SDC Weekly 150; A crazy motherfvcker; Ferrari says please don't buy it
A watch is never the endgame, and the launch coverage was never the truth. Also: Rolex price hikes, 3 years of SDC Weekly, a flesh-eating fly problem, the home-time no parent can switch off, and more!
🚨 Welcome back to SDC Weekly!
As part of the build up to The Escapement in Abu Dhabi this November, we’ve started a YouTube series called The Road to the Escapement. The latest episode features Rexhep Rexhepi talking about his new dong gong. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the Escapement’s YouTube channel to catch all the upcoming videos… I think Romain Gauthier is next. These are not primarily ‘marketing’ videos for the event at all; they were paid for by us, with the primary purpose of entertaining and informing collectors like you and I - so I really hope you enjoy them (feedback always welcome, of course). Tickets for the main event will be launching soon, so keep an eye out for those via the website.
Anyway, let’s start this edition with some wise words from one of my favourite thinkers:
Real artists do all the painting themselves, not like Rembrandt
Real artists use brushes, not technology like Cartier-Bresson
Real writers write it out by hand, not like Jack Kerouac
Real musicians record it live, not like Steely Dan
Real singers sing without processing, not like Kanye West and Daft Punk
Real directors do the prep without AI, not like Martin Scorsese
It turns out that real artists have always used technology. What they have in common is intent, responsibility, and the ability to create a feeling in the audience.
“Here, I made this.”
— Seth Godin
What about real watchmakers?
Admin note: The Unofficial Editor declined to review this draft because he’s just sitting in the driveway in his new Ferrari Luce, waiting for the midlife crisis to officially cure him. Please tap the title of this post or click here to ensure you read the most recent edition, which may include corrections made after publishing..
If you’re new to SDC, welcome! When you have some time, check out prior editions of SDC Weekly here, or find enlightenment in the archive here.
Estimated reading time: ~35 mins
🐐 A Crazy Motherfvcker
Most collecting stories follow a similar arc... you want a watch, you can’t have the watch, but then you eventually get the watch, and then you feel slightly empty and start wanting a different watch. This is the hedonic treadmill in a nutshell, and most of us know full well it’s a treadmill, and we hop on anyway because the hunt is the real drug.
Then, every once in a while, someone’s treadmill leads somewhere interesting, and the watch turns out to have been a kind of door the whole time.
This is a story about a man you probably know as @nycwatchguy. Most of the internet files him under ‘meme guy’, and the memes are decent for sure, but there’s a lot more to the man. He is by any reasonable account a successful entrepreneur who runs a sports and entertainment fund, plays pickup basketball like a pro, and a huge cat lover. He once mounted a citywide search for a lost cat that, I’m pleased to report, ended happily. For the rest of this post I’ll call him V.
Now before we go any further, I will add that V is a friend of mine, and of course, we met through watches, as us watch people tend to do. I say this so that you know to read everything that follows knowing that I (mostly) like the guy. That said, I’ve tried to stay neutral mostly because a fawning profile would bore us both, and also because quite frankly, the story holds up fine without any help from me.
The reason I decided to write this section is because it’s a great example of a watch working as a ‘key’ instead of just a wrist ornament - this will become clearer as we go along.
Where it starts
V grew up middle class in India, surrounded by wealthier friends. The thing he wanted more than anything in the fourth grade was a Casio with a built-in TV remote, so he could change the channel on people from across the room. It cost about $100 back then, which in his house was serious money, and he never got the watch. He finds it funny now that he’d drop more than that on dinner without even thinking (I can confirm he does this frequently).
At university his dad bought him a $40 quartz Timex, which became his most prized possession. In his final year he had a professor which any of us might describe as a cvnt. He was a hedge fund guy parked in academia during an SEC probe, who handed V a ‘D-’ and was mighty proud of a watch V thinks was a Glashütte Original. V never said a word to him. ‘Wanted nothing to do with him,’ he said, and the watch only emerged in his memory years later, when he started wondering why he’d become quite so obsessed.1
V’s spark came around 2011; he saw a Zenith Academy Christophe Colomb, assumed Zenith must therefore be the summit of all watchmaking, couldn’t afford the $350,000 version, and fell instead for one very specific Zenith El Primero Chronomaster.
He hunted it pre-owned across New York for months and found nothing, then mapped every watch shop in Rome on holiday and dragged a long-suffering companion to all of them. On the way back to the hotel, defeated, he wandered into a jewellery store on a whim. An older woman pulled out a roll of trade-ins, and inside it was the exact watch he had been hunting for all along. He talked her down from around $4,500 to $3,500, ‘saying I didn’t have much money, which was true’, and walked out with no box, no papers, and what he still describes as a feeling of fate.
He’s never been back to Italy since.
