The Journey Ahead — Part 2: The Currency of Trust

There is a peculiar problem waiting for anyone who decides to move from collecting watches to selling them.

You may know watches. You may understand movements, references, condition, service history, market values, boxes, papers, bracelets, polishing, replacement parts and all the other details that eventually become second nature to an experienced collector. You may have spent decades building a reputation for integrity in your professional life. You may have the money to buy inventory and the discipline to run a legitimate business.

And yet, when you offer a $10,000 watch to someone who has never met you, very little of that necessarily matters.

To that person, you are still a stranger on the Internet.

That realization has probably been one of the most important lessons of my journey so far. You can buy inventory. You cannot buy credibility. Credibility has to be accumulated slowly, through transactions certainly, but also through all the smaller interactions that take place before and after them.

In Journey into the Unknown, I wrote quite a bit about scams, cloned Facebook profiles, suspicious transactions, deals that worked and deals that didn't. At the time, I naturally viewed most of those experiences from the perspective of the buyer. I was learning how to protect myself, what warning signs to recognize and how much verification was reasonable before sending a substantial amount of money to someone I had never met.

Now that I am spending more time on the other side of the transaction, I see those same experiences differently.

They explain why a prospective buyer should be suspicious of me.

Experienced watch buyers are trained to begin from a position of distrust, and frankly, they should. We are dealing with objects that can cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars and can be shipped across the country in a cardboard box. Counterfeit watches have become increasingly sophisticated. Genuine watches can contain incorrect or replaced parts. Photographs can be stolen. Profiles can be cloned. References can be fabricated. Payments can be reversed. Packages can disappear. Even the identity and reputation of an entirely legitimate seller can be appropriated by a scammer.

I experienced a particularly educational version of this when a Facebook account impersonating a legitimate seller contacted me immediately after I lost an auction. Had I not noticed a few inconsistencies—including the dramatic difference in the number of friends associated with the profile—I could easily have believed I was still dealing with the same person.

Experiences like that change the way you look at transactions. They certainly changed the way I look at them. So when someone approaches a transaction with me cautiously, I cannot reasonably be offended. I have spent considerable time teaching myself to behave exactly the same way.

This has also changed the question I ask myself. Initially, it might have been, How do I convince people to trust me? I no longer think that is the right question. A much better one is: How can I conduct myself so that people need to take as little on faith as possible?

That distinction matters.

Trust and Evidence

When I first began thinking seriously about selling watches, I naturally thought about the obvious things: forming a business, building a website, finding inventory, understanding margins, accepting payments and deciding where to sell. Those are all necessary parts of building a legitimate business, but none of them automatically creates trust.

A polished website proves that someone can build a polished website. A registered company proves that someone registered a company. A photograph of an expensive watch proves surprisingly little when photographs can be copied in seconds. What begins to create confidence is the accumulation of smaller pieces of evidence that consistently point in the same direction.

If I encounter someone selling a watch, I want to know who that person is. I want to see how long he has been around, whether other collectors know him, whether his history makes sense and whether he participates in the community when he isn't trying to sell something. I want to know whether he has bought from people I recognize, whether he contributes to conversations, and whether he describes problems with his watches as readily as he describes their virtues. Most importantly, I want to have some sense that there is an actual human being behind the account.

None of these things individually proves that a seller is trustworthy. Together, however, they begin to create something enormously valuable: a history. And a genuine history is considerably more difficult to manufacture than a sales listing.

This is one reason I think simply being visible matters. Show your face. Use your real identity where appropriate. Participate in groups as a person rather than appearing only when you have inventory to sell. Talk about watches you like and, occasionally, watches you don't like. Ask questions. Answer questions when you have something useful to contribute. Admit when you don't know something.

There is an understandable temptation when starting a business to immediately create a professional identity around it: a logo, company name, product photography, carefully written descriptions and a polished website. I have done those things myself, and they certainly have value. But watches remain an unusually personal business, particularly within enthusiast communities. People frequently want to know who is actually on the other side of the transaction. A logo cannot shake someone's hand.

