Crown & Caliber Unveils A New Marketplace For Watch Lovers

For those of you who still like something ticking on your wrist Crown & Caliber has rebuilt itself from the ground up in an effort to sell some of the watches they’ve bought. Originally created as a watch sellers site – you’d tell them what you had and they’ve give you a price send a box mail it in – they have expanded further into watch sales in an effort to create a full marketplace.

Launched in 2013 the site took the Gazelle model to the world of watches. Now that the company has filled up their coffers with fancy tickers, they are ready to start selling some of the pieces.

“So the special thing about this new site is it adds a sophisticated ecommerce component to the site – thereby completing the marketplace. Now buyers can come to the site and easily buy inventory,” said founder Hamilton Powell. “In any marketplace, the hardest part is securing the inventory. That is why when we launched our original site, we built a site which catered to just the seller.”

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Further, they added a number of interesting features including a Wishlist that notifies you when a piece is in stock and an API that allows retailers to upload their inventory to the site. They also added some pricing descriptions that tell you why a watch is worth a certain amount. The prices are comparable to forum or watch store prices and the watches are serviced before selling.

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Interestingly the company is also creating a sort of “matchmaker” marketing feature that shows both the buyer and the seller for a particularly interesting watch. Because watch sales are usually personal affairs – a forum member reaches out to someone with a piece to sell – C&C has tried to recreate that experience through its website. It’s a fun and quirky way to keep the humanity in the process.

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As someone who’s gotten burned on watch sales before, something like Crown & Caliber is pretty compelling. While it’s been hard to pry my Apple Watch off my wrist of late, I definitely could strap on a Ploprof if you forced it on me. I’d just miss Siri.