A mythical object
V’s god is Michael Jordan, and I don’t mean this as a figure of speech. He met MJ as a 17-year-old at summer camp, and has spent his whole life idolising the man. So, when a serious collector in Chicago messaged him in early 2021 to confirm a rumour V had been wondering about for some time, it took him by surprise. The rumour was that Urwerk had made a small number of watches for members of Grove XXIII, Jordan’s famously private golf club. There were only twenty-three pieces, never publicised, NDAs for all buyers, that sort of thing.
The Chicago collector seems to have verified it the only way such things can be verified, which is to say he accosted a stranger at his local mini market who happened to be wearing one! V immediately rang everyone he knew with a Jordan connection, starting with Urwerk’s management, who would not confirm the watch existed and, I suppose promisingly, would not deny it either.
Roughly a year passed and he kinda lost hope. Then, over lunch in Miami one day, one of V’s own fund investors clocked the Urwerk UR-220 on his wrist and asked him, ‘what the fuck is that on your wrist?’ V explained Urwerk, mentioned the Grove edition he’d been hunting for a year, and the investor said, with nonchalance, ‘oh, you want me to call him for you?’
Call who?
‘MJ.’
Well, no sh1t… but V just assumed nothing would come of it. Two days later he was in the shower when the phone rang. Dripping, he answered. ‘Is this thing called the Urwerk Grove XXIII edition?’ Yes. ‘I talked to MJ and am connecting you to his guy.’ The guy did his diligence, researched V, researched his fund, and decided he was ‘a real dude and not some joker off the street’, and V, being V, rapped out his whole life story into the phone, including the hilarious ending ‘they will bury me one day in this watch.’ A chilly December day soon after this call, a package was handed to V at the St. Regis in midtown.
One of twenty-three had arrived.
How collectors lie to themselves
At this point I’d usually cue the violins... but V is rather unsentimental about what happened next.
Urwerk made a second version for MJ. Several of the original recipients, finding the brand too avant-garde for their taste or seeing profit, sold theirs. ‘Now like 6 of my friends have them and it ain’t really THAT special to have one any more,’ he admitted. The scarcity that made the watch magic, the twenty-three, members-only, unconfirmable-by-the-brand quality of it, leaked away, as scarcity tends to. The watch he thought was his end game became, in the cold light of a maturing market, a very cool watch that a handful of his mates also owned.
I find this framing pretty useful, because the thrill was never really in the metal itself, but in the impossibility of owning it. Once you remove the impossibility you’re left with the object, and the object, however epic, obeys the same emotional depreciation curve as everything else you’ve ever lusted after. ‘Everything wears off eventually, right?’
Never ask for money
So the watch lost a little of its shine... but the relationship it opened was the polar opposite.
For three years V kept Jordan’s people in the loop on his fund, sending quarterly updates and the odd deal, and mostly heard nothing. When he started raising his next fund, he sent a note that more or less said ‘everything I’ve built traces back to loving basketball, which traces back to one man, the amount is insignificant to me, I just want to be in business with you’. And again, he heard nothing… three months of nothing. His feeling at the time was: ‘Goddamn it, never ask for money!!!’
And then, a week before he was due to fly to Geneva (to collect some watches obviously), a reply came in. This led to a meeting at his New York office, at the end of which he was told that Jordan would like to invest in the fund. V says he damn near fainted. If that wasn’t enough, the guy asked what he was doing that night, because MJ was in town.
‘Bro, I’d cancel my own wedding if it was tonight.’
He showed up at a random building downtown and finally met the man he’d idolised his whole life - but this time, as a business partner. He talked far too much, and then pulled out his Akrivia AK-06 in steel, number 23, and showed Jordan how Rexhep Rexhepi had changed the ‘25’ to a ‘23’ on the power reserve scale, as a nod to the greatest of all time.2
V says Jordan looked at him and said, ‘you’re a crazy motherfvcker man.’
It gets better, still. Jordan, apparently taken with the whole saga, flew to Geneva to meet Rexhep himself, and stopped at Urwerk HQ to sign the wall on the way. ‘If you spot MJ with an Akrivia one day,’ V says, ‘I’m taking full credit for that shit.’
What happened here?
V’s own moral is ‘if you love something enough and put it out in the universe, it will happen for you.’ It’s a lovely sentiment perhaps, and I don’t especially want to be the guy who ruins it - but I do think the more interesting perspective is a little less woo-woo.
The universe did not deliver Michael Jordan at all. V’s track record did all the hard work. The reason the phone call worked in the first place is that when Jordan’s guy went looking, he found a legit fund run by someone far more serious than the meme account would suggest. The watch got V into the room, but after that, it was the unglamorous stuff which did the work. ‘Put it out in the universe’ is a nice post for Instagram. ‘Build something a billionaire’s people can underwrite in an afternoon’ is the underlying roadmap to this sort of outcome.
This, I think, is the real lesson to take away from the story... a watch can be a key, but the key will only open the right door if there’s something worth letting in on the other side of the door - that bit is up to you.