The same principle is one of the reasons I have come to value writing these articles more than I originally expected. I started writing because I enjoyed documenting what I was learning. Over time, however, I realized that the articles provide something a sales listing never could. They allow someone to see how I think.

A person can read what I have written about buying watches, scams, customer service, value, collecting and my own mistakes without ever buying anything from me. They may agree with my conclusions or disagree completely, but after reading several pieces they probably know considerably more about the person behind NEXO than they could learn from an "About Us" page.

Not everyone needs to write articles, of course. Someone else might make videos, contribute technical knowledge, post interesting photographs, participate thoughtfully in collector groups or simply help people when they can. The point isn't to manufacture an image of trustworthiness. In fact, attempting too deliberately to look trustworthy can sometimes accomplish the opposite.

The objective is simply to leave enough of a genuine trail that other people can make their own judgment.

Becoming Part of the Community

Some of the best opportunities to build that history occur when nothing is being sold. Buying watches, for example, is obviously necessary if you are building inventory, but I have begun to see those purchases as something more. Every purchase is an opportunity to meet another person in the watch community. If the transaction goes well, tell the seller. Thank him. Leave feedback where appropriate. If you encounter him again in a group six months later, say hello.

In less formal terms, be a nice person.

That may sound almost comically unsophisticated as business advice, but I suspect it is more valuable than a great deal of sophisticated business advice. The person who sells you a watch today may buy one from you three years from now. He may become a reference. He may introduce you to another collector. Or none of those things may happen and you may simply have made another acquaintance who enjoys watches. That is still worthwhile.

A network built entirely by asking people for something isn't much of a network. This also explains why I think joining a community and immediately trying to sell expensive watches is such a difficult way to begin. Imagine someone appearing for the first time in a Facebook group and offering a $12,000 Rolex. There may be absolutely nothing wrong with the watch or the seller, but from the buyer's perspective the situation is remarkably simple: I don't know you, nobody I know appears to know you, and you would now like me to send you twelve thousand dollars. That is a substantial request.

The alternative requires more patience. Participate before you need something. Talk about watches. Help someone identify a reference if you can. Congratulate someone on a purchase. Ask intelligent questions. Buy from established members. Meet collectors locally when opportunities arise. Let people encounter your name without a price attached to it. Not because every conversation needs to be converted into a future sale. Quite the opposite. People generally recognize when every interaction is transactional.

Just become part of the community. Reputation tends to follow.

Making Trust Easier

Eventually, of course, a watch does go up for sale, and at that point another kind of trust becomes important: trust in the description of the object itself. I have developed a fairly simple philosophy for my own listings. I would much rather have the buyer think the watch looks slightly better when it arrives than slightly worse.

That means describing condition conservatively. If there is a scratch, I want to photograph it. If I don't know whether a watch has been polished, I shouldn't magically become certain that it hasn't. If I suspect that a component may have been replaced, that needs to be discussed. If something isn't included, say so. If the watch isn't a full set, don't creatively redefine "full set" until it happens to describe whatever happens to be sitting on the table.

There is always a short-term incentive to make the watch sound as attractive as possible, particularly when you have money tied up in inventory. But the long-term asset isn't the extra few hundred dollars that might be squeezed out of one transaction. It is the buyer who opens the package and thinks, This is exactly what he told me I was buying. Better yet: This is nicer than I expected.

Documentation serves the same purpose. Good photographs, clear pictures of the box, papers, accessories and extra links, service records when available, and provenance when it exists all reduce the amount of trust a buyer is being asked to provide. If someone reasonably asks for another photograph, take it. If a buyer wants a picture of the watch set to a particular time beside your name and the date, I don't see that as an insult. I see someone doing exactly what I would advise him to do.

The same is true of communication. Important details should be clear and preferably in writing: what is included, how payment will work, how the watch will be shipped and insured, and what happens if there is a problem. Ambiguity creates uncertainty, and uncertainty is rarely helpful when thousands of dollars are changing hands.

