Boots On The Ground: Two Visits To Two Retailers

The view from behind the counter.

I ought to say at the outset that I may be the worst salesperson I have ever known and quite possibly one of the worst than anyone has ever known. The whole idea of trying to sell someone something makes me feel instantly inadequate and on the rare occasions when I have tried to make a living selling, I have made a mess of it. One of my first jobs out of college (Bennington) when I moved to New York (1984) was in a real estate office in Carrol Gardens, Brooklyn, which was a charitable gesture on the part of the agency’s owners, who were the parents of a classmate’s girlfriend. It didn’t cost them any money really to have me sitting at a desk – the pay was straight commission – and the job was anthropologically interesting at least, as part of getting the job involved being interviewed and approved of by the proprietor of the local funeral home, who was also (allegedly) a member of the local chapter of a certain fraternal businessman’s organization (a characterization I have stolen from Anthony Bourdain, but it is apt).

In a booming real estate market I barely managed to scrape a living and my sales pitch involved winning lines like, “Well, yeah, it’s expensive, you’re in New York, what did you expect?” which is not an approach that really closes the deal. After a year or so (if that long) of misery, I switched gears and began waiting tables at a swanky Nouvelle Cuisine restaurant in midtown (Menage à Trois, and if you want to see what a clown show it was, you can read Bryan Miller’s review in the New York Times, he called me and my comrades “exasperating”) but between the tips, which include occasional 100% gratuities from grandees like visiting maharajahs – literally, the hotel housing the restaurant was owned by the Taj Group – and selling cannabis out the back door to staff and purveyors, I was immediately making about four times what I’d been making trying to sell real estate. A wonderful time in New York, when everyone had a side hustle and maybe more than one.

In any case, over the years I’ve made a living doing lots of different things, most of which were writing in one form or another, but none of the companies I ever worked for ever thought for a minute of putting me in a sales position, which everything else aside was probably a smart decision every time. Faced with the realties of selling I become shy, nearly mute, and in many respects the personification of customer repellent. I remember many years ago, talking to a collector who went by the name Lord Arran (his real name was Willi Ernst Sturzenegger, and though reclusive, he was available to anyone who cared to discuss watches with him on ThePurists.com; he was also responsible for commissioning a wonderful complicated wristwatch based on an ébauche made by Louis-Elysée Piguet in 1892, and which began life as a 32mm grande et petite sonnerie before having a perpetual calendar and thermometer added to it by Franck Muller, and subsequently, a tourbillon and rattrapante chronograph by Paul Gerber). Lord Arran and I had many a back and forth on the forum and at one point I remember him opining that to be a good salesman you had to be a little bit of a sociopath as you had to on some level, believe your own sales pitch. I have met some salesman who gave the impression of some degree of sociopathy but honestly, and despite the plausibility of Lord Arran’s assertion, the percentage among salesman never struck me as any higher than in the general population.

I recent spent a day at one of my company’s stores in Denver, Colorado, for a one-day annual watch fair, and another at a retailer in Pittsburgh for the brand Frédérique Constant, for whom I do a little writing from time to time. (As you can see, the habit of having side hustles dies hard). In both cases there were some interesting and instructive conversations and experiences to be had.

One of the very first things I noticed was that, and this should in retrospect come as no surprise, that people who walk into a watch store as a general rule are interested in watches and interested at least theoretically in buying one. You might say the same about any retailer selling anything but I certainly don’t go into a watch boutique with the same level of feeling I bring to buying paper plates or a half pound of hamburger, and the feeling I had at both stores when talking to customers was that of talking to like-minded watch lovers who, irrespective of their readiness to pull the trigger on that particular day, still took a lot of pleasure in talking about watches and looking at them. The impression I had was that it is not so much necessary to sell someone on a watch or on watches – they are sold already on the idea or they wouldn’t be there in the first place – as it is to see where they are in their collecting and provide guidance accordingly. A few additional observations:

• People like Speedmasters. A lot of people like Speedmasters. I think the one watch I saw most on wrists at Denver was the Speedmaster, and in general, Moonwatches with Hesalite crystals seemed to predominate, although there were a few sapphire sandwiches as well. In Pittsburgh there were fewer Speedmasters although they were represented, and there seemed to be in both cities a fair number of (of course) Rolex, as well as a sprinkling of other brands; a NOMOS in Pittsburgh on one wrist and a Ressence on another in Denver; seeing a Ressence in the metal is a fairly rare experience.

• People like Rolex. This is an obvious observation but it hits different as they say, to see the steady crowd around pre-owned Rolex at both locations versus the ebb and flow around most of the other brand counters.

• The two things it never hurts to have when talking to customers, are a loupe (for obvious reasons) and a UV flashlight. Hitting the lume on a watch is a good way to get a little Wow factor into the conversation and people’s faces really light up, in general, when they seem something glow, especially if that something is, say, a Ressence, or an MB&F where the light show can be a major part of the appeal.

• Denver for some reason, is a hotbed of general aviation; over the course of a day I met a surprising number of people who fly their own planes, including one gentleman who is a flight instructor and who had recently been told that his students had given the FAA feedback that he was “too scary.” I said I thought that if you were teaching someone to fly maybe it’s ok to be a little scary. He made some interesting observations about the difficulty his students had staying oriented if he turned off GPS (“I mean, for starters, you can look out the window” he said, rather deadpan) and we talked about how difficult it is as you get older to read the Navitimer slide rule bezel and how cool it is that people actually used to use them for their intended purpose.

• Altitude sickness is a thing. This is something in the nature of a side observation but Denver is at a high enough elevation to make you feel any number of things if you are visiting for the first time, some of which include light-headedness and a persistent sense that no matter how much water you drink, you can never drink enough; the city for a noob very much feels high and dry. I must have gone through half a tube of Chapstick in 48 hours. It turns out that one of the things that can happen at altitude are excessively long, detailed nightmares. Apropos that, I also got to see the Denver airport’s famous giant sculpture of a rearing blue horse with flaming red eyes, which seems an odd ornament for an airport although it beats the endless vistas of marshes and oil tanks on the way to EWR. Also, not to be outdone, Pittsburgh’s airport has a life-size T. Rex skeleton nestled in between the escalators going to and from the gates.

• Watch people love to talk about watches and will talk your ear off given the chance (this goes for me too, obviously). This is easy to misread as a kind of showing off but what it really comes down to most of the time is that people seem to want to share their enthusiasm rather than lecture someone. This is not to say that the enthusiast community doesn’t like any other, have its own fair share of insufferable know-it-alls but in general discourse between collectors is engaged and civil (in stark contrast to frequently acerbic online comments and social media remarks).

I think the biggest takeaway for me from finally, after several decades, actually spending time at and with watch retailers, was that there is still quite a lot of interest in watches, enthusiasm for watchmaking, and interest in learning more. This may sound trivial but the view from behind a keyboard can sometimes be discouraging and disconnected from the reality of collecting and collectors. To see dozens of people show up to retailer events, eager not only to buy but to just spend some time with other enthusiasts, friends, and yes, like-minded salespeople (who at the two locations I spent time at, were one and all watch enthusiasts themselves) was refreshing and a much needed shot in the arm for my own belief in the future of watchmaking, which needs its clients to thrive; in fact it needs them to exist at all.