Quaid Walker: Co-Founder & CEO of Bezel

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be I want to be, you just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked down knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control control control. Hi, everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi, everyone. And welcome back to the Kara Goldin show. I am so excited about my next guest, we have Quaid Walker, who is the co founder and CEO of a company called Bezel. And if you’re not familiar with Bezel border, you’re going to be excited to hear the story and hear all about the marketplace that he and his two co founders have created. So it is a Bezel is a marketplace for authenticated luxury watches. And today with over 450 million worth of listings, including brands like Rolex cardi A. And if you can imagine some other luxury brands I’m not even going to pretend to try and and talk about how to pronounce some of those brands, but they probably have them. Quaid and his team have completely reimagined the marketplace for luxury watches, providing a trusted buying experience that focuses on in house authentication and best in class customer service. In addition, he has quite the list of angel investors backing him, including one who had invested in hint, as I just mentioned, to him, John Legend, so super good guy, and very, very smart. So very excited to see that he’s involved in this company as well. So quaids journey and launching and building Bezel is remarkable and very inspiring. So I’m thrilled that he agreed to come on the show. So welcome. Quaid. Nice to meet you.

Quaid Walker 2:16
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. And what an inch. I really appreciate it.

Kara Goldin 2:19
Thank you. Yeah, definitely. Well, I’m really inspired by what you’re doing. It’s it’s tough, especially luxury goods. And what you’ve done, I think is really solving a problem for for that market overall. But before we get into that, I really want to talk I really want to hear from you. Where did this all start? Like, Basil was not the first company that you had jumped into right out of college. But where did this all start? Like where did your journey start? Yeah,

Quaid Walker 2:54
absolutely. So I straight out of college started at Google. And that’s where I spent the majority of kind of my my early career, I was a designer there. So it was just obsessing over kind of building out products. And and I don’t know, Google felt like the right place to learn how to build things for scale and optimize products for obviously, millions, if not billions, of users just to leverage that. And I was working on the product. I was on a Google it’s called Google TV. I was really lucky at Google to join and have kind of like a side project pop up while I was there. And so Google TV was like an inkling and I have an idea on a whiteboard, we were able to kind of like raise money internally to scale it. And ultimately, it felt like a startup within a large company. So I got that obsession over taking product zero to one, I was one of the earliest employees on the product. And then, you know, the team grew to hundreds working on it, and you know, very large product launches before I left. And so I think I was just generally obsessed with the notion of building products and wanting to do it again and wanting to start small and kind of obsess over that feeling. And the way that I stumbled into watches, I think I always had a passion for craft and mechanical objects, and generally just being a nerd about how things worked. And watches just felt really elegantly into that category. My first bonus that I ever got at Google, like my first, you know, big boy bonus that I could, you know, spend that when I wanted to, I bought a watch with it. And I think my expectation growing up you see a lot of the most successful people like your idols, like they all wear these really expensive, beautiful timepieces. And to me, it meant, like a symbolic moment if I’ve arrived at this moment in my life or stage in my life, so it felt symbolic to buy it. And I think my expectation was that they would feel like popping the champagne and luxury. And in reality, it was actually a really scary process trying to buy a watch. I walked into a Rolex boutique with the amount of money I saw it worth online and I was told that There is a five year waitlist for the watch that I wanted. So I was politely kind of ushered out of the door and thrown into the secondary watch market. And the secondary watch market, certainly at the time is very, you know, who do you know, shop the seller, you know, do your own research, and you take the own risk, you know, and ultimately, it’s up to you to protect yourself. And I didn’t know what I was doing at the time, my expectation was kind of coming from other verticals like sneakers and streetwear. And using products like stock X and go, my expectation is, there probably was a managed marketplace, my expectation was that there’d be a product that made me feel trusted, thoughtful, kind of handled, the whole process was authentication forward, and just made me feel like I was ultimately getting the experience that I wanted. So I think the reason I got into watches and ultimately the product we built today with Bezel, it’s kind of like the superpower in what we are building in that I didn’t come from the watch industry. So you know, our goal is to empathize with the first time watch buyers and build up the best experience for buying your first watch all the way to collecting, you know, your hundreds.

