How two founders built a marketplace for trading watches
Chatting with the founders of Subdial about building a no-code marketplace, learning about your customers, and the great obsession with vintage timepieces
Commerce Thinking is a regular newsletter sharing stories of those building the next wave of new luxury brands.
The art of curating timepieces
Vintage timepieces have a strange allure that few other consumer goods can match. But the market for buying, selling, and trading these rare watches has remained stuck in the past - until now.
Enter Subdial, the modern destination for watch aficionados who crave something more.
Founded by a team of passionate horology enthusiasts, Subdial offers a curated selection of luxury watches for sale. From Rolex to Patek Philippe to Audemars Piguet, their collection features some of the most sought-after timepieces on the market. Each watch comes with detailed information about its history, condition, and specifications, so you know exactly what you're getting.
But Subdial isn't just a marketplace—it's also a community. Their blog is a treasure trove of information for watch enthusiasts, with articles on the history and mechanics of watches, as well as profiles of notable figures in the industry.
Whether you're looking to add to your collection or simply want to learn more about the world of horology, Subdial has got you covered.
We sat down with the Subdial founders to chat about all things timepieces, the tech its built on, and where they’re taking their watch empire.
Honestly, it’s impressive what you’ve built in a short time. Tell us about Subdial and how you landed on this business model.
We both come from data and digital product design backgrounds. Admittedly, we’ve always been wildly passionate about watches, so we eventually started Subdial together.
Our belief was that there was an opportunity to shift how the trading experience works for pre-owned watches, leveraging data to change how buyers and sellers interact.
Ultimately, these improvements would reduce the cost of buying and selling for all; and the rest is history.
What is it about timepieces that seem more justifiable to buy, sell, and exchange the older they get? It’s a bit different from how the luxury apparel market works.
Yeah, so watches are often lumped together with objects like wine, cars, art, sneakers, handbags, and so on. These are examples of luxury goods that can also form some sort of asset class.
And whilst there is some overlap, watches are a unique category in that you can consume them daily without devaluing them.
That’s clearly not true with wine and also not true with sneakers, handbags, or cars. The more those things are used, the less they are worth, and it only gets worse over time.
Art is probably the closest proxy, but the thing that really makes watches accessible is the ability to be precise and transparent around price.
No original artwork is the same, so it’s hard to say exactly how much you should be paying for work. With watches, particularly the most ‘blue chip’ references, it’s possible to be very precise and open about where they trade.
That actually reduces the barrier to entry for a new collector and makes the learning curve much less steep.
That makes more sense. And having been at this awhile, you’ve learned about your customers in the process. What’s that been like?
It took us a while to discover who our core customer is, that is the watch enthusiast or collector, and less the one-off buyer. The needs and interests of those two groups are quite different.
The one-time buyer really cares about things like warranty duration, interest-free finance, and a shiny showroom.
These are things that help you deal with any concerns you may have about spending a lot of money on a pre-owned watch where there is an information asymmetry.
The enthusiast market cares about different things.
You're always looking to buy something new and probably always thinking about what you're going to sell to pay for that next purchase. Being able to do that seamlessly and without losing a fortune on each trade really matters.
Finding rarer pieces also becomes increasingly important, as do small nuances around the condition, so you want to deal with someone who understands these things.
100%. Part of what makes Subdial great is your tech platform, which you’ve built to be lean. What shaped your thinking there, and how has that approach shifted over time?
We’re big believers in operating low-to-no code when building products initially. The goal is to experiment quickly, trying out different approaches at a low cost.
The one exception to this approach was our data stack, partly because this was a big bet from day one and partly because there is no Shopify for building a watch market index!
Leveraging tools like Airtable, Shopify, Zapier, and so on has allowed us to build quite sophisticated systems inexpensively early on.
It also enabled us to automate a lot of manual work that, as a result, has kept our development and operations teams relatively small compared to our peers.
Well, it’s clearly working, and now you’ve taken on strategic investment to grow further. What does that mean for the business?
The investment will help us take our platform to the next level. We are in the process of releasing a whole new platform (that we built) from scratch.
Tools like Shopify are brilliant for eCommerce, but there are so many niche requirements in building a two-sided marketplace, particularly one that has a pricing model running through it, a watch workshop, a photography department, and so on.
We’ve invested in the team here with more data and tech roles, and we’ve built a new workshop for servicing, repairs, and authentication, all of which is in-house.
We’re also focused on expanding the watches we offer at any given time.
We provide liquidity in roughly half of the transactions that go through Subdial (meaning, we actively buy the watch to facilitate part-exchange for example, or simply to allow the customer to cash out in 24 hours).
Any guidance you might offer to other founders on their own journies in the consumer world?
It’s important to remember that there is no ‘normal’ in the consumer market; there is always some challenge you need to deal with.
First, we had Brexit (when 45% of our sales were to the EU, now <3%) then Covid, now likely a global recession. Each of those things has meant really big changes to our customer base, the investment market, or both.
We’ve been lucky, however, that often those things have brought unexpected opportunities as well.