This is where references also become enormously valuable, although references introduce a problem of their own. Reputation in the watch market is remarkably fragmented.

Someone can have impeccable eBay feedback and effectively start from zero in a Facebook group. Years of successful transactions in one collector community may mean very little in another. A person can even have decades of professional credibility in the real world and discover that none of it automatically translates into credibility when offering a Rolex to someone three states away.

I encountered this firsthand when a trade involving my Yacht-Master and a white-dial Speedmaster initially failed because I did not have sufficient Facebook references. At the time it was frustrating, particularly because I knew perfectly well who I was and what my intentions were. But the other person didn't and that is the part that matters. He wasn't necessarily making a judgment about my character. He simply didn't have enough independent information to make the risk acceptable. Seen from that perspective, his decision was entirely rational.

That initial failure has continued to bother me for another reason, however. It exposes what I think is a genuine structural weakness in the current watch market. Our reputations are scattered across eBay accounts, Facebook groups, forums, dealer networks, auction platforms and other communities, with remarkably little ability to carry that accumulated credibility from one place to another. I continue to think there may someday be room for a better, independent method of establishing a verifiable transaction history across platforms.

Until something like that exists, the answer is considerably less glamorous: build references wherever you operate, and protect them carefully.

Playing the Long Game

There is a final temptation that probably becomes strongest precisely when someone is new to the business. Inventory represents money, and money sitting in a watch box creates pressure to sell.

That pressure can encourage bad decisions. A seller may accept a payment method he doesn't fully understand, overlook warning signs, continue negotiating with someone who makes him uncomfortable or push too hard when a buyer is clearly hesitant. None of those things is worth it.

I have already had failed deals. I expect to have many more. A watch will eventually sell. A damaged reputation is much harder to move.

And, of course, trust has to work in both directions. Sellers can be victims too. Payments can be reversed, returns can be abused, watches can come back damaged or altered, and a seller can do everything correctly and still find himself defending a transaction. The objective isn't blind trust in buyers any more than it is blind trust in sellers. The objective is to combine trust with verification: know who you are dealing with, check references, understand the payment method, document the watch before it leaves, insure the shipment properly and keep records.

The more I think about all of this, though, the more convinced I become that the most important part of reputation building happens outside the transaction itself.

It is the conversation you had with someone six months ago when neither of you wanted anything. It is the beginner's question you answered because you happened to know the answer. It is the seller you thanked after receiving a watch and the person whose new acquisition you admired without immediately sending him a private message asking whether he wanted to sell it. It is the article you wrote because you had something worth discussing rather than because you needed to advertise inventory. It is answering someone's message after the sale just as promptly as you answered it before receiving payment.

None of these things seems particularly important at the time but collectively, they become reputation.

That may ultimately be the paradox of building a watch business. The watches themselves can move remarkably quickly. Reputation moves very slowly. I can buy a watch this morning and, theoretically, sell it this afternoon. It may take years before someone encounters my name in a group and thinks without hesitation, I know who that is.

There is no shortcut worth taking.

So I am becoming less interested in persuading strangers to trust me. Instead, I want to continue doing the things that gradually make me less of a stranger: showing my face, participating, writing, buying, selling honestly, describing watches conservatively, documenting what I sell, giving references as readily as I ask for them, helping people when there is nothing obvious in it for me, and staying in touch with the people I meet along the way. Perhaps most importantly, I want the person on the other side of a transaction to be happier to know me after the transaction than before it.

If I can continue doing that, eventually something interesting should happen. A collection of transactions becomes a history. A collection of acquaintances becomes a network. A name becomes familiar. And familiarity, when supported by years of consistent evidence, becomes reputation.

In a business where almost everything has a market price, reputation may be the one asset that matters most and cannot simply be purchased.

That is why I have started to think of trust as a currency. It takes a long time to earn, it can travel surprisingly far, and it is extraordinarily expensive to lose.