Kara Goldin 6:05
So you launched Bezel with two of your friends, right? And how did that all come about?

Quaid Walker 6:14
I think like, when you’re thinking about starting a business, you identify the need, or at least is something that that happened for me. And I think there’s a lot of time where you know, you’re being very passive about it, you know, you want to do it. But there’s like this kind of like cold start problem, you’re sitting at the starting line, like waiting to take that job. And my two co founders, first one Chase PI on him and I have been best friends since we were in like third grade, we grew up in the same town, spent a lot of time together very different skill sets. He’s like he spent his career in finance kind of hedge fund world bouncing around, I obviously went kind of more of a technology route my entire life. We have such, you know, supportive skill sets that we thought we would do something together. And he’s always been the one to shut down when I wanted to work on from a feasibility perspective. So called him immediately, he had a very different reaction than I think he normally asked for he got very excited, he grew up like a very big watch head as well. And yeah, I think like we started diving into the details, and the numbers made a lot of sense. It was a sneaky massive market, and just felt like quite under penetrated from an opportunity perspective. And then Darrell Johnson, our third co founder, him and I had started a business together in college, he was a Google as well. And so he kind of came on kind of as our CTO. So it’s just insanely lucky opportunity where I get to work with like two of my closest friends every day, and we’re seeing cool watches all day. So I, I couldn’t be happier. And it’s one of the things that I always tell any startups that I advise at this stage, it’s like, the team that you build is, is in many ways more critical than the problem you’re trying to solve. And so I’m very, very lucky to have you know, the guys I have on my side to help make my day a lot easier.

Kara Goldin 7:57
Yeah, no, that’s, that’s so true. I love how you thought about skill sets, though, too, because I think so often people get together and they’re like, oh, yeah, we both like this industry. Let’s go start it together. They just graduated from business school. And that’s not necessarily the right thing to do. You’ve got to have people with different skill sets. And, and I love that you guys all came from different kind of interests more than anything else, even though you were both at Google. It’s definitely, I think, a recipe for for good stuff happening. So you’re a sneaker collector, and a product designer at Google. Do you remember the moment when you said I’m gonna go do this? Were you still staying at Google at that time? And and kind of figuring out this on the side? Or how did you think about that?

Quaid Walker 8:52
It’s a great question. So I think there was probably like, almost a year long period of like, the inkling of me wanting to do this existing and me still being at Google. And finally taking the leap. I think it’s, it’s twofold. One, it’s the the process of, of like, feeling comfortable enough leaping away from your otherwise very stable life, right. And the second is obviously, like, we were out doing research on the market, you know, talking to as many folks as we could and like making sure we were really doing our due diligence on the opportunity that we were going and jumping into. So I think that’s a lot of like how the process works. As far as like overlapping work. You know, we didn’t really do anything on the outside. We were very intentional, like Google is very particular about you wanting to work on other things, and like they’re focusing on keeping you and focusing on what you should be focusing on from a work perspective. So we made it like a very clean cut. I remember it was July 4, weekend or break as much as we have a break in our professional lives in you know, July of 2021. And that’s kind of when we said hey, We’re gonna go take this time we have off to go raise some money and make the jump. And so I think like, in the summer, we put together a deck and started to be very intentional about the narrative. We were casting together, we started the fundraising process. And in end of July, or you know, mid July, you know, and then I quit my job and in early August, right, so it was like, kind of once we got the first check, you know, lobbed over to us from a pitch deck perspective, then I was like, this is a very real thing. We’re doing this amazing quit my job and haven’t looked back ever since.

Kara Goldin 10:31
So you raised money before you actually launched I think that’s always this big decision. For four founders. Do you go and raise some money before actually getting a product out there that looks like it’s gonna have some success? What would you say to that?

