, So getting
Speaker 1: back there and seeing people still appreciate what we're still doing.
Speaker 1: I've been doing this for fifteen years. This is not
Speaker 1: like a two year old startup. So exciting to feel
Speaker 1: that energy and that appreciation. Again, definitely in person. But
Speaker 1: in terms of product, look, Langa, we've talked about a lot.
Speaker 1: They make some of the best watches on Earth. They
Speaker 1: introduced one watch and they're only doing one hundred of them,
Speaker 1: which is crazy. Odysseus Chronograph, It's one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars saying.
Speaker 2: So flex to launch one that is a flex and
Speaker 2: ps gone girl hated.
Speaker 1: I mean, you couldn't even never hit.
Speaker 3: It, never hit the shot.
Speaker 2: But by the way, you mentioned the the blue and
Speaker 2: brown Daytona, which came out any other new watches. I mean,
Speaker 2: I understand the entire Tutor thing blew up. I'm not
Speaker 2: a giant Tutor fan. They just feel like they're lesser. Rolexes. Well,
Speaker 2: I know that's blasphemy to say.
Speaker 1: I mean, look, it's it's not blasphemy, but I understand it.
Speaker 1: I haven't a love Tutors.
Speaker 2: I think at don't have the same proportions. They just
Speaker 2: feel like they're.
Speaker 1: And I do it too. I tried to. I really was,
Speaker 1: went in to buy put them on, and it just
Speaker 1: kind of you gotta buy what you like, you know.
Speaker 1: But they had a pretty strong year. Rolex has a
Speaker 1: new titanium watch, the Hot Master in titanium. I really
Speaker 1: like that. That's cool that. I like that more than
Speaker 1: I thought that I would. It's big but lightweight. Patech
Speaker 1: had a new travel time watch. So wait, you brought
Speaker 1: this up? Is it possible that? How is it possible?
Speaker 2: Protect Philip has not introduced a brand new watch in
Speaker 2: twenty four years?
Speaker 1: How is that humanly possible? Well, I mean that's a
Speaker 1: little bit of parsing of word. They're a little bit
Speaker 1: and so.
Speaker 2: They're always doing variation. Yeah, so this is a new
Speaker 2: model line, brand new. What other industry could go two
Speaker 2: decades plus and not introduce a new anything.
Speaker 1: You know, Portia, I mean they haven't. I mean, I
Speaker 1: guess they did.
Speaker 2: The Taykan, well, the Tykan, the Panamara is fifteen years old.
Speaker 2: The Macan is twelve years old that they've remember. It
Speaker 2: was blasphemy for them to roll out in suv of
Speaker 2: course fifteen years ago.
Speaker 1: But I mean again, I mean, so like the Tykan,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, the Cayenne was two was the year two thousand, right,
Speaker 1: so that's twenty three years ago. The Taikan, which is
Speaker 1: the electric car, was probably what six years ago? Five?
Speaker 2: You know, I think it's less than that.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: It's like Paul McCartney, right, he hasn't released an album
Speaker 3: in thirty years, but he can sell out.
Speaker 1: To read it.
Speaker 2: But if you're a Beetle, right, if you're one of
Speaker 2: the two surviving Beatles, you can probably the tech is
Speaker 2: the tech and I guess that's the parallel. So, since
Speaker 2: since we're talking about cars and I know you have
Speaker 2: to run soon, you spent the pandemic rebuilding three thirty GP.
Speaker 1: A slight, A slight exaggeration of my role in that.
Speaker 1: So I was I was working with somebody that was
Speaker 1: helping to do it, So I wasn't rebuilding. This was
Speaker 1: literally barn find a garage find it. They call her
Speaker 1: barn find but it was in a garage in Rome.
Speaker 1: That's all original, all original, untouched. It was on Bloomberg
Speaker 1: a few weeks ago. My friend Hannah wrote that story.
Speaker 2: So he's been a guest here a couple of times,
Speaker 2: so she was actually I actually visited her and Magnus
Speaker 2: in their shop in La It's.
