The WatchTime: Q&A

Teddy Baldassarre is a watch enthusiast turned YouTube personality. While he still aims “to educate and inspire the next generation of watch enthusiasts,” he recently also became an authorized retailer for more than a dozen of watch brands, including Bell & Ross, Bulova, Nomos, Oris, Tissot and Zenith. WatchTime reached out to him to talk about views, the industry and the challenges of being an influencer and watch collector at the same time.

- Roger Ruegger

WT: In September 2017, you posted your first video about the state of your own watch collection. What made you hit the record button?

TB: Watches were something that hit me fast, which I don’t feel is different than many others that eventually get ‘bitten’ by the bug. In the same way, YouTube and video were a huge part of growing up as an adolescent. If I am being honest, I don’t think I had any expectations or motivation for posting my first video. I had always enjoyed watching collectors showcase their watches as it was always interesting to see the quirks and qualities of an individual be represented in the watches they collect. Being someone living in an area that is anything but a watchmaking hub in Cleveland, Ohio, I felt isolated a bit, and my journey was that I simply wanted to show the world what I was passionate about. From there, I suppose the rest is history, as they say.

WT: What was your biggest lesson in the past years?

TB: For the sake of not getting too longwinded, one of the first surprises, when we were just starting out, was how watch brands didn’t know what to make of certain online channels such as YouTube. Brands very much like control and will have the closest allegiance to what has worked in the past and will not look to move on until later than most would. Having to push the envelope and try new things is scary when your biggest asset is the prestige of your brand that has taken hundreds of years to build. Now looking back, I understand their position more and there certainly has been progress since I posted my first video, but many brands completely neglected the power of digital channels or saw them as inferior to the traditional media they have been working with.