Mina Hasan wants you to wear a watch
The Waltham-based connoisseur and social media star is reintroducing vintage timepieces to the mainstream
CAMBRIDGE — Hunting for watches with Mina Hasan is a master class in meticulousness. She moves her eyes over the flowery designs and braided bands, fiddles with the clasps. Each watch is as much a timepiece, she explains, as it is a work of art — oval faces, set in slender straps of leather or plated in metal. A flattened needle inching forward indefinitely. Tick, tick, tick.
“There was a year-long period where every time I went into a thrift store, I would always come out with a watch,” Hasan said. “It was a guarantee. I was so taken by them.”
Her keen eye is why a growing swatch of the internet has come to trust Hasan about all things watches. More than 200,000 people on Instagram (@minahasan) and TikTok (@morefromminaa) obsess over the Waltham resident’s personal timepiece collection. Some also ravenously buy the secondhand watches she’s willing to part with at The Kismet Reserve (@thekismetreserve), her sixmonth-old vintage watch resale business online.
Since September, every Saturday inventory drop of around 15 watches has sold out within hours.
A vocal cohort is also taken with Hasan herself, and the way her identity (a 21-year-old Muslim woman), her politics (pro-Palestine), and her aesthetics (old Bollywood glamor, “clean girl” chic) are constantly on display.
Hasan layers her social media posts with classic “desi” music, sells T-shirts with Urdu script, and photographs watches atop monochromatic trade magazines. Her brownness is threaded carefully into her video blogs, or “vlogs,” where she sprinkles in chatter about spiritual holidays or showcases the abayas — loose, robelike dresses — she wore on a trip to Dubai. Her wrists are often in the cover art of videos. What emerges is a public presence where Hasan is the marketer, muse, model, and main character of her own watch-filled world.
“I would never sell a watch I personally would never wear,” Hasan said. “I am basically marketing the way I want to be marketed to. I am making videos I would want to watch.”
Hasan punctuates sentences with gentle smiles, a pair of aviator sunglasses perpetually resting above her ponytail. Whether she is talking about color corrector or colorism, she exudes enthusiasm for what she does — and for expanding young people’s interest in the vintage watch market.
Hasan, who grew up in public housing in Cambridge’s Central Square, started in late 2019 as a “content creator” — a title she says now makes her cringe. She made lighthearted videos about her PakistaniAmerican upbringing for roughly two years, until it was clear “that TikTok was changing, and I needed to change up my niche,” she said. “It took a long time to transform into a beauty, fashion, thrift creator, rather than having my whole personality revolve around being South Asian.”
Slowly, Hasan carved out her minimalist style online. She filmed herself applying makeup to her high-set cheeks; coaxing her hair to grow thicker with supplements and rosemary scalp treatments; thrifting suit vests and kitten heels. She shaped her simple, signature look around basics in blacks and beiges. But to many of her followers, nothing was more synonymous with Hasan than her daily watch: a 1980s Gucci Bezel Bracelet set. She married the color of the watch face to her outfit almost every day before commuting to her finance classes at University of Massachusetts Boston, or wandering the city with Alysha Ali — founder of the popular Instagram account @coffeeshopsofboston and one of Hasan’s closest friends.
The idea of starting a watch business struck Hasan after her 19-yearold brother died six months ago. In her grief, she chose to pursue something new and different, something that would bring change to her life.
She eventually decided to sell the timepieces people asked about in the comments of her posts. “That moment really was kismet,” she said in a March video. “That was a moment I felt passion. I felt fulfillment. I really was excited.”
So she began The Kismet Reserve. Hasan now spends hours each day looking for watches in the wilds of eBay and the websites of secondhand sellers from Japan. (“They have extremely strict counterfeit laws,” she said, “so you know you are getting what you expect.”) She frequents Global Thrift and Downstairs at Felton Antiques in Waltham, once home to the first-ever manufacturer of machine-made watches.
Weekend drops feature a smattering of watches priced between $30 and $125, plus higher-end finds: an Arabic dial watch ($370) and a working Gucci bezel set ($885) among them. Hasan hosted a pop-up in New York in February, with more events upcoming across the country.
But not every beautiful watch is a sound investment, and Hasan is new at running a one-woman business — shipping, taxes, budgeting. After she graduates in May, she plans to freelance as a social media manager for small businesses alongside her responsibilities to Kismet, a strategy that would make her chief of her schedule and kickstart a career in fashion.
On a recent Tuesday at FOUND market off Massachusetts Avenue, she selected a single watch from a glass case of jewelry and fingered its trapezoidal sections, smoothing her thumb over scratches in the goldcrusted dial. Hasan turned the watch over, then again. The tag read $100, written in inky blue pen.
Her eyes narrowed in consideration.
“I can find better somewhere else,” she said. “Onto the next.”
‘I would never sell a watch I personally would never wear. I am basically marketing the way I want to be marketed to. I am making videos I would want to watch.’
MINA HASAN on her business approach