Speaker 1: So tying it all together. Hannah was actually my editor
Speaker 1: at one of my very first freelance jobs for Forbes exactly,
Speaker 1: but not for watches. She was editing a literary blog,
Speaker 1: like a book blog. I was writing for that unpaid.
Speaker 1: Oh that's crazy, but I just wanted I wanted to buy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so she's amazing. But yeah, So I'm really in the cars,
Speaker 1: and I spent a little bit of time and a
Speaker 1: lot of money doing that during during COVID. But that's
Speaker 1: what I'm into. I'm intofying these things that have direct
Speaker 1: connections with interesting people and keeping them going.
Speaker 2: What other cars are you playing with?
Speaker 1: I've got drive an E thirty nine five almost every day,
Speaker 1: so I know.
Speaker 2: The spe convertible six. I the last year they made
Speaker 2: the sticks and I couldn't find it. I had to
Speaker 2: fly out to Indianapolis test drive it, and then my
Speaker 2: wife and I drove it home.
Speaker 1: That's fun.
Speaker 2: Stopping off at Falling Water is the first day they
Speaker 2: were open for the season.
Speaker 1: I'm not kidding. I did that in a GT three touring.
Speaker 1: I stopped off at Falling Water. Yeah, truly.
Speaker 2: I have a client that has a GT three that
Speaker 2: he wanted to sell, and the dealer said, give to us.
Speaker 2: We'll take a twenty percent consignment. I'm like, we know
Speaker 2: people that bring a trailer, let me list it for you.
Speaker 1: So that's what we're That's that's really funny. GT three
Speaker 1: stick Ship.
Speaker 2: It was the touring right, no wing, but the stick,
Speaker 2: which is now becoming increasingly rare. We were there the
Speaker 2: first day it was open, and I'm driving this six
Speaker 2: hundred horsepower monster and there's like a light dusting of snow,
Speaker 2: so I am like feathering the throttle because with just
Speaker 2: the slightest touch you're going sidew so but it was
Speaker 2: spect what a spectacular place.
Speaker 1: It really is. Nowhere it really is.
Speaker 2: It's amazing in into Porscha's you know, stuff here and there,
Speaker 2: so a little blasphemy. I have two nine to eleven's.
Speaker 2: One I'm keeping stock. That's a cabrio. By the way,
Speaker 2: before they went crazy, I picked these up for pennies
Speaker 2: and I have so the eighty seven is in a cabrio.
Speaker 2: The I'm sorry, the eighty eight is a cabrio. The
Speaker 2: eighty seven is a three hundred thousand mile car that
Speaker 2: I'm pulling the engine and the transmission out, dropping Tesla
Speaker 2: motor and completely kidder a nine to eleven E with
Speaker 2: Moment Motors in Austin.
Speaker 1: That's cool.
Speaker 2: And I've been on the weight so all these guys
Speaker 2: are booked a year, Yeah, Valley, I've been on the
Speaker 2: wait list for almost a year. It goes down to Texas.
Speaker 2: By the time this broadcast, it should be in Texas
Speaker 2: getting a heart transplant. And that's kind of a funny.
Speaker 1: And by the time I'm done, I.
Speaker 2: Would have been able to walk into a dealer and
Speaker 2: say give me that nine to eleven for what this
Speaker 2: will ends up costing. But it'll be the only electric
Speaker 2: nine to eleven in New York by the time It's
Speaker 2: done super cool. So if you're a BMW and a
Speaker 2: Porsche fan, I feel your your your taste. The one
Speaker 2: thing I have to ask in terms of Grail watches,
Speaker 2: so the and I'm not just a longa person, but
Speaker 2: the and I am going to mangle the pronunciation. The
Speaker 2: hand work best stuns anork s guns step tourbiyon. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that just has the numbers and that sort of carved.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The aperture at six, Yeah, what the hell does
Speaker 1: that thing go?
Speaker 2: For?
Speaker 1: The stage?
Speaker 2: You, by the way, complete you can't see them anywhere.
