- Austen Chu, 26, is the cofounder of Wristcheck, a platform for buying and selling pre-owned watches.
- He launched the company in 2020 and opened a brick-and-mortar store in a mall in Hong Kong in 2021.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Austen Chu, the 26-year-old cofounder of Wristcheck. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I've been addicted to watches since I was a kid growing up in Shanghai. My grandparents were math professors, so I was taught numbers before letters.
When I started collecting, there wasn't a huge watch collecting community in China. Watch collecting wasn't in pop culture, like it is now. Everything I learned came from nerdy forums that didn't even have photographs.
I bought my first mechanical watch with money I earned from DJing when I was 15. It took me a year to save up for a secondhand Hamilton Jazzmaster Face 2 Face, which costs around $6,700 new, while secondhand is a few thousand dollars. I'd contact sellers who said they had it and they didn't, or I'd visit their stores to find the condition of the watch was terrible.
When I got to college, I decided I wanted to fix this problem, so I started building my own watch community online and went on to start a watch consignment business called Wristcheck in 2020. We've had more than $80 million in watches consigned to us since we launched, and we've sold watches worth more than $1 million multiple times.
I started posting about my favorite watches on my own Instagram as a teenager
My friends weren't interested in watches, and the older collectors didn't take me seriously because of my age, so I didn't have that many followers.
I started buying and selling secondhand watches as a hobby. I didn't have a huge collection — I'd only own three watches at any time. I also got scammed a few times. Not everyone was sending the mint-condition watches they sent photographs of. This led to me owning something that wasn't as valuable as I thought it was, but I was still determined to continue collecting.
During my freshman year at NYU Shanghai, I launched @horoloupe, an Instagram page dedicated solely to rare watches and limited-edition pieces. I would visit watch stores and post images of anything that caught my attention. I decided to make the page anonymous so no one knew a teenager was behind it.
By graduation, I'd grown the account to 30,000 followers. I started working for a finance company after school, but I was posting constantly, and the limited-edition pieces I was photographing were getting lots of likes. I decided to stop being anonymous, and my profile as a watch enthusiast grew.
The ageism never stopped — I just turned being a Gen-Z watch collector into an advantage. It wasn't long before brands were approaching me for collaborations and magazines asked me for interviews.
Audemars Piguet reached out and asked me to premier one of its new models on my Instagram page. Then when I met Francois-Henry Bennahmias, the CEO of Audemars Piguet, at an event in late 2018, I asked whether they thought about creating a limited-edition timepiece for China, and they decided to go for it. I was even more shocked when they asked me to collaborate with them on the titanium Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar, one of which sold at auction for 300,000 Swiss francs, or around $326,402.
As I started working with watch brands, it became clear to me I needed to make a change
I was still working until 10 p.m. each night at the finance company. In 2018, with some savings from my finance job, I decided to quit. I wanted to help other people my age navigate the watch world and create a presale site for Gen Z watch collectors.
When I was being interviewed by Hypebeast in Hong Kong, I met my future cofounder and ecommerce expert Sean Wong. When I told my friends about my idea, they thought I was crazy, but Sean could see that it would work.
By July 2020, Sean had left his job, and I'd moved to Hong Kong to launch the brand. I knew that Hong Kong would be the perfect launch pad as it had been the number-one export market for Swiss watches for over a decade, and it had no sales tax on luxury goods.
Our aim for the brand was to make the buying and selling process of watches as transparent as possible
Whereas an auction house can make 20-30% from buyers and 10% from sellers, we would take 8% from sellers and 4% from buyers. We'd also authenticate the watches with the brands directly, which helped us build relationships with them.
We're a consignment-based company, so we don't buy the watches. We only give the seller the money once we've received payment from the buyer. This means we don't have our money invested in watches and we can focus our spending on growth. Until October 2022, we didn't spend any money on marketing.
In March 2021, we listed 80 watches for sale priced from $5,000 to $500,000. My Instagram account gave us a few thousand followers at the beginning and then further interest was gained with media attention. The two of us did everything — taking photographs of the watches, writing the product descriptions, and sending invoices out of our coworking space in Hong Kong. When we rang up our first sale for a vintage Patek Philippe Nautilus 3800, we were ecstatic.
While our goal is to be mostly online, we knew that a store would help build trust with customers who were leaving their expensive watches with us
My own experience in the secondary market was kind of awful and nowhere near glamorous. The stores were dingy basements in sketchy parts of town, and watches were laid out like dead fish.
I wanted our store to take inspiration from an art gallery, where they have knowledgeable gallerists, you get a glass of champagne, and secondhand art is given the same level of respect as brand-new art. While rents were a little cheaper during the pandemic, opening a state-of-the-art store in a mall in Hong Kong was expensive, but we knew it would be worth it to help build trust with customers. Everything from finding a location to finding staff was a learning curve.
On September 1, 2021, we opened our store at the Landmark Atrium in Hong Kong. It was one of the best days for the brand as we saw our dreams come to fruition.
We now have 30 members of staff, including a creative team that produces video content for brand collaborations; a dedicated watch concierge team who previously worked for companies such as Piaget and the watch department at Bonhams; and a tech team.
I wake up at 5:30 a.m. so I can answer emails and chat with collectors in Europe and the US. I might start the day with a breakfast meeting with a collector or a brand, but I can still be working until 10 p.m. In my downtime I'm still thinking about watches, but as I've just got a puppy, I now spend time going for hikes and discovering new places in Hong Kong.
Until June 2022, we'd bootstrapped the brand with our savings
We now plan to launch in mainland China, so we decided to seek funding. A lot of our clients are very wealthy, so attracting investors was organic. When we sold our fifth watch, a client asked if he could invest in the company. We didn't take them up on it at that point, but we reached back out.
By November 2022, we'd raised $8 million, with our lead investors being Gobi Partners, who manage the Alibaba Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Investment Fund.
The money raised will be used to launch an app in the second quarter of 2023, and we're also focused on improving our AI by building a pricing tool that'll show you what the last three versions of your watch sold at and whether your watch is real or fake.