WatchCheck offers repairs and maintenance by mail – The New York Times

As the founder of Oliver & Clarke, a luxury watch resale company, Linden Lazarus is no stranger to selling and purchasing high-quality watches. But until recently, he said, he often thought about repairing watches.

"If someone said to me, 'Do you have a watchmaker I can go to?' I would often have to direct them to a dirty shop in downtown Los Angeles that had a guy in the back who could fix his watch. "," he said by phone from his home in the more salubrious Laurel Canyon neighborhood.

Lazarus and a new business partner, Will Haering, now have a solution: WatchCheck , a website launched Tuesday. They claim it will enable easy repair and maintenance for more than 202 brands and 38,721 models.

"I thought, 'There has to be a way to optimize this so that the consumer can have not just a decent experience, but a premium experience,'" Lazarus said.

The site's sleek design seems to fit the type of high-end watch brands its founders want to attract. Videos describing the process, for example, feature voiceovers in British accents and show watchmakers in lab coats in deep concentration.

Once a customer arranges the service online, the company ships a kit that includes a padded, gold-embossed box for the watch and a discreet brown box for shipping (for starters, within the United States). Lazarus said the packaging costs about $38 per watch, according to WatchCheck.

Fees payable at the time of initial booking range from $200 for polishing a leather strap watch to $2,850 for a full service on a very complicated watch. Prices include insurance of up to $35,000 during shipping (a customer with a more expensive watch may opt for additional insurance) and up to $1 million during the work itself.

Repairs and maintenance are performed by Dayton, Ohio-based Stoll & Company, an authorized service center for Baume & Mercier, Frédérique Constant and more than 25 other brands. The company owns a stake in WatchCheck but declined to say how much.

The affiliation with Stoll, founded in 1982, may be at the core of WatchCheck's initial appeal, "because the trust has to be there," said David Flett, editor-in-chief of Beyond the Dial, a watchmaking website and podcast. "I find this to be the main problem when people look for independent watchmakers."

Lazarus said he had been thinking about starting a technology-focused watch repair business for about a year when he met Haering, a serial entrepreneur and computer programmer, in mid-2023. Each of them invested $100,000 to start the company and recruited investors.

Lazarus and Haering said they plan to expand the WatchCheck brand and potentially add more services. (The company is not affiliated with an Android app of the same name that determines a watch's time accuracy.)

Why a website when most startups seem to prefer an app? Haering said customers "check out the service frequently, but not often enough to install this app on their phone."

"It wasn't worth it for us," he continued. "It was much easier to offer a very, very mobile-optimized experience, but through watchcheck.com."

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