Speaker 2: If I saw one was somewhere at auction I found
Speaker 2: out about afterwards, I would I would ballpark three hundred, okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: and that was eighty ninety when it came out.
Speaker 1: Probably more. I mean if I know a website that
Speaker 1: would probably be able to tell you. I think we
Speaker 1: covered it. I know we covered it.
Speaker 2: When I came out a buck and change, Yeah, I
Speaker 2: would get one forty oh so it's only double.
Speaker 1: But those are those are the airs thin in that world.
Speaker 2: Like I saw one of those go for about two
Speaker 2: hundred about a year ago. And again I'm still wrestling
Speaker 2: with a thirty forty thousand I'll watch two hundred is
Speaker 2: like next level.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just I mean, it's just said earlier, really
Speaker 1: earliest in this in this session, like it's just applying
Speaker 1: to man, there's a lot more guys that want a
Speaker 1: Nautilus or an aquanat yeah, because they know what it is,
Speaker 1: or Daytona. Nobody's ever heard of a Handrick skin turbion
Speaker 1: from longag even if it is that much.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, that could be the like if I
Speaker 2: have a rail watch, that's it.
Speaker 1: And once I do that, then I just you know,
Speaker 1: you've done it. Probably not where do you go from that?
Speaker 1: I mean that.
Speaker 2: So that's listen, that's the same problem with the Grand
Speaker 2: Longo one. Where do you go from there? It just
Speaker 2: you just struck going full OCD and backfilling and it's crazy.
Speaker 1: So I have a bone to pick with you guys.
Speaker 2: I'm speaking at some event in Aspen. It was the
Speaker 2: International Luxury real Estate and I've been about real estate
Speaker 2: my whole career. So they invited me, and you know,
Speaker 2: they say, get there a day or so early because
Speaker 2: the altitude is you know, you don't want to stand up.
Speaker 2: And if you've been to Vail, it's the same sort
Speaker 2: of thing sor right, I get there, I get a
Speaker 2: day to kill and I go into Aspen and what
Speaker 2: is this a Langan Zone shop? So I go in
Speaker 2: and I see the Langa one, which is their famous
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety four watch that's asymmetrical, which was a radical
Speaker 2: departure from Marches, and I think there's just like March April.
Speaker 2: And I get back home and I don't know if
Speaker 2: you've ever experienced this. You see a watch and it
Speaker 2: just starts to haunt you again. Yes, right, we're talking
Speaker 2: about Yeah, I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking about it.
Speaker 2: I have a big round birthday coming up in October,
Speaker 2: and so I make an appointment to go into the
Speaker 2: Langa boutique in New York and I try on the
Speaker 2: longer one and look, I'm not a little guy mill
Speaker 2: What is this a toy?
Speaker 1: I need a real watch. And so the woman says, oh,
Speaker 1: we have the grand Langa one, sure, and I try on.
Speaker 2: It wasn't the one I fell in love with, and
Speaker 2: it wasn't the one I ultimately really wanted.
Speaker 1: But have a bone to pick with you.
Speaker 2: It was it was a Grand Langa but without the
Speaker 2: moonface and that sort of chocolate, silver gray. I don't
Speaker 2: even know how to describe the color. Sure, And so
Speaker 2: I start looking around and looking around, and now I
Speaker 2: find I find the Saxonia with the moonface black watch
Speaker 2: pink face, and I'm waiting on I'm trying to decide
Speaker 2: if I want that, And then I see the platinum
Speaker 2: Grand Langa one. What is that?
Speaker 1: Forty one and a half something like that? Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: and and it's on you.
Speaker 2: It's sixty six new but new papers box on Hodinky
Speaker 2: forty two, and I'm trying really hard to wrap my
Speaker 2: head around forty two.
Speaker 1: It's a lot of money for a watch, yeah, and
Speaker 1: I can.
Speaker 2: Afford it, but it's it's just a lot of money.
Speaker 2: So I make the decision.
Speaker 1: I don't remember.
Speaker 2: It was like the end of August or the end
Speaker 2: of September. Hey, my birthday is in October.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go.
