A watch brand by and for millennials
Jake Kassan, 26, likes to play a little game: ask other 20somethings for the time, and see if they glance at their wrists or their phones.
“More often than not, they reach for their phone,” he said.
This might seem like a problem, given that Kassan and his business partner, Kramer LaPlante, also 26, run Mvmt, a watch company that targets millennials. But Kassan could care less. “Watches have evolved,” he said. “Our audience cares more about the style of a watch than its function.”
Millennials are often thought to be the lost generation when it comes to watches, since they were raised with cellphones, are often too busy struggling to carve out careers in an uncertain economy to fritter away money on their yuppie parents’ status symbols.
Funny, then, that a Los Angeles-based watch startup founded by a couple of college dropouts in 2013 has become an industry player (the company says its revenues were $60 million last year) by selling old-school timepieces to people too young to remember rotary phones. The business is built on a simple, if implicit, premise: young adults, with their do-everything smartphones and tablets, may not need another device to help them navigate their daily existence. But they care deeply about any image enhancer that helps them pop on Instagram. It seems to have worked. Company research shows that 88 per cent of its customers are under 34 years old, and 45 per cent are under 24.
“The belief that traditional watches are relics of the past is false,” Kassan said. “Our consumers may not be the most formal in their attire, but they are very intentional. They think about what they wear, about what is on trend and up-to-date. That may be ripped jeans and a T-shirt, but it’s not a baggy T-shirt with stains on it.” “A watch,” he said, “is their statement piece.” As the company has grown, it has begun selling in stores, like Nordstrom, advertising on radio and television, and has also expanded into sunglasses.
The partners, who met in Santa Barbara, Calif., after leaving college, each had tried his hand at e-commerce and crowdfunding ventures, with middling success. While neither was what you would call a watch obsessive, both had a hard time finding a brand to fit both their style sensibility and budget.
The original Mvmt line, introduced on the Indiegogo crowdfunding platform, was tastefully designed. Watch geeks will draw obvious parallels to minimalist Swiss classics like the Movado Museum Dial series and the IWC Portofino, which are far more expensive.
The Mvmt watches delivered sleek, hyper-minimalist design for prices that were roughly in line with the average monthly cellphone bill, and had, as they say, great branding. (Prices range from $95 to $180 US.)
Timekeeping, clearly, was not the point. Mvmt watches largely did away traditional functional design elements, like numerals for hour markers, or luminescent hands. To set itself apart in the sea of under-$200 fashion watches, Mvmt positioned itself as an Instagram-first watch company. Its Instagram feed for its men’s line, for example, which has more than 855,000 followers, is a cornucopia of FOMO-inducing shots of stylish young lovelies cavorting in exotic locales wearing cool watches.
And while the company experimented with celebrity endorsements, including Kylie Jenner and Klay Thompson, it seemed to find its footing with a social media star known largely to other millennials: Sam Kolder, a globe-trotting young videographer and thrill seeker with more than 590,000 Instagram followers and great abs.
“Our whole thing is, ‘Dress with intent, live with purpose,’” Kassan said. “He scales buildings and scuba dives with sharks. But he’s not going to five-star resorts. He’s just doing something everyone can do.”
And wearing a watch that everyone can wear.