Quaid Walker 10:49
I think it’s, I think it’s entirely contingent on the business, the market and like what you’re trying to achieve. It made sense for us for a number of reasons, like one it was 2021. And so it was quite a frothy venture market. So, you know, we were very intentional about putting together the team that we thought get this job done. And so I think we showed well, from a pitch perspective, and we were able to get like a decent amount of capital in the door to really help us unlock but we needed to unlock in the next 18 months. I think the other reason that made sense for us is it’s kind of you alluded in the intro here, building for a category like this is quite hard. We, our average order value is $12,000. Like, you know, building out a product that stands for trust and makes you feel comfortable purchasing such a large item, oftentimes, the largest thing anyone’s purchase certainly online. It takes an instant, like a good amount of time and intentionality around brand and execution and product and trust. So it wasn’t something that we felt like we could bootstrap to the scale that we wanted to so venture made sense at that stage. And we’re, you know, we’re very intentional about how we think about round structure where, you know, folks like John Legend that you mentioned, an amazing brand, task two allowed us to build that trust before we had the brand to build itself. And so we were very intentional about getting a lot of individuals like like John, or Kevin Hart, or Michael Rubin and these kinds of folks that could come in and help us build this credibility and give us a really unfair advantage building that brand that we wouldn’t have had should we have not done that fundraising round? So for us, it made a lot of sense. I think in this market for a lot of other businesses like I love when founders are bootstrapping stuff, and they’re pushing off venture as much as possible. So I think it’s really just a cocktail of decisions around what makes the most sense for your business.

Kara Goldin 12:37
So when you decided to launch and you’d raise some initial seed money to get it going, how many SKUs did you actually have at that point at at on day one,

Quaid Walker 12:49
day one we launched because we did an interesting procedure. And it was actually a funny story we launched in, in January, unofficially, we launched a beta in January of 22. And we didn’t officially launch until June of 22. So January, we had a product. And we had some initial beta testers and we had a waitlist. And it was really just funny, because it was just an example of of needing to do bespoke things for the industry that you are in and us not being totally cognizant of that and not necessarily doing the best job. weightless. I come from a technology background like wait lists are like the cool thing to do if you have a cool new app, right? The challenge about our industry is that a lot of our buyers are put on waitlist by brands like Rolex, and AP, and Patek and they’re sick of hearing the word waitlist. So like a waitlist for us was actually a counterintuitive thing. It like made people mad in the beginning. And that was a very scary process. And there’s a lot of like, you know, making making quick moves and trying to get out of the waitlist as quickly as possible. But we launched the weightless products. In January, we had an amazing partnership with Soho House, we threw an event in Miami and like luxury, luxury, announcing ourselves for the world and in a kind of quiet way. But we brought on maybe a few 1000 users. And I think at that point, we probably had like $7 million in inventory, like, you know, that we just had scrapped together from early dealers that are willing to help us. And then we officially launched in June of 22. With, you know, it’s certainly like sub 50 million in inventory. And then we kind of announced our seed in January of 23. And that’s when like we really announced our presence to the world. We did an announcement in Bloomberg. And I think at that point, we broke 100 million in in inventory. And then now we’ve like you know, we’re just hovering just under 500 million in inventory over the last year of growth. So it’s been a fun process of obviously hacking the supply side and getting the right watches in the platform. So

Kara Goldin 14:55
how do you source product and authenticate the product as well? Yeah, it’s

