From a $3,500 Rolex at 16 to Over $10 Million in Sales: How Mason Maressa Built Clocked In

GRAND HAVEN, Mich. — At 16 years old, Mason Maressa had saved $3,500 while working and going to high school. Like plenty of teenagers with a few thousand dollars saved, he could have put it toward a car.

Instead, he bought a Rolex.

The watch was a vintage Rolex Air-King, and at the time, Mason wasn’t buying it with a five-year business plan in mind. He was already fascinated by luxury goods and watches in particular, but the purchase quickly became something more.

A few days after the Air-King arrived, Mason listed it for sale online. He sold it for approximately $4,000.

The roughly $500 profit wasn’t life-changing money. What mattered was what it showed him: there was an opportunity in a market he was already genuinely interested in.

So he did it again.

Instead of spending the money, Mason put it back into another watch. One watch became two. Two became several. As his inventory grew, so did his understanding of the business behind it.

For the next several years, Mason continued buying and selling watches while learning the details of the pre-owned luxury market along the way. Pricing, condition, references, market demand, authentication and customer relationships all became part of the job.

There wasn’t one transaction that suddenly turned the idea into a large business. Growth came watch by watch.

By his late teens, what started as a fascination with luxury watches had developed into something much more serious.

Taking Clocked In from online to brick-and-mortar

Eventually, Mason reached a point where opening a physical store no longer felt like a distant goal.

In January 2025, Clocked In opened its brick-and-mortar location at 601 S Beacon Blvd, Suite 103 in Grand Haven, Michigan.

The store operates by appointment only, giving customers the opportunity to view and compare watches in a more personal setting. Clocked In specializes in pre-owned luxury watches, with inventory that includes brands such as Rolex, Omega, Tudor and other recognized names in the industry.

The goal was to create a place that worked for both sides of the luxury watch market: experienced collectors who know exactly what reference they’re looking for and customers walking into a luxury watch store for the first time.

Opening the store also marked a major shift for Mason personally.

Only a few years earlier, he had been a high school student buying and selling individual watches online. Now there was a physical storefront, inventory on display and customers coming through the doors of a business that had started with one Air-King.

For a category built heavily around online transactions, a physical location also offered something Mason considered important: the ability for customers to actually sit down, handle different watches and understand what they were buying before committing thousands of dollars to a purchase.

Trust matters when the product costs thousands

Selling pre-owned luxury watches is different from traditional retail.

Two watches of the same model and year can have meaningful differences in condition, completeness and value. Buyers may also be spending five figures on a single transaction, making the reputation of the seller particularly important.

For Clocked In, building that trust became part of growing the company.

Mason wanted the buying process to feel approachable whether someone had owned 20 watches or was shopping for their first Rolex. Customers could ask questions, compare options and learn about the differences between watches without needing to already be an expert.

That customer base has expanded as luxury watches themselves have reached a wider audience.

Models and nicknames that were once mostly discussed among serious collectors are now widely recognized, while the pre-owned market gives buyers access to vintage, discontinued and difficult-to-source watches that may not be available through traditional authorized retailers.

Clocked In operates within that market by buying, selling and trading pre-owned timepieces with customers and other participants in the watch industry.

From one watch to over $10 million in sales

Five years after buying that first Rolex at 16, Mason says Clocked In has surpassed over $10 million in cumulative sales.

He is now 21 years old.

The number stands out, but the path to it was relatively simple in principle: keep reinvesting.

Clocked In didn’t begin with a showroom full of watches or a massive inventory purchase. It started with approximately $3,500 and one vintage Rolex.

When that watch sold, Mason bought another. As more watches sold, more money went back into inventory. That allowed him to gradually carry more watches, increase the range of pieces available to customers and complete larger transactions.

One became two. Two became 10.

Eventually, an online business became a brick-and-mortar store.

That progression is still visible in the way Mason approaches the company today.

Surpassing $10 million in cumulative sales isn’t something he views as the end goal. For him, it’s a milestone that traces directly back to the first decision he made at 16: taking the money he had saved, putting it into something he understood and was passionate about, and seeing what he could build from it.

Clocked In now serves customers looking to buy, sell and trade luxury watches from its appointment-only Grand Haven location.

What started with a 16-year-old, $3,500 and a vintage Rolex Air-King has grown into a multimillion-dollar luxury watch business.

And it happened one watch at a time.