Worn & Wound needs no introduction in America (and around the world) as one of the best-known watch publications with headquarters in New York. It was founded in 2011 by Blake Malin (CEO), Zach Weiss (Executive Editor) and later James Helms (Chief Commercial Officer), and in addition to the publication, there’s Windup Watch Fair in four cities and the Windup Watch Shop that represents brands such as Alpina, Citizen, Hamilton, Junghans, Oris, Seiko and many more – almost 40 brands in total. That doesn’t include the straps, clocks, knives and accessories, many of which are present at Windup Watch Fairs throughout the country. I recently attended the San Francisco event and had an extended conversation with Blake about how the show, publication and shop came to be.
Blake Malin, CEO and Co-Founder of Worn & Wound and Windup Watch Fair
Erik Slaven, MONOCHROME – Blake, so I generally start my interviews with a brief overview of how you became a watch enthusiast. Was it an early gift from your parents, something you saw in a store window or magazine? How did you catch the bug?
Blake Malin, CEO of Worn & Wound – Well, I think unlike a lot of folks in the watch industry that carried an obsession with watches from an early age into adulthood, I was just a typical kid with Swatch watches and also browsed cheap watches at the mall when my mom dragged me there to buy clothes. Watches weren’t a thing I really focused on until I started my career. Basically, I had a steady job and wanted to buy a watch, and one of my good college friends who knew about watches was Zach Weiss, who ultimately co-founded Worn & Wound with me. I had a few hundred dollars and asked what I should get, and it kind of took off from there.
That’s basically how I started as well, with those cool 1980s Swatches with the rubber crystal guards. What was your background prior to Worn & Wound? Were you in a completely different industry?
Yeah, I came from a totally different background. Zach and I met in college, where I majored in political science, and I initially worked in the non-profit space and fundraising. Mostly institutional fundraising and raising money from foundations, and I did that for almost ten years in New York City. As I really became a watch enthusiast in adulthood, I started Worn & Wound with Zach and later James, and decided I’d rather be in charge of a company than work for one. It was a natural fit for me to be CEO as I’m very comfortable with financial records and other skill sets that I learned in my previous career.
Worn & Wound was founded in 2011 after you met Zach in college. Who initiated its start?
After college, Zach went to Chicago for grad school, and I stayed in New York to work. He came back to the city when we were in our mid-20s, and we spent way too much time playing video games and drinking beer, but we soon started focusing on watches. He had always been a watch enthusiast, and I had again asked him about purchasing one for a few hundred dollars. We researched online and discovered there wasn’t really a website that focused on the more affordable or approachable segment. Everything seemed to lean to the high end. There were some scattered forums, but navigating them can be challenging for many, so we started a blog and wrote about the affordable segment.
It certainly didn’t blow up overnight, but we gained a solid readership early on and knew it was a real thing with a community interested in these types of watches. About a year after the Worn & Wound blog started in 2011, James Helms in California reached out as he was interested in the same thing and asked about teaming up. Zach and I said yes, and the rest is history. We started selling watch straps in 2012 with the early Windup Shop, and the Windup Watch Fair debuted in 2015.
This is the 10th Anniversary of Windup Watch Fair, so congratulations on that. How did you get started with these events?
With the watch strap business and our general interest in clothing and accessories, we had already been going to pop-up shops in New York and a well-known one, Pop-Up Flea, run by Michael Williams and a few partners that sold leather goods, boots and so on. All very approachable environments. As we did this, we knew something comparable needed to exist for watches. The watch events we were attending were very high-end, stuffy and even intimidating. Not really our style at all. We already had a lot of enthusiasts interested in our watch straps, so creating this event for watches was a logical step.
That goes right to my next question. A lot of the big and popular shows today – Watches and Wonders, Geneva Watch Days, Dubai Watch Week and even WatchTime New York – generally highlight the upper end of the industry. Brands like Rolex, Piaget, Vacheron and so on. Windup has always been for us mere mortals with brands like Oris, Christopher Ward, Oak & Oscar, Islander and Studio Underd0g. Are the hundred or so accessible brands (generally $5,000 and below) under one roof what make Windup Watch Fair so popular?
