Collected Wants to Professionalize the Wild West of Pre-Owned Watches

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A few years ago, Tim Bender, the founder of San Francisco Bay Area watch dealer Fog City Vintage, grew tired of the informal, haphazard way that most of the pre-owned watch industry operated. “Through my time as a watch dealer, I have done thousands of transactions, and I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly,” he tells Robb Report. “People have been sending wire transfers and hoping their watch shows up.”

It didn’t take Bender long to realize that if the market was going to mature to its fullest potential, both dealers and consumers needed more safeguards. Together with Zach Scott, a Bay Area design executive with past clients like Google, Juul Labs, and Sonos, Bender decided to build a platform—Collected.io—offering a bundle of services that many pre-owned watch dealers currently lack: contracts, community, and a commitment to transparency, to name a few.

“If you’re buying watches on the secondary market, we’re finally adding peace of mind, structure, and transparency to the purchase,” Bender, who serves as Collected’s founder and CEO, says. “We’ve built out the tech with all the right checks and balances to ultimately be the fiduciary for a consumer. A contract is not going to be the end-all, be-all, but what it does do is it changes people’s behavior. And that’s the most important thing. It’s saying, ‘Hey, I come in good faith. I’m putting my name, my reputation, and my ID behind this transaction.’”

While Collected, which launched last month, has plenty of watch listings, don’t make the mistake of calling it a marketplace, or at least not just a marketplace. “We’re building the infrastructure that we want the marketplace to run on,” Bender explains. “The dealers have never really had a structured way of doing things, and that’s the reason, largely, that the consumer has had to operate the way they do, is because the dealer held all the cards. If you wanted a watch, you had to send a wire transfer. And that’s a really scary place to operate in.”

Unlike most marketplaces, Collected doesn’t make money by charging dealers a percentage of each transaction. Instead, dealers pay a fee ($200 per month or $2,000 per year) to take advantage of the services that Collected has automated—things like invoices and contracts, for example, that many dealers have resisted implementing because “the opportunity cost that’s associated with stepping back and trying to focus on building something better is just too large for them,” Bender says.

He emphasizes that on the buy side, consumers are clamoring for these protections, too. “They want these things to be brought into the modern era,” he says. “They want things like invoices. They want to make sure that they know who they’re sending a wire transfer to.”

The site’s architecture reflects its multifaceted offer. Everything that appears beneath the “My Collected” vertical—including an inbox for messages, a community board filled with profiles of members to follow, a shoppable marketplace and a Vault to keep track of purchases—is free to access. “Everyone gets an Instagram-like profile,” Bender says. “You can highlight the watches in your collection and the watches that you’ve previously sold. And if you’re a dealer with inventory available, that’s going to show up on your profile.

“The Community is where you can see everybody who’s joined and you can drill down by who’s most active, who are the dealers, who are the ‘Insiders,’ which is that free account tier,” Bender adds. “You can curate a feed. If you follow a dealer, every time they post a watch, it’ll show up in your feed, whereas the Shop is everybody that’s currently posting inventory. If you like a watch, you can add that to your watch list just to keep tabs on it.”

The Vault tab is where collectors can manage their collections, as discreetly or publicly as they’d like. “You don’t have to show the world what you have to take advantage of this,” Bender says. “You can keep that off your profile or push it live and share it with the world. As a dealer marks a watch sold, that’ll seamlessly push to a collector’s Vault. For a transaction that happened on the platform, you’d be able to access all of your purchase documents, like invoices and purchase agreements. As crazy as this is, this is a new thing for our industry. People don’t use contracts, and I think that’s absolutely wild. There’s no other industry in the world where you’ll do a $100,000 deal without an attorney.”

Those documents in the Vault live inside what Collected calls the “Ledger,” the platform’s most groundbreaking, if controversial, feature. “This is going to be where we start to highlight the history of a watch,” Bender says. “Traditionally, most dealers have not wanted to disclose everything about a watch, but I think that that fear is something that we need to work through,” he adds. “We’re being mindful. We know that we can’t show things that are going to impact a dealer’s business. Otherwise, they’re not going to join our platform. But we’ll be able to start highlighting, ‘Hey, did this watch sell with a dealer? Did it sell in New York? Did it then go to Hong Kong? Were there different dials in these watches in years past?’”

Scott, who serves as Collected’s chief operating officer and designer, says the best parallel to the site’s Ledger feature is Carfax, in that users will now be able to see a record of the watch’s provenance. “But the future of the platform is more like Bring a Trailer,” Scott says, referring to the popular online auction platform for collector cars. “It’s like social and marketplace together. But what it’s all really fueled by is this infrastructure for the dealers. And to me, that’s more like a fintech-level platform. It’s like Stripe or Shopify.”

The fintech analogy is key. Over the past 25 years, the secondary watch market—now valued at roughly $30 billion—has expanded at a rapid pace, but the digital infrastructure needed to support that growth has lagged. Only recently has that begun to change. Much like financial technology helped introduce verification, standardization, and transparency to legacy banking systems, a new generation of third-party watch services—ranging from remote repair to authentication and grading—is beginning to institutionalize trust in the secondhand watch market. Bender and Scott say Collected is designed to sit at the center of that shift, providing the connective tissue that allows the entire ecosystem to operate more securely and at scale.

“If we can standardize how everything runs in the industry and take these unwritten rules and finally put them down on paper so that everyone knows what they should know, that’s going to be what changes and drives this industry forward,” Bender says. “And the more people that are educated and don’t have to be fearful of transacting with the guys on the secondary market, that only increases the size of this market, right?”

Creating a culture which values disclosures—objective data about a timepiece that’s offered for sale—is one of Collected’s most important tenets. “That’s a big thing that doesn’t really exist today,” Bender says. “We’re mandating that people should be disclosing things about a watch. That is going to be built into the contract that people are buying and selling. So everything is black and white. I understand there are a lot of dealers that don’t want that. They’ve always operated from a place of opacity. But the one thing that needs to be made clear to them is that time is running very, very short. AI is here. It is going to leave nowhere to hide.”