An Interview with Quaid Walker, CEO and Co-Founder of Bezel

Last week, I had an opportunity to chat with Quaid Walker, CEO and co-founder of Bezel. Before his time in the watch space, Quaid was the design lead and founding designer on Google TV. With almost a decade of UX design experience and a lifelong passion for watches, Quaid saw an opportunity to create a modern-feeling, tech-first, fully-authenticated watch marketplace built for a new generation of buyers.

During our conversation we discussed the early days of Bezel, launching a marketplace during the hottest watch market of all time, how Bezel has stayed resilient during the subsequent downturn, and much more. I’m happy to report that both of our dogs were in attendance during the interview.

This interview is sponsored by Bezel. Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.

The Inspiration Behind Bezel

Skyler: During your time as design lead on Google TV, you put your first bonus towards buying a watch, a Rolex ‘Hulk’ if I’m not mistaken. Is that the one you're wearing today?

Quaid: It's not, I'm wearing a 16610[LN] today. But I still have the Hulk and would never let it leave the collection. It's the one that started it all.

I always wanted a watch. I was obsessed with watches as a kid . . . I grew up surfing in LA and I was at the beach all the time, so I wore those Freestyle Sharks and Nixon watches and things like that. My time at Google straight out of college was the first moment where I had the ability to afford a Rolex. 

Skyler: As a quick aside, I heard you mention Nixon watches in another interview and it brought me back to browsing CCS catalogs when I was a kid. I wanted a Nixon watch so badly but never had one.

Quaid: It's so funny – that was on Blamo because Jeremy Kirkland was a big Nixon guy . . . I remember it was the Nixon Player and it had the little diamond in it. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world . . . It was a graduation gift from my parents and it was such a massive deal for me.

Skyler: So while at Google, while searching for this Rolex, you notice a gap in the luxury watch buying experience: there's no modern-feeling option that gives buyers, specifically first time buyers, confidence in spending five, six figures on a watch . . .

Can you speak more on what you thought was missing when you were searching for that Rolex and what you would have appreciated as a first time luxury watch buyer?

Quaid: Absolutely. I think there's two parts there. The first part is the way the watch industry works for people who don't play in the space intimately . . . the industry caters itself to existing buyers that have networks, connections with authorized dealers, watch guys on the secondary market. I think that's the way the process has always worked. 

So for me, as a relative first time watch buyer, I saved a bunch of money, I was in a place to make the purchase, I went on the Rolex website and, the same way I would buy anything else, I expected to walk into a Rolex boutique and they would just have what I wanted in stock and I would be able to purchase it. I was in San Francisco at the time.

Obviously that was not the reality that I found . . . I was deciding between a Hulk and a ceramic black dial Daytona. I had underwritten the fact that I would pay whatever [retail] was at the time: $8,500 for the Hulk and $12,000 to $13,000, I believe, for the Daytona.

I walked in there. I was kind of laughed at and thrown on a waitlist for the Hulk and they wouldn't even put me on a waitlist for the Daytona. I thought that was crazy. So I switched to the secondary market.

I had collected a bunch of other things in the past. I was a big sneakerhead so I had a lot of exposure to products like Goat and StockX. I always admired their ability to consolidate what was a fragmented market that had a lot of sellers and players in it that I wouldn't have otherwise trusted myself. 

I wasn't a particularly knowledgeable sneaker buyer; I couldn't discern between what was authentic and what was not. So I could trust these brands because they raised capital from exciting people, they built brands that stood for trust, and ultimately they built out modern-feeling mobile-forward applications that felt trusted to engage with.

I expected the same exact thing to exist in watches because the [average order value] was so much higher, it was higher risk, and it just felt like such a delightful moment. It was so celebratory. I was going to get my first big watch.

I just found myself so lost on the existing players. I was doing research about marketplaces and every watch person I knew in my life and every message board said, “buyer beware, shop the seller.” I would use [existing marketplaces] as a means of understanding market prices but never actually purchased there. 

I built a relationship with one secondary market dealer local in SF, but they didn't have a Hulk in stock. I had to wait for them to get another connection from Japan and I was like, “this is crazy. I just want to spend, whatever it is, $15,000 on something right now.” I've underwritten the cost of it, but it's so challenging for me to actually do it. So that was the big aha. It took about a year from then to figure out if we were qualified to do it . . . 

