How Bob's Watches Disrupted Luxury Ecommerce - and Won Bob's Watches is a top online marketplace for buying and selling pre-owned and vintage luxury watches, with a special focus on Rolex timepieces.

Known for its transparent pricing and unmatched trust, Bob's Watches, the leading online destination for buying and selling pre-owned and vintage luxury watches, has revolutionised the industry with its unique model of openly publishing buy and sell prices. Entrepreneur UK's Daniel Malins spoke with the company's founder and CEO, Paul Altieri, to learn more about the secret of growing a successful business from scratch.

How did Bob's Watches come to be 15 years ago? What made you mad enough to do it?
Well maybe not mad, but I was overwhelmed with what I felt was a rare opportunity to create something better for consumers. I've always been a big believer that to start a business or for it to be successful, you've got to have one of two things; You've either got to build a better mousetrap or fill a void. Filling a void is so much easier than building a better mousetrap because if you're the only waffle house in town for example, the waffles don't have to be that great. People, if they want a waffle, they have to come to you. So, filling a void is always a lot easier in a business environment. But building a better mousetrap means that you've got to be better or cheaper. Because if you don't bring value to the consumer, why would they shop with you?

So, you've got to be faster, better, or cheaper, or at least two of the three, if not all three. So, when I recognised the business opportunity, I mean, the internet was still sort of in its infancy, and you had eBay and you had Craigslist back then to sell a Rolex. They're both still around today obviously, but they both come up short in a lot of respects. For one you had to have a PayPal account, you had to know shipping and FedEx, you had to have fraud prevention skills; you had to know what you were doing. And you could get taken advantage of and lose your watch or lose your money or both. And putting a Rolex for sale on Craigslist was even more daunting. You'd have to meet someone maybe at a Starbucks or a coffee shop and that had its own challenges and risks. So, in 2008 and 2009, I said to myself there's got to be a better way. The existing dealers that were around back then, on a $5,000 watch for example, wanted to sell it for $9,000 and buy it for $2,000. And so I came along and I discovered that the consumer just had no idea what their watch was worth. There are millions of pre-owned and vintage timepieces, mostly Rolex, and there was no pricing guide. There was no transparency. There was no integrity. Consumers had no real way to know prices.

So I said, "You know what? We're going to sell that $5,000 watch at $5,000 and we're going to buy it at $4,000. We're going to make a tiny little markup. We're going to be completely transparent. We're going to show people the pricing whether we're buying or selling and we're going to be an open book. So we quickly became the Kelley Blue Book [an American vehicle valuation company] so people have knowledge and trust." So, one thing that was absent was trust. And to build trust, you've got to be the good guys. And that's always been kind of my best advice to entrepreneurs. You can fill a void, you can build a better mousetrap, but be the good guys. It'll come back to you in spades.

Did Bob's Watches take a long time to get going?
Yes. The first two, three weeks went by in July of 2010, and we didn't buy or sell a watch. And I remember scratching my head saying, "Geez, I thought this was such a good idea." But you've got to have patience and persistence and if you believe in it, you've got to just keep at it. I don't think Amazon took off right away either, not that I'm comparing myself to Amazon, but that's kind of the humble beginnings of how it got started , just noticing a void in the marketplace and trying to fill it with a better offering to consumers.

You've stumbled upon something that really piqued my interest: the comparison with Amazon.
While we don't pretend to be on Amazon's level in terms of size or reach, we do share the same commitment to making online buying as secure and straightforward as possible. We operate in entirely different spaces, but there are some parallels in how both companies have built trust and transparency in their respective markets.

Like Amazon, Bob's Watches has focused on creating a seamless online shopping experience, prioritizing customer service, competitive pricing, and immediate availability of products. However, unlike Amazon, which offers mass-market goods at scale, Bob's Watches specializes in a niche market—pre-owned and vintage luxury watches - where expertise, authentication, and personalized service matter just as much as efficiency.