Speaker 2: Get that watch on my birthday, even though it's gonna
Speaker 2: kill me to spend that much money. Yeah, just it's
Speaker 2: I have way too many cars, I have a bud like,
Speaker 2: I'm not afraid to spend money, but to strap a
Speaker 2: BMW on your wrist, you have to mentally brace yourself
Speaker 2: for that so my birthday rolls around and I I'm
Speaker 2: gonna do it, and I go to the whole dinky
Speaker 2: stot gone and not only is it gone, you can't
Speaker 2: find them for sale anywhere. Wow, they just have disappeared.
Speaker 2: I have Buddies on forty seventh Street and I'm like,
Speaker 2: find me a Grand Laga one the I think it's
Speaker 2: the one thirty five twenty five.
Speaker 1: We should talk off air, yah yah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So so you can find them new in Switzerland for
Speaker 2: retail and you still have to pay like a nine percent.
Speaker 2: It's insane. So this was my other longa chop which,
Speaker 2: by the way, this is even more dressy than the Platinum.
Speaker 2: That's almost like a sporty version that watch. And I
Speaker 2: don't want to order it from a site I'm not
Speaker 2: familiar with. Ye, And it turns out that the guys
Speaker 2: that have this watch are an Aventura. I'm at a
Speaker 2: different conference in Miami, and I do my gig. I
Speaker 2: come literally off the stage into an uber run to Aventura,
Speaker 2: look at the watch. They wouldn't take a credit card,
Speaker 2: but I mean it's a whole room full of well
Speaker 2: if they take a credit card, they could charge a
Speaker 2: credit card for you, blah blah blah. But they weren't
Speaker 2: set up to do it there, and so get home
Speaker 2: wired and the next day the watch showed up. So
Speaker 2: this is my I couldn't get my grin langa one
Speaker 2: but and it was forty two. And I'm like, now,
Speaker 2: how often you kick yourself.
Speaker 1: With ye all the time? Yeah? Runs out all the time.
Speaker 2: We can help get that watch even and the the
Speaker 2: other Daytona. And I don't want to make this all
Speaker 2: about my watch shopping, so so I do this with cars. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I have way too many cars. I'll watch a car
Speaker 2: come out, I'll watch the price wobble, and I'm like,
Speaker 2: come to Papa a little lower. And I bought a
Speaker 2: couple of nice things during the beginning of the pandemic
Speaker 2: when people are freaking out, and I'm looking at the
Speaker 2: Daytona in the white, golden blue face, which was I
Speaker 2: think twenty six, twenty eight retail, it was twenty, it
Speaker 2: was nineteen, it was eighteen. I'm buyer at sixteen and
Speaker 2: then the lockdown happens and it's forty five, fifty five,
Speaker 2: sixty five. It just goes nuts. I'm like, for two grand,
Speaker 2: and look.
Speaker 1: What you did? You free. Nobody ever could have guessed though.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so hold aside these million dollar watches, these one
Speaker 2: hundred thousand dollars watches, A newbie interested in watches, how
Speaker 2: did they get involved in watch collecting?
Speaker 1: Where would you send somebody like that?
Speaker 2: Really?
Speaker 3: I think, you know, kind of riffing off of something
Speaker 3: Ben said earlier, which is this kind of there's a
Speaker 3: sense of like the imitation culture, like you want something
Speaker 3: because you see other people having. For me, I personally
Speaker 3: think the best way to build a collection is just
Speaker 3: really follow your passion. Get out there, educate yourself, learn read,
Speaker 3: visit a few retailers, you know, maybe maybe check out
Speaker 3: an auction, you know, catalog to see what's what's considered
Speaker 3: to have a history or provenance of Just do your
Speaker 3: research and then ultimately, you know, pick something that.
Speaker 1: Really speaks to you.