For us, it’s always about having a “big tent” that’s approachable. That said, if a brand with watches in the $20,000 range or so wanted to participate, we’d definitely have that conversation, and we’ve had many in the past. I’ve seen attendees at our shows with a Seiko on one wrist and something like a F.P. Journe on the other. People who collect high-end watches collect all kinds of watches. I do think there’s a market for high-end brands at Windup, but the core event will always be about watches for everyone. That also goes along with how we run the event, never requiring registration or an attendance fee. We want to create as few barriers to entry as possible. Just a laid-back vibe for watch enthusiasts and newcomers alike. I’ve heard from many people over the years who became watch enthusiasts because of our shows. The ease of access and comfortable nature really attract a lot of people.
As you mentioned earlier, there are high-end and intimidating events with a large collection of watches that I couldn’t even begin to afford. They’re always fun, but what I really like about Windup is both the realistic approach and the creativity you see with smaller brands.
Yes, some of these smaller independent brands don’t have the resources for sophisticated movement development and things like that, but when you look at the interesting designs they come out with that often push the envelope, it’s just more exciting than what’s coming from the larger brands. They have the flexibility to really think outside the box. I feel like this affordable segment just offers a more exciting spread of designs. Horage is probably the highest-end brand at the show with in-house movements including micro-rotors and tourbillons, but even those are more accessible than comparable watches from larger brands, and they’re often more creative with design.
I couldn’t agree more. Some brands that come to mind are Xeric, with their wild creations, and Studio Underd0g with their creative, food-based dials.
Yes, absolutely. And there’s a great story behind Studio Underd0g’s new Av0cado and Guacam0le releases.
You have four shows in 2025. New York, San Francisco, Chicago. Am I correct in saying that Dallas is new this year?
Yes, we just added Dallas this year.
That’s a lot of shows. Are you reaching your limit with these events, or do you see potentially more in the future? Also, would you ever consider hosting a show outside of the US?
I don’t think we’ll do more than four shows in a calendar year as we’re now hitting north, south, east and west of the country. For example, many can easily travel to New York from the East Coast states and so on. We’re doing as many events as possible with the team we currently have. That said, doing a show outside of the US has always been an interest of ours. We’d like to host an event, potentially in London or a similar city, and it’s something we talk about trying when the time is right. I’d say we don’t have immediate plans, but I see it happening in the future.
Is Windup Watch Fair the biggest show of its kind in the US? And is that based on the number of brands and/or attendees involved?
For us, we think about it in two ways. First, just the volume of brands we work with in a given year. We’re well into a hundred brands, perhaps even two hundred unique brands, which makes us the largest of our kind, especially after the end of Baselworld. Second is attendance and geographic coverage. Last year, our New York show alone had over 10,000 people in a single weekend, so in terms of a watch event, Windup Watch Fair is the largest in the US and perhaps the world.
Your events now include EDC Expo, so you also have knives, wallets, pens and so on with their own tables. What exactly is EDC Expo, and how did that happen?
At Worn & Wound, we generally think of watches as part of a broader ecosystem of things that people are enthusiastic about. Whether it’s knives or pens, photography or travel, wallets, bags or other gear, there’s just so much crossover. We’ve also participated in non-watch shows, such as a boot event, and written about other products and accessories on the site that again tie into the watch enthusiast ecosystem. About two or three years ago, we had our first integration of non-watch brands called EDC Alley (everyday carry) in San Francisco, and it went very well. People were excited to see these products mixed in with watches, and many discovered new interests, whether in knives, pens, bags or other accessories. As it’s grown, we started calling it EDC Expo and found that many of these brands had better sales at our watch shows than at more product-focused events. For us, it’s all about the interesting crossover.
