Hodinkee, the watch blog that had morphed into a timepiece e-tailer, will now return to being a watch blog.
“Moving forward Hodinkee’s primary focus will once again be creating…watch content,” founder Benjamin Clymer wrote on the site yesterday. “The last few years have been challenging…. Suffice it to say, we’ve learned a lot. And now it’s time to get back to basics.
“As of today, we aren’t going to be adding any more pre-owned watches to Hodinkee or Crown & Caliber [a watch e-tailer owned by Hodinkee]. Nor will we add any new models to our modern watch business. Instead, we’ll be dedicating our efforts to evolving our editorial into something truly special and industry-leading.”
Hodinkee was founded in 2008 “out of pure boredom at work,” Clymer once wrote on the site. As it became a recognized name in the watch space, its vision expanded.
In 2016, it began offering limited-edition watches, including a Vacheron Constantin that sold out within a half hour. In 2020, it raised $40 million in Series B funds, with participation from LVMH Luxury Ventures, NFL quarterback Tom Brady, and musician John Mayer. Following that funding round, Clymer became the site’s executive chairman, and e-commerce veteran Toby Bateman became CEO.
The next year, Hodinkee made its biggest move, acquiring Crown & Caliber. The Wall Street Journal reported Hodinkee paid $46 million for the site, which was then bringing in over $50 million a year in revenue.
In 2022, the market for secondhand watches, which had soared during the pandemic, began to crater, and Hodinkee had to pull back. A planned multibrand showroom in New York’s SoHo neighborhood never opened. The company eventually switched CEOs and went through several rounds of layoffs.
Even as Hodinkee is making this clear—even humbling—U-turn, Clymer hinted the site might venture into e-commerce again.
“Does this mean we’ll never sell watches again?” he wrote in his post yesterday. “I wouldn’t say that…. We want to be ahead of the curve. What we’ve done over the past few years simply wasn’t that.”
(Photo: Getty Images)
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