Quaid Walker 15:00
a great question. So kind of we have two types of sellers, we have the professional dealers of the world. So these are folks that like manage legit watch businesses, and they do this full time. And so that was the easiest way for us to hack supply in the beginning to go to these large pools of supplies, to build that a better upload process better kind of more transparent payout process quicker, like the goal was just how do we solve the problems they’re having on existing platforms and make the experience kind of better for them, so it’s much easier. So that was the first place that we have supply. The second is, I think there’s a huge opportunity in the space right now, where there’s not really a peer to peer wiener in watches. And what I mean by that is, if I buy the watch that’s on my wrist, and I want to sell it and get liquidity out of it today, my options are to kind of go to IT professional dealer, and they’re going to bake in a margin they need to make on that watch, like, I’m not getting full value of that, or I listed on kind of one of our competitive marketplaces, we’re the only one right now that like obscures who the seller is and optimizes for authenticating everything in house. So if you’re on an existing platform, and it’s you’re, you’re trained as a buyer, to look at who the seller is do the research, it makes it really hard for someone who’s never sold a watch before to compete against some of these big dealers that have 1000s of transactions and five star ratings and things like that, right. So it’s really hard to sell peer to peer. So a lot of our sales actually come from folks like, you know, ourselves that are buying a watch, they may be bought it directly from an authorized dealer, they bought it in the secondary market, they wore it for a year or two, they decided, hey, the value went up whatever it is, I want to trade out of it. And so we allow for that type of collecting, which doesn’t really exist, you know, really prevalently in the market right now. So we’re super excited about making that happen. As far as how the authentication goes, the way the process works, our headquarters is in Los Angeles. Once the sale is initiated, we own that whole process, we send the label out to the seller seller overnights, the watch to us, and we spend, you know, a day or two in office authenticating that watch, the way that authentication process works is it’s broken up into kind of three parts. The first is the general authentication check. So it goes through multiple authentic authentication specialists hands on our team, they’re looking at all kind of touch points of the watch, looking at it under magnification, they’re going is nuances, seeing how the papers smell like, there’s a number of these very tactile checks. And then the second is it goes through a diagnostic check. So running against a time loss test, a pressure test, making sure the watch is performing the way that it should. So it’s not just is this watch authentic, it’s if I’m buying a dive watch that I want to take on vacations to Hawaii, like we want to make sure it’s waterproof, right? Like we don’t want to make sure you’re not getting something you would expect. And then the last is we run it against a loss registry to make sure it was never reported stolen, you’d be shocked at how many watches are actually reported stolen, and no one knows that. And they’re kind of put through the process again, and someone ends up with that watch. And, you know, they’re just they have no recourse if they’re sold a watch that is ultimately stolen if an insurance company knocks on their door and says, hey, it’s actually someone else’s watch, I need it back. We’ve had a bunch of watches have to go through that process. And you know, one of them was in a high profile samurai sword heist in London, it’s always these crazy stories. And so our job really is just obsessing over making sure that if you’re buying something online, and you’re really excited about that you never lose that excitement, you ultimately get exactly what you’re expecting, and you can wear it and kind of create your own stories with it.

Kara Goldin 18:34
I read some when I was doing research on your company that you reject nearly 25% of the watches that are coming in. So yeah, that’s that’s really pretty crazy. So it’s a pretty high number.

To your point. It’s

Quaid Walker 18:51
staggering, I think, like we started this business because we were baseline apprehensive as buyers ourselves in the industry. And I think now we’re petrified, right, like I think the whole focus is we have some of the best dealers in the US and the platform, if not, you know most of the best dealers in the US in the platform. And you know, there’s still issues that happen. And it can be anything on the on the spectrum of we get a lot of downright fakes. We get a lot of watches that, you know, have service dials that were not mentioned, they have replacement parts they have damaged, they’re not in the right condition. So like it may fluctuate the value by 10 to 50%. We have watches that are not working the way that they should. They’re not keeping time and they’re not actually a watch. Like there’s everything in between. So, you know, everything follows kind of that spectrum. And the number was the 23% is kind of what we announced last year, which is quite staggering. That’s

Kara Goldin 19:43
wild. So when you’re building this brand, you’re obviously very customer centric and I can see why that’s so important. But before somebody is actually purchasing the watch, how often are they coming back? to sort of look at the site and check things out, can you convince them to buy a different brand, or are people coming in saying, I want this brand this model, and if they can’t get that, then they’re out.

