Hodinkee Founder and President, Ben Clymer.
Ben Clymer gave up his job as a banker at UBS on Wall Street during the 2008 financial crisis to follow his dream: becoming a journalist and blogging about his lifelong passion for watches.
His parents - both public school teachers from upstate New York - worried he was giving up a very well-paid job for a hobby that might never make him a living.
18 years later it’s fair to say Clymer’s parents’ fears were unfounded. That “hobby blog” Hodinkee - a bastardization of hodinky the Czech word for watch - now attracts millions of eyeballs a month and has made Clymer enough money to build his own extensive watch collection - and another of classic cars.
His love of watches came from his grandfather who gave him his treasured Omega Speedmaster MK40. “Every time I would see my grandfather, he would let me wear the Omega,” he says in a video interview from his office in Soho, Manhattan. “Then, one day, when I was sixteen, I handed it back to him at the end of my visit and he said, ‘You know what? Keep it’.”
Clymer, 43, was a geeky kid - fascinated by the mechanisms of watches and an early adopter of the internet “back when you still had to do the actual coding”.
By age 15 he had created his own website, complete with gifs. But he never thought he could make a living solely online, so he did what all his friends were doing and got a job in finance.
“I was still doing the blogging on the side, and it was starting to get noticed,” he says. “We were doing something that others weren’t - at the time - we were speaking to people in an ordinary way. Not speaking down to them, but engaging them on a level as equals.”
When the financial crisis hit in 2008, Clymer suddenly had much more time to devote to Hodinkee. His day job ground to a halt but his boss still expected him to be in the office everyday leaving him with many hours in front of his computer to blog on his passion.
Then UBS put out a buyout offer, and Clymer jumped at it. “I thought fuck it, I don’t care about money,” he says. I want to do something fulfilling, and creative.”
Clymer used the UBS payout to fund a place at journalism school at Columbia University. He quickly impressed, and was offered a job at Forbes, but by then he was making more money from advertising on Hodinkee than Forbes would have paid him as a lifestyle writer.
Hodinkee grew slowly, but Clymer was starting to get emails from readers. “They would say things like ‘I read your story on the Paul Newman Rolex Dayton, and I went out and bought one.’ That’s like a $100,000 watch, and they’re buying it based on what some kid from Rochester says. That’s when I knew it would work.”
Next came celebrity readers. “I got an email from [singer songwriter ] John Mayer, saying how much he liked the site,” Clymer says. “I thought it was my friends fucking with me. But it really was him.”
Clymer interviewed Mayer for a video series called Talking Watches, which went on to become the most-viewed watch content on YouTube. The series has attracted dozens of celebrities including British singer Ed Sheeran, American TV personality Adam Levine and François-Henry Bennahmias, the chief executive of luxury watch company Audemars Piguet.
The industry noticed, with Clymer receiving dozens of takeover offers from watch manufacturers and retailers as well as private equity firms. He stuck it out alone until December 2020 when Hodinkee raised $40 million from investors — including LVMH Luxury Ventures, Mayer and the former NFL quarterback Tom Brady in a deal organized by Los Angeles private equity firm Chernin Group that reportedly valued Hodinkee at $100 million.
In 2024 Hodinkee was bought by UK-based Watches of Switzerland Group for $14 million. Clymer says teaming up with Watches of Switzerland helps the overall watch community as it “brings together an enormous retail network and with a media network, that will allow us to reach more people and do more cool stuff.”
Despite now being part of Watches of Switzerland, Clymer says Hodinkee is still free to work with all watch brands. “They let us do what we want to do. We’re still in the same office doing the same things.”
Asked about what he plans for the future, Clymer says, characteristically bluntly, “Fuck some shit up, and have some fun!”
There will be more Hodinkee collaborations with both Watches of Switzerland and other luxury watch brands, but none are likely to attract the fervor of the recent tie up between Audemars Piguet and Swatch.
The Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop Collection caused chaos at stores upon launch.
Fights broke out, police were called and stores were forced to close when Swatch launched the Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop Collection from $400 in May this year. The watches are now available on the secondary market for a minimum of $1,000.
“That was a collab that really cut through beyond the watch community,” Clymer says. “A number of people texted me about it - not my watch friends, my friend-friends from high school. It really got people excited about watches again.
Clymer says it was a great fit for both sides. “For AP it showed that there is a real thirst for hard luxury,” he says. “And Swatch with all its stores showed what real hype could be.”
The hype could have gone a bit too far though he says, describing the security incidents at some stores as “unfortunate”.
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