There’s two co-founders: Chase Pion and Darryl Johnson. Darryl and I worked at Google together and started a business together in the past. He’s our CTO. 

And then Chase and I grew up together. Chase was the other smart watch person I knew in my life that was in a very similar stage as me where we admired watches but we hadn't really dove deep into our collecting journeys . . . We did a ton of research on the market. We looked at all the incumbents and we just plotted from a technology and a product perspective what the ideal experience would be. Our thesis from Bezel came out of that, which was, unlike a lot of players in the space, we need to obsess over the first time watch buyer. 

Obsessing over the first time watch buyer does two things. One, it forces us to build a better experience for everyone. If you build a product that is so simple to use that first time watch buyers feel comfortable engaging with it, and you then scale the inventory to support the entire spectrum of buyers, you ultimately build the best product for everyone. 

Second was just our belief that . . . if we can get folks that want to buy a watch but, similar to myself at the time, are sitting on the periphery of the market because they don’t have an entry point to get the watch they want – if you all of a sudden can catalyze those buyers – you will A, grow the market, and B, cement the future of the business and the brand. 

Every whale had to be a first-time watch buyer at some point. It's a pretty cool story if you find a brand, you meet with their concierge, you start to build trust with them, and you build your entire collection on the app. To me, that was the special engagement that we had an opportunity to create. So that's kind of what kicked the whole process off. 

Skyler: I’ve heard you describe early-on in that process asking yourself “am I the one that's going to do this?” and even “who are we to do this?” So walk me through what made you realize you were, in fact, the ones to do it.

Quaid: It was a year-long process to figure out if this was something that we felt we could do justice to . . . We went to watch meet-ups, we did all this research, we started collecting ourselves, we started spending money on pieces that we wanted. 

What we learned is that the watch industry, unlike a lot of other industries, can sniff out something that doesn't feel genuine to the space. 

A lot of the work that we were doing was asking ourselves, “how are people transacting today to buy watches?” Then, “how do we take the best of what already exists and build something that feels really custom-fit to the process?”

And so a lot of the pieces were there. I knew how to build products. I knew how to launch products and build them in a way that felt really thoughtful. So I felt really comfortable from a technology stack perspective and a product perspective. 

It was really getting folks like Ryan [Chong] – who you've chatted with in the past – around the table and substantiating that watch knowledge. Then spending a lot of time chatting with shipping providers , understanding if from a delivery perspective we could make it happen, understanding from a seller perspective if we could onboard the inventory – asking ourselves, “can we actually provide value?” The last thing I wanted to do was just start a business because I was excited about watches. I wanted to start something that genuinely provides value to both sides of the market. Once we realized that that opportunity existed, then we just got insanely excited about it. 

Skyler: In the startup world, “doing things that don't scale” is a big thing: making progress and gaining momentum even if the methods aren’t scalable or even sustainable. I've heard you describe some early-on processes like uploading inventory yourself and flying out photographers to shoot inventory for sellers. Can you think of any other examples of early methods that maybe didn't scale but were impactful in growing Bezel?

Quaid: Yeah, I mean even as we're at scale – and we're growing quite fast, the inventory numbers are north of $500 million and the business is larger obviously than it was a few years ago – we're still in that phase, I would say.

We do things to obsess over the customer experience that I think, if you zoomed out, you wouldn't necessarily say are scalable. Every single customer we have is paired with a real person on our team. And that's not just a statement. They know your name, you have access to their calendar, they'll jump on the phone with you for hours and talk about watches . . . The whole model is luxury. 

Everything that we do should feel like it shouldn't scale. 

Our customer should leave the experience saying, “I don't even know how they do that for everyone because that was insanely hands-on.”

That's the North Star goal in everything we do . . . in the early days while trying to onboard a seller . . . it's a chicken and the egg problem. You need to have the inventory to get the buyer excited. You need to have the buyer to get the inventory excited. We just had to make everything so easy. So that looks like flying up to New York and shooting all of the watches for the sellers. That looks like, when we had our first buyer, rolling out the red carpet and taking them to lunch and flying out and showing them the watches even if it's not scalable . . . 