Quaid Walker 20:13
It’s certainly a very considered purchase. Right? Like it’s, it’s, that’s the fun part, right? When we were starting a business in the early days, it was, it took us a while to be able to kind of build enough data to understand the cadence of a purchase, because folks would come to some event that we would host in January, or they would get their bonus, and they’d come in and they check out watches. And then it might take, you know, two, three months for them to buy their first watch, once they ultimately felt comfortable with it. It depends on the kind of cohort from a buyer perspective, we have the first time watch buyer that hops in and their whole job, or their whole goal is I want to buy a watch, but I have no idea what I want to buy. And I have a general price point. And so we built out kind of a whole concierge model to the business where every buyer is paired with a real person on our team, they know your name, you know their name, they’re the same person you deal with every time regardless of kind of the issues you’re having, or the concerns or the questions or whatever it is, and you have access to their calendar, their phone number, they’ll jump on and just chat you through anything. I think that was really important to me and starting a business because it’s such a considered purchase. And there’s so much knowledge transfer and just passion around these things that I don’t know, it’s like delightful to hear the stories of our concierge members jumping on with someone and they’re like, I’m getting married, you know, next month, and I want to give my wife a watch for my husband to watch. And I, I like what should I get them, right. And so it’s like a fun storytelling, memorable purchase. So it’s fun to be have such a kind of intimate part of that. And then we have the buyers that are these, you know, big time collectors, and they know that they want a certain watch at a certain price point. And we go out and we get it done for them. And they want it fast. And they want it at their door. And it’s kind of like, in and out no questions asked. Right. So and then we have it kind of everything in between where the fun part about watches is, there’s kind of like a treasure hunt portion of it, where we have buyers that want the most modern thing that’s easy to track down. And we have buyers that want a specific birth year, you know, specific year vintage watch that is really important to them because of some symbolic reason, right? So I think that’s kind of the the way the process works. And it kind of the cadence of time it takes to acquire the watch really comes down to who the buyer really is.

Kara Goldin 22:28
So it seems like a very personal purchase, for sure. Do you think that the like, what percent are gifts as compared to the individual actually getting on with you in purchasing this is

Quaid Walker 22:43
interesting, it’s a non trivial percent, but it’s actually been less than I assumed. And I think that goes back to what you’re saying are like watches are such a personal thing. And in many ways, it kind of tends to be a purchase that people make for themselves, just because it’s also like, you have to be a very particular type of a person to be giving someone else in your life $10,000 gift, like it’s, it’s oftentimes a hard gift to give someone. And so that’s why like the gifts become more special, right? It’s usually around very special occasions, it’s big anniversaries, it is weddings, and and sometimes we have, you know, we have certain buyers that buy their spouse a watch every month. And that’s a life that I wish I was living, you know, and so it really comes down to, to the buyer. But a lot of these purchases are made mostly mostly, mostly individuals that are, you know, they’ve been pining over owning this thing for a very long time. And they’re finally like at the point where they’re ready to pull the trigger, and they’re buying it for themselves.

Kara Goldin 23:46
That’s awesome. Do you do things like engraving and things like that? On the watches?

Quaid Walker 23:51
Absolutely. So. So our job is to kind of roll out the red carpet and allow the purchase to be as personal and exciting as possible. So everything from engraving to wine pairings with the watch when you get it to delivering it at a very special moment to you know, you know, writing notes about the provenance of the watch. So you can explain it to your spouse that you got it for it, right. So I think there’s a lot of fun there that we can do. And our job is just to make the experience as memorable as possible. What

Kara Goldin 24:19
has been something that’s been surprising and maybe that you didn’t know walking into starting Bezel that you had obviously worked on projects within large companies now, you know, you you hit go and are starting this company with with a couple of friends. But be starting a company and the buck stops with you. Right? It’s it’s hard, right? It takes a lot longer typically than anyone can ever imagine, especially if you’ve never started and grown a company. So what else would you add to that? What What did you feel was kind of surprising that you just didn’t realize?

