As the founder of Oliver & Clarke, a luxury watch resale business, Linden Lazarus is well versed in the sale and purchase of high-end timepieces. But until recently, he said, he often wondered about watch repairs.
“If someone would say, ‘Do you have a watchmaker that I can go to,’ many times I would have to refer them to a dingy storefront in downtown Los Angeles, where in the back there’s a guy that can fix their watch,” he said by phone from his home in that city’s more salubrious Laurel Canyon neighborhood.
Mr. Lazarus and a new business partner, Will Haering, now have a solution: WatchCheck, a website that debuted Tuesday. They say it will provide easy-to-arrange repairs and maintenance for more than 202 brands and 38,721 models.
“I thought, ‘There must be a way that this could be optimized, so the consumer could have not just an OK experience, but a white-glove experience,’” Mr. Lazarus said.
The website’s streamlined design seems to fit the kind of high-end watch brands that its founders hope to attract. Videos that describe the process, for example, have voice-overs in British accents and show watchmakers in lab coats, deep in concentration.
After a client arranges service online, the company sends a kit that includes a padded gold-embossed box for the watch and a discreet brown box for shipping (in the United States, to start with). The packaging costs WatchCheck about $38 per timepiece, Mr. Lazarus said.
The fees, which are paid during the initial booking, range from $200 to polish a watch with a leather strap to $2,850 for full service on a highly complicated timepiece. The prices include insurance of as much as $35,000 during shipping — a customer with a more costly watch may opt for supplemental insurance — and as much as $1 million during the work itself.
Repairs and service will be done by Stoll & Company, based in Dayton, Ohio, an authorized service center for Baume & Mercier, Frederique Constant and more than 25 other brands. The company owns a percentage of WatchCheck, but it declined to specify how much.
The affiliation with Stoll, which was founded in 1982, may be central to WatchCheck’s initial appeal “because the trust needs to be there,” said David Flett, the editor in chief at Beyond the Dial, a horology website and podcast. “I see that as the main issue when people are looking for independent watchmakers.”
Mr. Lazarus said he had been considering establishing a technologically driven watch repair business for about a year when, in mid-2023, he met Mr. Haering, a serial entrepreneur and computer coder. They each invested $100,000 to start the business, and lined up investors.
Mr. Lazarus and Mr. Haering said they intended to grow the WatchCheck brand, eventually adding more services. (The company is not affiliated with an Android app of the same name, which determines a watch’s timekeeping accuracy.)
Why a website, when most start-ups seem to favor an app? Mr. Haering said that customers “service watches frequently, but not enough to have that app installed as a fixture on their phone.”
“For us, it just wasn’t worth it,” he continued. “It was much easier to deliver a very, very mobile optimized experience, but through watchcheck.com.”
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