Even today, we’ll throw events and invite clients because we know that they're a big fan of the certain venue or the sports team or the person we're collabing with. Or we'll send out bottles of wine to clients and do partnerships with brands . . . The goal is to really celebrate how delightful buying a watch should be. We've had weddings where we've figured out how to get watches to obscure venues in the middle of nowhere . . . 

Buying a watch to me is such an emotional thing. And if we can do anything to support that in a way that doesn't feel like we're taking away from the experience, but adding to it, I think it just becomes super special. 

Skyler: We've mentioned Ryan [Chong, Head of Watch Operations] a couple of times now. During our interview, I asked him what he brought to Bezel from his experience at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Along with, obviously, the wealth of technical knowledge that he picked up, he mentioned the network of dealers and private collectors that he had acquainted himself with. Can you speak a bit on Ryan's impact especially during the early days of building out Bezel? 

Quaid: If you look at the founding team, we were really strong from a product perspective and a technology perspective . . . I come from a background where I could empathize with the first time watch buyer. I was one, I was not in the watch industry. But I think that's almost our superpower. We're speaking about our customers as if we are the actual customers because we are.

Ryan and his team basically built out all of the initial watch credibility for the business. Ryan is an absolute savant in this space. His ability to authenticate watches, understand watches, network in the community, and just the general respect the watch world has for him given his age is insane.

A lot of what we're doing is recruiting the best authenticators and making sure every watch we sell goes through them first.

It was all about asking ourselves, “how do we run this procedure? How do we do it in a way that we're 100% confident we're the strictest in the industry?” Then, “how do we even go above and beyond?” Then unlocking capital to make sure Ryan and the auth team have all the tools that they need to do that. 

Then on the technology side, it's so fun because you're taking a largely analog process that [Ryan has] run thousands and thousands of times and then building out as many tools as possible that allow the technology to support the flow without getting in the way of the flow. 

We always say that you can never digitally authenticate something in the watch space. I think it's silly when I hear companies saying that. You can use technology to augment your authenticators so they feel like they have superpowers and they can do their job in a much more efficient and thoughtful and accurate way. 

I don't think anyone on the planet would have been better for the job than Ryan because he totally understands technology and the ambitions to innovate the watch space while having the deep, watch knowledge and credibility. 

He's also just the best person . . . he’s an old soul. It's crazy to me. The amount of knowledge and respect for craft – and I think he was talking to you about this, but he was an Art History major in the past. He has an understanding of Renaissance paintings all the way to obviously watches in such a thoughtful way. So yeah, he's a powerhouse, I would say, in the watch space. 

Launching Bezel During The Hottest Watch Market Of All Time

Skyler: I wanted to ask you about Bezel’s launch because it coincided with the biggest bull market for watches of all time. The closed beta began in January of ‘21, you pulled the waitlist in June of ‘22, then announced your seed round and really announced yourselves to the world in January of ‘23. 

Was there any urgency to pull the wait list while the market was still hot? Was there reluctance to do so? Were market conditions even a factor?

Quaid: Yeah, it's a really interesting question. We learned a lot from it. That's a great moment of catalyzing this thought of us being a technology business but also selling watches. 

My background obviously comes from the technology world. I've done multiple launches of products. The cool thing to do for a sexy new tech startup is to give it a waitlist while you're building out the community. So we just ran that same playbook and no one saw it as a potential problem . . .  Speaking of what I said earlier, where [we wanted Bezel] to feel genuine to the watch space, all of our early users were like, “this sucks. I'm so done with the word ‘waitlist’. I just downloaded your app because I was put on a waitlist by Rolex. I don't want to be put on a waitlist for your app.”

People were really mad at us and we were like, “oh my god, we're so dumb. That was not the most thoughtful way to run this.” So [pulling the waitlist] actually had nothing to do with the market conditions . . . A lot of the waitlist process was just making sure everything was working the way it should. We're selling an average order value of a $10,000 item . . . it needs to feel really flawless, everything from the customer experience, to the app, to the checkout flow, to the shipping experience, to how it looks when it gets to you, whatever it is, it needs to be tailored and dialed in. So we spent an inordinate amount of time making sure we got that right before we opened it up to everyone and put our brand on the line to make that happen. 

We just saw a lot of horror stories, and I won't speak to specific names, but competitors that I think have grown too fast and just took a “whatever, we’ll make it work” approach to watches. 