I'm 69 years old and I've been in a number of different businesses. . So, I've learned mostly through my failures. Generally, you learn more from failure than you do success. But one of the things that I find that a lot of entrepreneurs don't do is they don't do the math ahead of time. It doesn't need to be any fancy Excel spreadsheet, but do the math So you know what it will take to break even. How many widgets do I have to sell? How many watches do I have to buy for me to get to break even? Because a lot of businesses fail, not because they're not profitable, but because they run out of money. And 90 something percent of small businesses fail. So my philosophy is they're not doing the math and they're not projecting the business needs conservatively enough. If you think you need £100k, start with £200k. If you think it's going to take five months, plan on a a year. Just be ultra conservative, and so that's kind of what I did early on. And I said, "Okay, what's it going to take for me to get to 10 watch sales a day? And what's that going to look like? What are the numbers going to look like? How much can I spend? and How do I acquire them?"

I don't need exact numbers, but how much cash did you need to burn through initially, and for how long, before you got to a stage where you felt like you were sort of paying for yourself?
For us it was pretty short. 2010 was the early days and it was a lot easier to build an online presence back then so we bought an existing company, 'Bob's Watches.' Bob Thompson started the company and was planning on retiring. So we ended up buying an existing company for a lot of reasons. So within a year, we were at break even. But we started with only $300,000 that I self-funded. So to this day, we've never taken on any debt. We've never borrowed money. We don't have shareholders. We grew patiently, and we grew profitably.

I would rather grow and be a small company and own 100% of it than have these dreams of being the next Amazon. I know it may sound corny, the goal was never to make a lot of money, because if you're going to be transparent with your pricing, it can't be about money. The way you make it back is to scale. Volume. You've got to sell a lot more watches to make a profit. So we knew the scale would be there, and it was just projecting how long it would take.

It's interesting you've said a couple of times about how you got in there early with the internet, but I would give you a counterargument, which is that buying expensive goods online was not as normalised then as it is now. And it was just in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Did you feel those headwinds at all?
It was a major hurdle buying a $10,000 watch online with a click of a mouse. You had to earn their trust. And back then you had eBay, which is not a pillar of integrity. Its a huge leap of faith. When people buy that watch and put their credit card down, they have to know who you are, where you are, and they have to really trust you. Price to consumers has always been secondary. If you ask all of our customers why they buy from us, they buy from us because of trust, and building that trust has taken a long, long time. In the media, we've had really good coverage.

We've had great opportunities to leverage our name and our mission statement, but we did feel headwinds in the sense that it was a challenge because it's an expensive item. It's not a $17 book like what Amazon was selling. Right now, authenticity is still number one, not price. The price has to be good, but they have to have trust in who they're buying it from. So, it took a long time to build that trust, yes, and we did feel that headwind.

I guess it wasn't culturally embedded amongst consumers to buy such expensive items online, whereas now, if you're feeling a bit flush or you've been given a bonus or something, you can blow it in an hour online.
Generally what we find today is people do their homework months or weeks in advance: the model they want, who they're going to buy it from. They've read it in Robb Report or Gear Patrol - there are a lot of publications out there that cover the industry. 95% of the watches out there are no longer in production. That's an astonishing number, 95%. So if you want that [Rolex] Milgauss, for example, you can't buy it new anymore. You have to buy it on the second hand market. But you're right, it's an expensive item. So, it's a big leap of faith. That's why we give people three days to return the watch, unconditionally. So, even if they put it on their wrist and they think it's too big or too small or they don't like it, just send it back for a full refund, no questions.