Of course, some watch brands are involved with other products and vice versa. Montblanc, for example, started with pens and still has a large division, while Leica Camera is now selling watches with proprietary movements.
Absolutely. One brand we’ve worked with, The James Brand, focuses on knives and tools, but has also done many watch collaborations. I know they’ve worked with Timex and others. There’s again a lot of crossover among brands, and as you said, watchmakers like Montblanc even started with pens, which was their core product for almost a century before venturing into watches.
The Windup Shop debuted about a year after Worn & Wound was founded and started with straps. Today, you have a lot of major watch brands like Hamilton, Tissot, Seiko, Louis Erard and Junghans in the shop. How did you go about approaching these brands and getting them on board early on?
Yes, we started with watch straps in 2012 and then began making other products like watch rolls and tools. In 2018, we rebranded the shop as Windup Watch Shop and started approaching brands. At that point, we had developed a dedicated enthusiast community and a sizeable platform, so brands were very receptive. A shop like ours also has a larger marketing reach by nature than a more traditional mom-and-pop retailer, so Windup Watch Shop has become part of a broader strategy for brands. For example, we work with Citizen, which also works with jewellery shops and department stores. So, multiple strategies are in play, and ours is a great fit for these watch brands. We just try to be a strong part of the pie, so to speak.
How do the Windup Watch Shop and the editorial side of Worn & Wound complement each other?
Yeah, it’s interesting. Over the years, we’ve developed our business with three pillars: editorial, shopping and events. Sometimes people don’t realise that we’re directly involved with all three, such as at Windup Watch Fair. They’re surprised that Worn & Wound even runs it. People generally discover us through one of the pillars, whether at an event, reading an article online… One often leads them to seek out another. A review or editorial could bring someone to the shop, or an event might bring someone to our articles.
Where do you see things in five years? Any big changes?
Well, we certainly don’t want to change the core principle of what we’re doing. We’ll always be an accessible place for enthusiasts and a welcoming environment for everyone. We also see an opportunity for growing the watch community by reaching out to those interested in other products or enthusiast genres. For example, Worn & Wound occasionally writes about products other than watches, like cameras. We recently did a hands-on review of a pocketknife. So, we’re trying to incorporate enthusiast products that aren’t specifically watches and complement our watch community’s interests. That again involves things like the EDC Expo and knives, and other products in our shop. We never want to feel like we’re talking into an echo chamber, so bringing in different groups of enthusiasts helps us branch out and expose photographers or knife collectors to the world of watches. Traditional Nikon or Leica shooters who really appreciate the mechanical workings of their cameras are likely to appreciate the mechanical workings of a fine watch. I think in five years you’ll see an even more diverse selection of enthusiast products at our shows and on our site. Real enthusiasm is infectious as people talk about different interests under one tent.
I’d like to wrap this up with a glimpse into your personal collection if that’s okay. Do you have any favourites or some special pieces?
I have a bunch of watch boxes behind my desk that are mostly filled with limited editions that we’ve released, but the ones that I wear most can vary. I have a Polar Rolex Explorer II 16570 that I often wear, and I picked up a Christopher Ward Bel Canto last year at Windup Watch Fair that’s very cool. I’m wearing a Seiko 007 right now that I probably don’t wear enough. I started getting rid of some of my plain Janes or black dial watches and am trying to mix things up. For example, I had a black Speedmaster that I recently traded in for the white one. Sometimes it just feels like I have too many, and it can be hard to wear them all.
As far as watches I’ll always keep, I think the Polar Explorer will always be with me. I have no interest in ever selling it. It’s so wearable and one of the first higher-end watches I purchased.
Blake, thanks so much for your time. I always enjoy the San Francisco Windup Watch Fair and look forward to more. And congratulations again on the 10th anniversary of the show.
Thanks, Erik, and it was great talking with you!
For more details on upcoming events, check out windupwatchfair.com.
https://monochrome-watches.com/interview-blake-malin-ceo-and-co-founder-of-worn-and-wound-windup-watch-fair/