Hodinkee's Content Commerce Success

Kevin Rose shares the story of how Hodinkee grew from a small watch blog merger to a $100M+ revenue company.

"Ben Klimer created Hodinkee the blog, and I created Watchville which was an aggregator app that brought together different sources so people could read watch content on their mobile phone. Most watch sites didn't have mobile versions back then - they were just on old publishing software that was horrible.

I had a lot of eyeballs, with some of the biggest collectors using the product. Hodinkee was the most prominent source of content, so I talked to Ben and said 'Hey, you don't have the tech team here, let's merge and combine forces.'

We merged the two companies together. He was 3-4 people and I was 3-4 people. I moved to New York, became CEO. At the time they were doing maybe $1.5-2 million a year in revenue, just enough to do payroll. We grew it from there, turned on ecommerce, and started creating partnerships with big watch brands.

It was still relatively unknown back then whether people would spend large sums of money over Apple Pay. I remember someone from Apple told us they had seen a $250,000 transaction come through Apple Pay on an American Express - that was the largest known transaction at that time, for a sight-unseen vintage Rolex.

Now we're over $100 million in revenue. New luxury watches are double-digit billions of dollars a year in terms of market size. It's a big industry that's not as apparent in the states - when you go overseas to Europe, watches are so much more of a thing that is worn versus smartwatches or no watch at all here in the states."