I apologize. I do not like to talk about myself, and most of you are not interested in reading about me. But for years, I consistently get some form of the question, “How did you get into the watch business?” Whether from a young person looking for his own path, or a friend who’s simply interested, here’s the outline of the story. Let’s do this once and get it over with…
I always loved watches. My mother, who was single for much of my childhood, would bring me to the local jewelry store as a regular activity. She would look at jewelry and I would wander over to the watch case. I eventually went into finance, and in my early 20’s had put together enough money to buy myself a nice watch. My budget was around $5,000 and this was supposed to be my one watch forever. I thought Rolex was for mainstream suckers and figured real watch guys must know of something much better. So I found the internet forums, which is where the journey really began.
First Timezone. It was a whole new world. Each forum at any given time has its own darlings. At this point it was the Blancpain Chronograph on X71 for under $10k, the Lange 1 over $10k, and the Datograph and Dufour Simplicity as grail watches, mainly because of Steve G’s amazing photos which were lightyears ahead of any other amature watch photography at the time. So, influenced by the posters there, I found my first watch: A Blancpain Aqualung Chronograph
Unfortunately, I had caught the bug. My plan to buy a be-all-end-all watch right out of the gate was DOA. I went deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole and eventually found ThePuristS forum, which was even nerdier and more hardcore than Timezone and was responsible for launching much of the Independent Watch scene we know today. I didn’t have that much money to spend, unfortunately, but for my whole life I had been buying and selling things (starting with baseball cards when I was 5) to slowly trade into the really expensive stuff I always wanted. Within a year or so, I bought my first three Independent watches: an URWERK 103.03, Journe Resonance PT/YG, and Paul Gerber. I was hooked. Also, having recently moved to Los Angeles, I made friends with the PuristS group who would have meetups and dinners with the watchmakers who came to town. This is where I met Max Busser.
Max came through town a few times between the end of his tenure at Harry Winston Rare Timepieces and the launch of MB&F. We hit it off at a dinner after he saw me pull up in my Ariel Atom. The watch scene at that time was much older and much more conservative than today. There were very few other young people around. He and I stayed in touch and would get together whenever he came through town. After the launch of HM1 we had a coffee together. He was frustrated in the US — didn’t have retail or press connections and didn’t particularly enjoy the American style of business. I had no connections either, but by that time I was a pretty well known collector on the forums and was full of enthusiasm. We both hated the typical brand rep approach where a hired gun in a suit repeats a press release. I pitched to him that I would do it: I would start MB&F North America, find all the inroads, and promote the company as someone who really knew watches and really cared about what he was doing. Aside from having no money to pay me and no watches for me to promote with, he thought it was a good enough idea to try, and so we made it work. While that saga could be its own series of posts (financial crisis a couple months later, I bought my own HM2 to promote with, etc etc), the rest is truly history. This was my first foray into the watch world as a professional and it was at the top of the world — an executive with one of the coolest watch startups of the century.
After 5 years, that job was mainly done. The brand was firmly established and no longer in “startup” mode. I never sought to run a watch brand, only to help something I believed in. There were merely a few brands on earth that I would have been interested in doing work like that for and the others were signed with US Distributors, a whole different business model. So I closed that chapter and opened the next: TickTocking.
As I mentioned, I had been buying and selling for as long as I can remember. In fact, I was basically doing my current job when I was 6. In all this time I had resisted becoming a watch dealer though. I’m not super motivated by money (to say not at all would be a lie, but I need another motivating force). Ultimately I realized that independent watches needed help. The brands were bad at communicating and the market remained close to non-existent. I decided I could use the skills I had honed as President of MB&F North America — the ability to connect normal people to haute horlogerie and share my passion — to promote independent watches as a whole all while buying and selling the stuff I truly loved. So that is the purpose of TickTocking — the inventory, the YouTube, this Substack, the Instagram. It is crazy to spend this sort of money on watches. But there are great people making great things and they need a healthy market in order to continue. I obviously cannot take credit for all of it, but the market for the brands I love has grown immensely since I started, and I’m proud to have contributed in whatever way I have. Getting interested and following the good stuff has led me to meet lifelong friends all over the world and made for an interesting life.
For those of you who ask me this question for career advice, while my path may not be repeatable, the main lesson is to be truly interested and approach your business from that point of view. I will keep evangelizing for great watches and getting grails on my customers’ wrists because I know that excitement. Let’s do a deal today!