The authentication experts of Bezel spill all the details.
Quaid Walker, Chase Pion, and Darryl Johnson built Bezel on time. Or, more specifically, on the telling of time.
The trio launched Bezel, a tech platform that specializes in the buying, selling and — most importantly — authentication of luxury watches when they noticed there wasn’t a resource for new and younger collectors.
In the last 20 years, the market for luxury watches has skyrocketed, in part thanks to celebrity collectors including John Legend, NBA champ Kyle Kuzma, and DJ Steve Aoki (all three invested in Bezel’s seed funding round). And then there’s none other than Rihanna. “She wore a $700,000 Jacob & Co as a choker around her neck to Pharell’s Louis Vuitton show,” Chase says. “It’s awesome to see watches penetrating pop culture like that — and also seeing a female collector.”
Bezel recently joined Equinox Circle with the launch of a performance-centric collection of one-of-a-kind pieces. We sat down with all three founders to hear why watch collecting is the thing for pretty much anyone with an eye for design and luxury.
How did Bezel start?
Quaid Walker: I spent most of my career at Google as one of the earliest employees. I was a designer and very much focused on the product side — I worked on Google TV — so I got to watch it scale out. While I was there, that was when I became very much obsessed with watches. I bought my first one with my first bonus. I was just this college kid then. But that’s what ultimately led me down this path.
Chase Pion: And I come from the finance side — I worked at a couple of different hedge funds — but also, Quaid and I grew up down the street from each other in the Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles. We’ve been best friends since third grade. We grew up playing competitive soccer together and surfing together a lot. And I’ve had a big passion for watches since I was 11 years old for…no good reason. I just used to pour through watch magazines and read all about them because I didn’t have any money to buy one, obviously. It’s always been a passion of mine.
Darryl Johnson: Just like Quaid, I spent most of my career at Google as well. You’d assume that’s how we met, but we met coincidentally before that. Anyway, I was a software engineer over there, and then eventually we took it from there with Bezel.
And did you [Darryl] come in with a passion for watches as well?
Darryl: People ask me that all the time. I wouldn't say I had a passion for luxury watches, which is interesting given the space we're in. But I remember spending, like, $300 on this watch as a poor college student because I had to have it on my wrist. And since starting here, I’ve gotten all the lectures. I’ve really become a collector with these guys.
Chase, you said that you got into watches at age 11 for “no good reason,” but obviously there are so many people who are drawn to watch collecting — hence why Bezel exists. What do you think is so appealing about them?
Chase: I've tried to figure this out, and for me, it’s changed over time. When I was young, I was a big Lego builder. I’ve always loved the tangible nature of putting a bunch of pieces together to create something, and so watches always perplexed me — the idea that you could put a bunch of pieces together to create something that would then be able to capture time correctly, and time is such an ethereal concept. Since we’ve started Bezel, and as I’ve started collecting more, it’s definitely more about aesthetics — watches are one of the few things out there that's a men's piece of jewelry in terms of like expressing yourself to others. I think it's become an amazing way to start conversations and connect with people who are passionate about the same thing.
Quaid: We’ve also talked to a lot of buyers about this. They tend to fall into three categories: Passion for the craft and the mechanical nature of it; rational investment in pieces that store value similar to purchasing art; and then there's this third bucket, which I don't think gets the same love as the first bucket but is equally important: flex culture. “I've established myself, and I've arrived at a moment in life, so I bought that gold Rolex.”
We’re in this tech-centric, AI-hyped world, but there’s actually been an increase in demand for analog watches over the last few decades. What’s going on there?
Quaid: It's almost like a breath of fresh air in the sense that everything else in life has become exceedingly more digital. Prior to starting Bezel, Darryl and I were staring at computer screens all day at Google, and being able to have something that juxtaposes that in a romanticized way is intriguing. The pandemic played a role as well. A lot of folks are generally more interested in collecting now, so that brought new types of buyers to the market. And then watches have become pop-culturally relevant. There’s been adoption by celebrities, athletes, musicians, and actors in the last 20 years or so. And so it's just more top of mind.
Why is it that buying watches secondhand is actually more appealing to people than buying them directly from, say, Rolex? It seems like it’s actually more luxurious to buy one-of-a-kind vintage watches.
Quaid: Yeah, this is a particularly interesting thing about watches. There are similarities to certain aspects of fashion, particularly things like the Birkin bag. But there’s something that many people don’t know about this market: If you wanted to buy, say, a Rolex Daytona and you walked into the authorized dealer and you’re ready to pay whatever — $14,000 for the watch — in reality, you’re pushed away by a massive waitlist of maybe three to five years.
So that’s where the secondary market comes in, and that’s kind of why we started the whole business as new collectors struggling to get access. We sell pre-owned watches but also unworn watches. And we have all sorts of collectors. There are the collectors that value the notion of provenance and want to go further and further back in years of collecting, and then we have collectors who only want modern watches that have never been touched by someone else because they want to write their own path. There are people who only collect dive watches. And then you get the watches like a Daytona that was worn by Paul Newman and had been engraved by his wife with this whole beautiful storytelling aspect. Every collector is different.
Who is Bezel’s ideal customer?
Chase: The goal is to be able to serve everyone in the market, but we do reach a particular group that no one else reaches, which is first-time buyers. Look, the watch industry is unapproachable and intimidating, which we found when we were starting collecting. And so what we've tried to do is make Bezel a place where there are no dumb questions. We're here to invite you into watch collecting, no matter how much context you have. I think that is relatively unique, not just because of how we interact with our customers and the content that we put out, but also because authentication is so important. Until we came along, it was very much “buyer beware” and to feel confident about a purchase you had to kind of be a watch expert and do a bunch of research on the seller that you were buying from. There were just so many hoops that you had to jump through.
I didn’t realize how important authentication is in this industry until prepping for this interview.
Chase: It’s so, so important. The question we often get asked is: How many watches are really that fake that you spot? Right? And, you know, it's anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of the watches that we see. So we're protecting buyers on a daily basis. These are some of the biggest purchases anyone's made in their life other than a house or a car. And so the protection is just so important, especially given the fact that the issues are just so rampant. Our overarching goal is really to create a paradigm shift in the industry, where people who are selling watches need to be held to a higher standard than they are currently.
How many people do you have working on authenticating these watches?
Chase: We've got a whole team of authentication specialists and watchmakers. That’s important — most other services have only one or the other. An authentication specialist is essentially a watch historian, so they’re looking at all the parts and confirming they haven’t been changed. The watchmaker is more on the functionality side, and they work hand-in-hand with the authenticator to make sure the mechanical nature of the watches is sound.
This last question is hopefully a fun one: Do each of you have a bucket list watch? Like a watch that you dream of having in your collection someday?
Quaid: How long is this list? Actually, there’s an industry term for it which is “grail watch.” Mine, personally, is the Audemars Piguet 15202 salmon dial.
Chase: Mine’s the MB&F Legacy Machine Perpetual Evo Green.
Darryl: And I’m going to go with the Patek Philippe 5196R-001.
The Exclusive Bezel Equinox Circle Offer:
Equinox members recieve a dedicated Equinox concierge that can source any timepiece upon request, $250 Bezel credit toward purchase, and preferred pricing on warranty products; plus access to exclusive events.