Behind the memes
None of the above tells us what kind of collector V actually is, so I asked him some other questions to offer you a quick tour. He seems rather clear-eyed, almost to the point of bluntness, about his own record. He traded in and out of Richard Milles every few months in 2017, treating them as silly toys - turns out, each one would now be worth a New York apartment. He waited three years for a Vacheron Overseas Skeleton Perpetual, decided it was the best modern watch the brand had made, and disliked it the moment it touched his wrist. Wrong proportions, no strap could save it, ‘an expensive ass mistake.’ He sold a Logical 1 for roughly $100,000 less than it would fetch today. He is, in other words, about as fallible as you and I.
He’s also weirdly principled about taste. ‘I’m the guy who decides what gets meme’d,’ he says, only half joking, and claims he’s never once bought or sold a watch because of what the internet was doing. His logic is that if he likes something it’ll get hot eventually, so he’d rather buy ahead of the noise. The low-key watch he’s most devoted to is a Nomos World Timer NYC Edition, which says ‘5th Ave’ on the dial in place of NYC; nobody on Instagram cares about it, but he says he’ll never sell that one. He bought it after someone at Wempe messaged to say they’d found one in the safe, and he ran down Fifth Avenue to get it. There’s a version of V that is still the broke kid fresh out of college who met Ben Clymer at a Nomos event and thought a $3,000 watch was end-game stuff.
The persona costs him, mind you. The running joke in the trade is that he’s the Medici of the watch world, patron to every emerging independent. The reality, he says, is that he feels the pressure to back makers he can’t always afford to back, that brands assume NYCWatchGuy can buy anything, and that he says ‘no’ far more often than people think. Being the audience is a job, the job has a budget, and the budget is apparently not infinite.
Underneath all of this, he’ll tell you, watches come second, believe it or not. Basketball is the first love… he describes two hours on the court as his only real meditation, the one place his phone and his stress vanish - and he means it literally. He has leapt off his sofa screaming at a Steph Curry shot more times than he can count, and never once at a Hodinkee release. Watches, by contrast, mostly cause him stress, because he lacks the bottomless bank account a lot of this hobby assumes - he claims every purchase ‘legitimately hurts’ (which I call bullsh1t on, but anyway).
What watches gave him that basketball couldn’t, was the people. Here’s a specific question and answer from my interview with V:
The community is the part you’d miss most. Have you ever been wrong about a collector friendship? Someone you thought was a friend who turned out to be using the access, or someone you wrote off who turned out to be the real deal?
For the most part I have had nothing but incredible experiences with the watch community, which is not what you’d expect from a bunch of rich people. As my mother always said, if you don’t have something good to say about someone, don’t say anything at all, and so I won’t be naming any names here.
I will say that very very few people have truly disappointed me in the watch community but there have certainly been a few who tried to chummy up to me and made up all sorts of fabrications, only for me to find out they were all lies and I honestly don’t even know what the end game was. There are also people who have bad mouthed me to ADs, I can only imagine to try and win themselves favor and try and cut off my allocations. I don’t know who these people are, but hopefully they’ve found something better to do with their time.
On the other hand, back in 2021 I was approached by a young guy at the Phillips auction in NYC asking if I was NYCWatchGuy and he struck up a conversation with me. This happens all the time so I never think anything of it, but sort of rolled my eyes at the time being like oh boy, here we go again. A few weeks later he messaged me and asked me to lunch. Once again, I was like eh, who is this kid but fine, I’ll oblige.
Well, fast forward 5 years later and he’s become one of my closest friends, has been an invaluable resource to me in the business world, and I’m truly glad he came up to me that day to say hello. As they say - always say hello to the person next to you on the plane because you never know, and so while I’m an introvert and will never be the first one to say hello, I’m always secretly hoping the other person will because I’m more than happy to chat!
This brings the whole story full circle and I didn’t think this was the end game when I started writing it. V once said that if you took his watches away he wouldn’t much miss the objects, but losing the people would leave a hole he couldn’t fill. The Grove XXIII Urwerk began as the most special object he’d ever owned, but later it was less so, and this ended up proving his own point for him… meaning the object itself kinda faded, but the man it introduced him to, did not.
I guess that’s all watch collecting ever really is... we tell ourselves we’re chasing the object, and sometimes, if we’re lucky and a little unhinged, the object turns out to have been a way of getting to the people.
Or, as the greatest of all time apparently put it, crazy motherfvckers, the lot of us.
🚗 Ferrari says please don't buy it
At one of the anticipated launches the company has made in years, Ferrari’s head of marketing asked its biggest fans not to buy it:
“To my petrolheads that I meet, I always tell them, please don’t buy [the Luce]”
According to him, the buyer they’re targeting is someone who already owns an electric car. What the fvck? This is a strange thing to say given that in 2025, Ferrari shipped 13,640 cars, and historically, ~80% are sold to existing owners.