Watch Wild Things 1998 Online Free

[Awilda]

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All stories great and small have a beginning, and ours is no exception. The foundation of our story is two people, each of whom self-identifies as entrepreneurial, each of whom are lifelong watch fanatics.

Having discovered watches at 13 years old it became more of a passion with each year that passed. The idea of actually designing and building a watch was something that occurred to him only in the past decade, yet the idea of having some kind of watch business was something that he first tried in the late 1990s.

It was 1998 and the very early days of eBay and Internet watch trading message boards. The convergence of an early electronic commerce product where you could buy and sell goods, coupled with a watch fanatic community that was starting to find their way online proved irresistible for Aron.

Also in the early days of eBay, there were not yet even photographs. So that meant that someone could try to sell a watch on eBay and all they would have was a written description. So it was the wild wild west of watch selling - a real gamble. Further, there were no professional merchants on eBay. eBay was literally like a garage sale that just happened to be online and around the world.

One weekend, Aron had found this amazing early Orfina Porsche Design chronograph on eBay. He had studied eBay in great depth and found ways to beat last-minute bidding wars before software was built for this purpose. So Aron won this watch and it was from a reputable seller with whom he had dealt with before. Knowing the watch would arrive in around 4 days, Aron simply relisted the watch with a much more detailed technical and historical description, and he then spread the word among the watch community as well.

On the day that the watch arrived in Aron's mailbox, his eBay auction ended and he had sold the watch for eight times what he bought it for. While this was truly an exceptional case, Aron's little watch side business proved an important proposition for him. That it was possible to not only maintain love for a hobby, but find revenue streams that could generate profit and most importantly for him, sustain his watch habit.

This side watch business allowed Aron to maintain a fairly large watch collection for well over a decade without spending a cent out of his own pocket. Like the baker who is too in love with his own donuts, Aron definitely minimized his profits by dipping into his own pantry. Probably 30% of the watches that Aron bought and intended for resale would simply go on his wrist and be added to his collection. Not a great way to run a business, but a pretty great way to fund an expensive and growing hobby.

Part of it was being attracted to a brand or a name. and part of it was being attracted to either of the simplicity or complexity of a watch. For example, one of Aron's favorite watches in his collection was a Rolex Air King from the 1960s. It was such a simple, beautiful and perfect watch, very difficult to do anything with aside from honor and respect and enjoyed its design and beauty. But he also enjoyed a Seiko Giugiaro digital chronograph, with amazing Italian design from someone who design cars and race products. While our tastes can be eclectic, they become more clearly defined by experience and sharpened by time.

Throughout this process Aron realized that he kept adding a lot of the same style watches to his collection. A 40mm Fortis pilot watch was joined a couple weeks later by an Orfina pilot's watch. And while he would question why he needed multiple watches that essentially looked and felt the same, he was just drawn so much to a certain style and favored that in his collection over other things. More importantly it felt different wearing the Orfina than it felt wearing the Fortis, or wearing a Glycine Incursore, back then a massive massive pilot's watch at 44mm.

By the time 2008 came around, and after a decade of really intense watch collecting and trading, Aron made his first designs for watch. It was a 44mm military style watch, kind of a hybrid between a classic pilot and a Panerai. It was a design extremely similar to one of the first California-designed Tsovet watches, which Aron soon discovered and acquired.

While this project never went past the design phase. Aron had some professional drawings done for the watch. He then ended up getting very deep into some professional projects for a couple years. While Aron's watch love remained as strong as ever, he pulled back on the buying and trading.at that point. Aron was traveling over 300,000 miles a year and while he would pick up the occasional watch on his travels, there just wasn't the kind of time necessary to sit behind the computer and do the work to maintain an online watch trading business.

It was only after that special visit to what we think of as a candy store for watch fanatics, and Aron's departure from Toronto for Europe, that we started to build what we thought would be at least a prototype for an idea for a watch. To be honest, at that point, if you would have asked us the percentage chance that we would actually end up building a watch or a watch company I think we would have said it was less than 20%. At best.

The importance of this cannot be over-emphasized. Too often entrepreneurs, especially those of a relatively tender age, go into an entrepreneurial activity with a lot of energy and focus but they're just not aware of what they don't know. And, of course, what they don't know tends to appear when it's in the shape of a bear and ready to give them a solid bite. Sometimes that's a bite from which they don't recover in time to save the business.

Aron, particularly, had a lifelong love of Japanese watches, Aron's first watch, that he received at age 13, was a mid-70s Seiko Speed-Timer. For Aron, this hooked him on Asian watches for life. No matter what other styles of watches and watch brands Aron enjoyed, he would always gravitate back to Asian watches, with a particular love for Seiko and all of its different varieties and sub-brands. Parenthetically, Aron is also a huge fan of Japanese G-Shock watches. Before our Mission 1, Aron's daily wearer, even with a full collection of watches some of which are quite high-end, would be a G-Shock.

So as the idea for Mission Watch Company began to play itself out, we realized that we wanted to provide amazing value for people who would wear our watches. As we had many conversations over many months, we began to unfold the vision. Our vision would be to build a watch in Asia, of custom-made components, using a global supply chain, that would allow us to produce a great watch of Swiss quality at a significantly lesser price. That was our vision. That was our value proposition.

We resolved from day one that cutting corners was an impossibility. We knew that the only way we would sell even one watch is if we built a watch that Peter and Aron would both love and want to be our own daily wearer.

You have to think about what a high bar we intentionally set for ourselves. To have two lifelong watch fanatics both feel strongly enough about a watch that they would want it on their wrist every day is a massive mountain to climb. And, to be very honest, for both of us, if this watch wasn't that quality of watch, we wouldn't wear it even if we built it. The end result would have been us building a watch that never would have made it to market because we personally wouldn't have been proud and excited about it.

So our first challenge was obviously designing a watch. It's one thing to design a watch by yourself. It's another thing to design a watch with another human being.The same withhold true whether it was a watch or any other physical thing. No matter how much two people can have respect for an admirer the same physical thing, they have different tastes, styles, and design influences.

While common sense may dictate that the design process should then become both collaborative and deeply based upon compromise, that simply doesn't work. The collaboration piece works great but in designing any physical thing two people are going to come across many different points where they're views don't intersect.

While we will dive into much detail about this in later chapters, suffice it to say for now that each of us had certain aspects of design that we felt much more strongly about.This turned out to be a very good thing. There were very few points where we had philosophical and practical disagreements, yet felt equally strongly about that piece of the design and build.As in any relationship, it is much easier to compromise on something that you don't feel is as critically important as the other person does.

It is those occasions where a line is drawn in the sand that compromise becomes impossible. We chalk it up to good luck that we encountered extremely few of those points, and each of us was able to take the design lead on elements we held closest to our individual hearts.

It is also important to be connected in your own mind and body to why you feel certain things are more important than other things and building any kind of product, whether it is hardware or software. When frustration comes in building something, it helps to take the time to connect yourself to the source of that frustration.If we recognize that the reasons for our creative frustration comes from a place of some kind of personal frustration or block in our own vision, that is a very different proposition than frustration that stems from the evolution of what you are building. When you are actually becoming dissatisfied with what you are building, it is, of course, critically important to take a step back and examine the direction your design is going. Luckily, we encountered extremely few of those points and when we felt that ourdesign was not being true to our mission statement and our vision, we were fairly quickly able to right our own course. As any good navigator knows, deviating from your course is natural - tides, winds and weather can move you around. The way to get to your final destination is consistent and careful course correction. And our design process allowed for us to go deep into watch design and aesthetics but consistent course correction and reference to our North Star kept us on track.

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