Hodinkee, the watch enthusiast website based in Manhattan that has helped spread the gospel of mechanical watchmaking since its founding in 2008, has a new owner.
On Friday, the Watches of Switzerland Group, one of the world’s largest watch retailers with more than 220 multibrand and brand stores in Britain and the United States, announced that it had acquired the media company, which includes a website, a magazine, a brand partnerships division and an insurance business. Neither company would disclose the terms of the deal.
“We have fielded a few dozen inquiries about acquisition over the years ranging from other retailers to luxury groups to media companies to private equity, and this is the first one that felt really good,” Benjamin Clymer, the founder of Hodinkee, said last month in a video interview from the company’s office.
“The U.S. is now the No. 1 market in the world for watches,” he said. “It was not pre-Hodinkee, or pre-Watches of Switzerland being in the U.S. It feels like we’ve got two companies that together really help elevate the business for everybody.”
With headquarters in Leicester, England, Watches of Switzerland is marking its centennial this year: In 1924, Maurice Lane, the founder of G&M Lane & Co. in London, began selling watches by mail order. The Watches of Switzerland Group entered the American market in 2017, when it acquired Mayors, a fine jewelry retailer that at the time had 17 stores across the southeastern United States. The following year it opened a Watches of Switzerland store in New York City, its first in the United States.
David Hurley, the group’s deputy chief executive, said he and Brian Duffy, the group’s chief executive, had known Mr. Clymer for several years, but the discussion of what he called “a more substantial partnership” only began in December 2023.
Mr. Hurley credited Hodinkee with helping to grow the watch business in the United States by “telling stories in a way that was appealing to a younger clientele,” and he praised its popular limited edition collaborations with brands such as Casio, Hermès and TAG Heuer.
“We feel like there’s a perfect marriage, in terms of their content, their limited editions, the traffic that they drive,” Mr. Hurley said of Hodinkee. “And then we’ll couple that with what we do well, which is retailing.”
Pop-Ups and E-Commerce
In 2008 Mr. Clymer was a 25-year-old project manager at the investment bank UBS when he founded Hodinkee as a personal blog to share stories about wristwatches he loved, beginning with his maternal grandfather’s Omega Speedmaster. (The site’s name is a play on the Czech word hodinky, meaning wristwatch.)
Five years later, Mr. Clymer said, the site was attracting 10,000 readers a day, and soon, the attention of watch-loving celebrities such as the musician John Mayer, who in 2013 appeared in Hodinkee’s first “Talking Watches” video which has been seen 2.4 million times. Since then, the popular editorial franchise has featured boldface names including Ed Sheeran, Brooke Shields and the celebrity chef Daniel Boulud.
In 2012, Hodinkee began selling straps and other watch accessories, its first foray into e-commerce. “When we started to do live events, including pop-ups at Harrods in London and Bergdorf Goodman here in the city, people would come in and buy what we were selling, literally,” Mr. Clymer said. “Those were meaningful moments where I said, ‘Wait a minute, our audience is different than others.’”
By 2015, the Hodinkee Shop was selling limited-edition timepieces created in partnership with brands; the following year the shop expanded to include collectible objects and vintage timepieces. The real coup, however, came in 2017, when it became one of the watch world’s first authorized online dealers, eventually selling more than 40 brands, including Breitling, Omega and Vacheron Constantin.
Return to Basics
With the sale comes Mr. Clymer’s official return to the helm of Hodinkee, as its president. He had stepped away from the business in December 2020, citing personal reasons, and hired Toby Bateman, the former managing director of the men’s fashion e-tailer Mr Porter, to serve as chief executive, while he retained the title of executive chairman.
That same month, Hodinkee raised $40 million from investors — including LVMH Luxury Ventures, the venture capital arm of the luxury giant LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton; the former NFL quarterback Tom Brady and Mr. Mayer — an effort managed by the Chernin Group, a private equity firm in Los Angeles. At that point, the company was valued at a reported $100 million, much of that based on its e-commerce business.
Mr. Bateman, who had difficulty traveling from his home in London because of pandemic restrictions, stepped down in December 2021.
His departure — and replacement by Jeffery Fowler, the former president for the Americas at the online luxury e-tailer Farfetch — marked the start of a period of financial turmoil for Hodinkee. In February 2021 — as pandemic-fueled buying sparked a frenzy in pre-owned watch sales, especially for popular steel sport watches by brands like Rolex and Patek Philippe — Hodinkee acquired Crown & Caliber, a watch reseller in Atlanta, for a reported $46 million.
“The idea of being in pre-owned was something that we long toyed with,” Mr. Clymer said. “It didn’t feel like a necessary part of our business until the pandemic, when it became very clear that that was the market.”
Shortly after the acquisition, however, the market shifted. During the first half of 2022, the start of the Ukraine war and the crypto collapse triggered a correction, leaving the company with a large stock of depreciating pre-owned inventory.
In July, Mr. Clymer published an open letter on the website alluding to media reports published elsewhere about the company’s overspending, financial mismanagement and multiple rounds of layoffs. He then outlined his plans to divest Hodinkee of its e-commerce operations and to return to its roots in watch coverage, with the occasional limited-edition issue.
“Today I am here to tell you that moving forward Hodinkee’s primary focus will once again be creating the world’s most detailed, engaging, and entertaining watch content,” Mr. Clymer wrote in the letter. “Sorry, but you’re gonna have to live with fewer emails offering $300 off your next pre-owned Rolex hitting your inbox.”
In an email following his recent interview, Mr. Clymer wrote that Crown & Caliber had been sold, but declined to give any details: “The C&C business itself was absorbed by Hodinkee over the past few years — and the brand has indeed been sold. It is not our place to announce that, but you will see it in the market again, and we are happy with where it has ended up.”
Both Mr. Clymer and Mr. Hurley said Hodinkee’s staff, which now totals about 35 people, would remain intact and that its editorial team would remain independent of Watches of Switzerland oversight.
“But at a point in time,” Mr. Hurley said, “when you click on the Hodinkee Shop, you will see the full range of the product that WatchesofSwitzerland.com carries. We are going to do some work over the next several months to make that effectively seamless.”
“Making It Cool”
Reflecting earlier on Hodinkee’s impact on the watch industry, Julien Tornare, the chief executive of Hublot, wrote in an email that it was “partly responsible for fueling the frenzy of watch collecting and making it cool.”
Collectors around the world would not disagree. Punit Mehta, the founder of RedBar India, a chapter of the global watch collector organization RedBar, described Hodinkee as “an alma mater” for watch enthusiasts. “Ben revolutionized how we looked at watches, helping people in India and globally make more informed decisions but keeping in mind our love for them,” Mr. Mehta wrote in a text.
Mr. Clymer said he intended for Hodinkee to honor that legacy under its new owner. “The goal is for it to continue to be the voice that defines the culture of watchmaking globally,” he said.
“It’s more about watches than ever before,” he added. “That’s the beautiful thing about a partnership with Watches of Switzerland. Watches is in the title.”
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