The Idea:

In 2008, Ben Clymer was a 26-year-old at UBS, and the financial crisis had just made his job pointless. Told he had six months before he’d be let go, and told to look busy at his desk in the meantime, he started writing about the one thing he couldn’t stop thinking about: wristwatches. The obsession went back to childhood in Rochester, New York, when his grandfather would let him wear his Omega Speedmaster. Clymer took the buyout, registered a domain from his fourth-floor walk-up on Spring Street, and named it after the quirkiest translation of “wristwatch” Google could find: the Czech word hodinky. The watch world at the time was stuffy, print-first and suspicious of the internet. Clymer wrote like a fan. Strangers started stopping him to talk about his piece on the Paul Newman Daytona, and the biggest names in Swiss watchmaking started buying ads. When Forbes later offered him a job as a lifestyle writer, he turned it down. The blog was already out-earning the salary.

This was the beginning of Hodinkee.

The Execution:

• 2008: Clymer launched the blog and it was profitable from day one, with Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe and Rolex among the early advertisers.
• 2012: He bolted a Shopify store onto the site selling straps and pouches, with Clymer and early hires packing orders in his West Village apartment.
• 2013: The New York Times crowned Clymer the High Priest of Horology. Around the same time, a cold email from a reader named John Mayer turned into a filmed chat about his collection, and Talking Watches went viral, becoming a long-running series with musicians, athletes and comedians.
• 2014: The industry stopped seeing the internet as a sideshow. Hodinkee was brought in as a consultant to Apple on the design of the Apple Watch.
• June 2015: Hodinkee merged with Watchville, a watch news app built by Digg co-founder Kevin Rose, who led a $3.6M round with True Ventures, Google Ventures and John Mayer.
• 2019: Limited editions became the money machine. Hodinkee sold 100 watches for nearly $1M in under 10 minutes, and expanded with a Japanese branch the same year.
• December 2020: Raised a $40M Series B led by TCG, with LVMH Luxury Ventures, Tom Brady and John Mayer on the cap table, valuing the blog Clymer started out of boredom at north of $100M.
• 2021: Hodinkee acquired pre-owned specialist Crown & Caliber for a reported $46M, taking revenue to around $100M. When the used watch market cooled, revenue settled at $60M by 2023 and the company trimmed back.
• October 2024: Clymer refocused Hodinkee on what made it special, then sold it to Watches of Switzerland, the retail giant behind Mappin & Webb and Goldsmiths. The founder came back as president, the New York team stayed intact, and Hodinkee now runs as an independent editorial brand with its insurance business backed by Chubb.

The lesson? Clymer never had a marketing budget. He had taste, a point of view, and a voice readers trusted enough to let him tell them what to wear on their wrist. That trust got him an advertiser list of Rolex and Patek in year one, a seat at Apple’s table, and 100 watches sold in 10 minutes. Even when the market turned, the audience didn’t leave, and that’s what a retail giant paid for. Inventory goes up and down. An audience that trusts you compounds.