Yeah, but I guess a lot of entrepreneurs are trapped in the cycle of chasing a quick buck?
Yes, but look, there's certainly a lot more challenges involved. Let me just pull something up real quick: running a business today and growing it - you've got to have the will to succeed. Speed counts. And if you cant outsmart your competitors, outwork them. Most of the business books say people are your greatest assets, and they're kind of wrong in the sense that people are not your greatest assets, good people are. And I don't know what the hiring market's like in the UK, but I can tell you here in the US, it's always been a massive challenge to attract talent, and keep talent like smart people that are passionate. And again, getting back to the fact that we're technology marketing people, there's a lot of technology that goes into running an ecommerce site. It's much more sophisticated today than it was 20 years ago. You've got Facebook and you've got TikTok and you've got mobile speed. When we launched in 2010, there was really nobody shopping on a mobile phone. They are now 86% of our traffic today comes from a mobile device, so you have to have a really good mobile design. And again, if you can't outsmart your opponent, you can outwork them. I always say there are 40 hours in a work week, but it's not what you do with the first 40 hours, it's what you do with the second 40. And at the beginning, the first five to 10 years, I was working 80 hour weeks. There was no off button. Five o'clock didn't come and I went, "Okay, I'm going home." No, I worked sometimes till 10 o'clock at night, because I'm always in survival mode. I'm always running from failure.

Do you think some entrepreneurs lack that sort of drive and that willingness to put in the hours?
Probably a little bit of both. I think you get tested as an entrepreneur if you're really passionate about it and you believe and you have the energy. If you look at the Beatles, yes they were talented? Were they lucky? Yes. But what they had, if you read about them in the early, early days, was enormous amounts of energy able to play every single night on some stage somewhere in some nightclub in Liverpool or London etc. But they had this amazing energy and they had a passion for music.

So I think entrepreneurs will get tested ahead of time right away, and you will know if you have the energy level and if you have the commitment and the resilience to hang in there. Elon Musk does a lot of interviews and in one of them he says that being an entrepreneur is not always fun. People think they're going to go into business for themselves and it's going to be fun, but it's not all glamour. I mean, there are bits and pieces of it where it's fun and it's enjoyable and rewarding, but the other 90% is not. He says, "running your own business is like staring into the abyss and chewing on glass". And you're doing everything at the beginning and you've got to be ready for it. And you better have the energy level, too, because there's a lot of sleepless nights and you're working 10-12 hour days. You've got to be ready for that.

You mentioned having worked in other industries previous to Bob's watches. To what extent do you find that the skills or the processes within the business are as applicable here as they were there?
I can tell you now at my age, I have a lot more wisdom than I did when I was 25, when I was starting out. And I realize that I'm not the smartest guy out there, I'm not. Far from it. But I don't think you have to be super smart to be successful in business. You've got to be smart enough, but you don't have to be a genius out of some top engineering school. And I do think there's still plenty of opportunity out there. I think the internet has opened up a world of opportunity for entrepreneurs that have to fill the void.

There's always something that can be done better, faster, or cheaper. And back in 1980 when I graduated college, there was no internet, there were no cell phones, and opportunity was a lot more limited. Everything was brick and mortar. and so it was a different ballgame back then compared to how it is now. But there's a lot of things I've learned that are applicable today. Just finding quality people to help you, you cannot build your company alone. You need to attract talent, find good people that share that passion and that enthusiasm. That was true back in 1980, as it is today. And then be customer obsessed. A lot of people keep an eye on the competition and they focus too much on the competition. Stay focused on the customer. Is he happy? What else can you do for them?

You've mentioned a couple of times now the importance of attracting talent and then retaining it. That's the end goal, but what's the means to get there, especially on the retention side?
They all want to be in a challenging environment. They want to grow their skills. They want to be with other people that are passionate about what they do. But as an entrepreneur, as a CEO, you should never stop hiring, you should always be hiring. My daughter graduated from UCLA about 10 years ago, and I remember her calling me one day and saying that Mark Zuckerberg came to do a speech on campus and how he was fantastic. Everybody was so excited and he was wonderful and that was so nice of him to do that. And when she was done talking, I said, " he's recruiting." She said, "No, no. He came to give a speech." I said, "Yes, he's recruiting." He knows how important it is to attract the best and smartest college graduates every year.

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