Quaid Walker 25:05
I think everything right, like, everything has been a surprise, there’s been nothing that that just like went specifically to plan, right? I think my skill set going into this was product because very good at building products and understanding the technology around it and just obsessing over like building out the app, the website like that was my safe space. And so I think my inclination in building this business was to go to my safe space all the time, and to obsess over the products and build out that, I think the it’s not that I didn’t know this going into it, but the like brand and the storytelling and the marketing around it, and the optimization of that and just building out the narrative around the business was so wildly important, and like people love the product, but people come back because they resonate with the brand they resonate with for saying like they resonate with the customer experience. If you look at our Trustpilot reviews, I obsess over them like I there’s not a morning, I don’t wake up and I’m not reading Trustpilot reviews, but the Trustpilot reviews, it feels good to me as like the designer of the product to hear them say like, I love the product, but like the part that makes me really excited is like, I loved my interaction with Chris, my consignors. He’s the man, like I love talking to him, like I felt so safe and protected. Right, I think that was the fun realization is, it was scary to me to start a business because I got into design in my previous job because I was obsessed over like that craft of it. And a lot of starting this was like letting go of that obsession, because I can’t be in the weeds like making things all day like I have to think higher level. But it’s it’s open this, like new level of like gratification and excitement I could have for something where like we’re building this holistic experience and obsessing over all aspects of it. I think that’s the fun part. I think the challenge of marketplaces it’s been really interesting is just like, sometimes optimizing for one side makes it really challenging to build a great experience. For the other side. Like, we deal with this every day, if a watch comes in, and there’s an issue with it, we are protecting the buyer, which is awesome. But we’re also like, have to then deal with the seller, and the seller thinks that like they’re being screwed over here, and whatever it is. So it’s a bit of this dance of figuring out how to build both sides up in a really thoughtful way. How to scale like, you know, it’s it’s one thing to get past like a product market fit thresholds and feel like the flywheel is spinning, people are happy, but then it’s like, okay, let’s, let’s push our foot on the pedal more. But if we push our foot on the pedal more, how do we sustain the same level of quality that we’ve been hitting right now like, That can’t degrade. That is that is fundamentally what we sell. We’re not selling necessarily knickknacks or items, like we’re selling a feeling of trust and safety, and then Transitively that converts to GMV and sales. But our whole thing is we need to make sure that we’re growing very intentionally. And then overlaying the, the whole fundraising market and the model is changing is the other challenge, right? Where, like, I think I started this business, naive to the way the markets change. And I think like, it’s very hard when you start your first business to not get sucked up into valuations and, you know, runway and like making sure that like you’re building around venture modules or milestones, rather. And so a lot of the reframing for me was like, focusing more on like business milestones and growth, like optimizing for building a really fundamentally strong business that feels independent of kind of the venture cycle. So yeah, I think like, that was me saying basically everything and a lot of words, but it’s been such a learning process. And it’s, it’s been so fun to really kind of expand my knowledge here and continue to learn.

Kara Goldin 29:18
Yeah, I love that response. So last question. So is there one runaway best seller on best Bezel that is that everyone, it’s the hot thing? Yeah,

Quaid Walker 29:31
I think like steel sports model watches is are like the thing and they’ve been the thing for a while. So that’s like not a that’s not like a hot data point that I have to offer here. But it’s kind of what you would expect, like Rolex dominates the market. Everyone wants a Rolex. And I think the fun thing that we’re able to do is because we invest so heavily in personalization and building out models to really understand what people want, and then we have that really personal human connection on the concierge aside, it allows us to get folks into the ecosystem that maybe want one of these big bestsellers like a, you know, a Rolex date, just a Rolex Submariner or Rolex Daytona, Omega Speedmaster, like a cardio a tank, a lot of the classics. And we have such breadth in inventory and understanding of what you like that we can actually offer you something that might be in a better price point, or might be something you see less often, or might be bumping up from a demand perspective. So it’s an interesting investment. Like, I think that’s the fun part that I’m really excited about. It’s how do you get folks that are tangentially interested in watches to come in and buy their first watch, because they want to look good in the boardroom. But then how you get them obsessed with the storytelling. So they then come back six months later, like frosting to buy their next watch, because they want to build out a collection and convert this first time watch buyer into you know, the lifelong sickness that is collecting watches. So that’s kind of the whole goal of the journey.

Kara Goldin 31:06
So Quaid Walker, co founder and CEO of Bezel, thank you so much for coming on. We’ll have all the info in the show notes. Everyone needs to check out Bezel for sure. And and thank you really appreciate it. Good luck with everything. Awesome. Thank you so much. And thanks for having me. Super fun. Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show.

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