Speaker 3: If there's a way to again weave some sort of
Speaker 3: milestone or personal aspect into the watch. I think one
Speaker 3: thing I often think about is, of all the things
Speaker 3: you put on your person, a watch is one of
Speaker 3: the very few that will actually typically have a story
Speaker 3: associated to it, like your sneakers, your jeans, or your
Speaker 3: sweater typically will not. So I don't know, then there's
Speaker 3: something just special about that. Like like Ben said, they're
Speaker 3: sort of like totems of our lives in some way,
Speaker 3: and a collector, I think, you know, we'll always remember
Speaker 3: her his first watch. I think it's just, you know,
Speaker 3: it's worth it to take the time to do the
Speaker 3: research and really wait for that thing that so to
Speaker 3: speaks your name.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I would certainly echo all that, but I
Speaker 1: would also say listen to actual experts in a field,
Speaker 1: not the guy you found on YouTube or the gal
Speaker 1: you found on Instagram or TikTok. There's so many people
Speaker 1: out there that are purporting to be experts in this space,
Speaker 1: mostly on social media, YouTube, TikTok, etcetera, that have no idea.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're just kids that think they understand things.
Speaker 1: And to be clear, I was one of those kids.
Speaker 1: I've since put in fifteen years to ensure that I'm
Speaker 1: not one of those kids. And there are people out
Speaker 1: there that really know watches, and then there are people
Speaker 1: out there that really don't and pretend to understand the source.
Speaker 1: I mean, going back to journalism school, like know your source,
Speaker 1: know who's saying what and why, know who's a retailer,
Speaker 1: of so and so, you know who owns twenty of these,
Speaker 1: so they're trying to build it up. Really understand why
Speaker 1: people are saying things that they.
Speaker 2: Are, and any particular brands you would send people, Just
Speaker 2: like I always tell people someone asked me about to watch,
Speaker 2: I'm like, hey, go look at Saco.
Speaker 1: Say if you're.
Speaker 2: Wrong, YEA, spend four hundred dollars.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Sekos Watch System fifty one self finding watch for
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty bucks. We sell them on Hoodinky.
Speaker 1: They're amazing, they really are.
Speaker 2: And and the next step from there, and then we'll
Speaker 2: go then then Hamilton, Hamilton field Watches really handsome. Wow,
Speaker 2: great watch, solid, solid, long lasting. I agree, all right,
Speaker 2: Now I'm going to take you one last one. I
Speaker 2: keep saying last one. So you go past Hamilton, where
Speaker 2: do you go?
Speaker 1: Tag tag Hoyer, Uh huh, you know a Tag Hoyer,
Speaker 1: Aqua Racer, a Tag Hoyer, Monaco.
Speaker 2: Even those are great watches. Carreras, they're a little bit
Speaker 2: more money, but great watches. Great, Jeff, anything from.
Speaker 3: You, I would say, you know, I love the Hamilton pick.
Speaker 3: I think the Hamilton field Watch is like a total classic.
Speaker 2: I bought their new Krono by the way, is really
Speaker 2: crazy handsome for what it is. Yeah, and very reasonably priced. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I bought the Field watch for my brother and one
Speaker 3: for myself kind of when I joined Hodinky as a
Speaker 3: nice little celebration of that moment. And then if I
Speaker 3: were going to go one level, I'd say the Tutor
Speaker 3: black Bay fifty eight, and we talked a little bit about.
Speaker 1: Nine to keep up.
Speaker 3: For me, it's perfect kind of size, it's it's a
Speaker 3: great everyday watch.
Speaker 2: They have a very vintage vibe to it. That's kind
Speaker 2: of what attracted me to them. Guys, thank you so
Speaker 2: much for such a generous spot with your time. Next
Speaker 2: time we do this, I'll have a camera crew, we'll
Speaker 2: do talking watch U I'll just do I'll just grab
Speaker 2: a dozen watches from people here and thank you guys
Speaker 2: for being so generous with your time. If you enjoy
Speaker 2: this conversation, well, be sure and check out any of
Speaker 2: the previous four hundred and ninety three such discussions we've
Speaker 2: had over the previous nine years. You can find those
Speaker 2: at YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you find.
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