I think it's really hard to walk back to that reputational hit when something slips through the cracks or an experience isn't the way it should be. We wanted to make sure that, especially as a new incumbent, we were really blowing it out of the water for our quality expectations . . . So that was what the waitlist was used for. If I was to do it again, I probably wouldn't use the term “waitlist" . . .  but ultimately it allowed us to spend almost a year iterating on the product and making sure it felt up to the quality bar we expected for ourselves. 

Staying Resilient In The Unpredictable Watch Market

Skyler: There's only so much you can control as a marketplace . . . I think Bezel’s inventory-light model lends itself to staying resilient in a volatile watch market. Can you speak a bit on Bezel’s approach to staying insulated from those kinds of big swings in the market?

Quaid: When we first raised capital and left our jobs to start this business, that was in August of ‘21. So we started the process in the biggest bull market for watches ever. In many ways, that was an awesome condition to start the business because it was so buzzy and exciting. You had a lot of new collectors entering the space, there was a lot of talk around watches as investment classes, and you had different types of buyers entering the market.

We ended up launching [Bezel] as the market was turning . . . till now where the market has drastically turned. The way that we provide value, being asset-light, helps both sides of the market in different market conditions. When the market is up and to the right, we have access to [inventory] for buyers. We get it to them at the best price we possibly can. They move fast.

When the market goes down all of a sudden, a seller that maybe didn’t need to list on a market place . . . we’ve built out tools for them to allow them to get turnover very fast on their inventory as the market is going down. Then that also excites buyers . . . it’s crazy to even say these numbers, but at the time I remember we had Panda Daytonas on the market in the 50s ($50,000+). You look at a watch like that and you're like, “wow, I really love that watch.” Then you see it priced in the high 20s ($20,000+) and you're like, “you know what? It's still double retail, but I want it. I've seen it go way up, and now it's in an area where I can strike on that price and feel good owning it.” So you had even more buyers enter the space since the market came down. 

With our customers, we'll tell them if we don't think it's the right time to buy a certain watch if they ask us that question. We will never give investment advice on watches . . . our job is to go get you the best example at the best price in the market from our seller network. That is our goal and our promise to our buyers . . . Our advice for clients in these types of speculative volatile markets is just to buy what you like . . . 

I think the watch market for a really long time was intentionally asymmetric. Sellers had all this data and they knew what the prices were. They were holding things intentionally and buyers had none of that information. So our job is just to make it equal . . . we just believe in complete transparency. We know what the watch is. We know what bids are on the watch. We know what other asks are on the watch. We understand what the market price is and we let our buyers make the decision on what the right entry point is for them. 

The Future of Bezel

Skyler: What's something that we have not talked about that you're really excited about, be it something that already exists on Bezel or something that's yet to come? 

Quaid: It's a great question. It's a very high level answer, but I'm super excited about this year for us . . . last year was very foundation building . . . it was really like, “how do we build out the best place to buy and sell watches? What does the foundation look like? Does everything work the way that we think it should?” [We were] playing the same game as everyone else, but doing it in a more trusted, thoughtful, more technologically-forward way. 

Now that the flywheel is moving quite fast, we have the massive base of inventory that we have, and we've built out that foundation, this year is really all about doing things in a way that I don't think they’ve been done in the watch space. 

We launched auctions in January . . . we think about [Bezel Auctions] as the first real thoughtful auction-house-meets-marketplace experience . . . You’re bidding on watches, but you also have watches in stock on the marketplace, and you have a concierge guiding you through that experience . . . It lets you buy watches in a really fun way. 

That same mentality applies to our sellers: how do we build out all these amazing tools to help them run their business in a really thoughtful way . . . So without saying too much, there's just a lot of really exciting stuff that's launching this year that I think takes the business to another level. The only reason we're able to do that now is because of all the foundation that we've built over the last year, the trust with our customers, the amazing clients, and the relationships we have with them. So I'm just super excited about this year . . . after this call, I'm just gonna go whiteboard a million times and design stuff because we have all these amazing features to take the industry, in my opinion, to the next level. 

Final Thoughts

Thanks to Quaid for sitting down and chatting with me. I had a great time learning more about the early stages and inspiration of Bezel. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading my interview with Bezel’s Head of Watch Operations Ryan Chong where we delve deeper into watch authentication, collecting trends, and more. For more info on Bezel, go ahead and install the app, or simply visit them at getbezel.com