Meet the Netflix of Watches
Eleven James just received $30 million in funding to let users rent Rolexes
Rob Bates | January 13, 2017
"Today, you can rent just about anything: accommodations (Airbnb), clothes (Rent the Runway), purses (Bag Borrow or Steal), and even boats (Boatbound).
But when luxury exec Randy Brandoff investigated, he found no service that lets you borrow luxury watches. “When I saw it was not available,” he says, “I set out to build one.”
In 2013, he founded Eleven James (named after James Bond), a New York City–based service that lets users borrow $5,000-plus watches, typically for two to three months at a time. It currently has a membership in the “low thousands,” 40 percent of which are millennials. It claims to have amassed one of the largest watch collections in the world.
The service just raised $30 million of capital, following the $10 million raised after its debut. The new funding will be used to establish a new women’s rental service and target corporate customers.
Eleven James, and services like it, are part of what is called “the sharing economy,” the growing sector built around the renting, rather than the purchasing, of goods.
A Piper Jaffray report notes that while renting is nothing new, the trend was boosted by the ease of communication enabled by the internet—in particular, the early success of peer-to-peer services like eBay and Napster—and by the Great Recession and corresponding drop in consumer demand.
“The sharing economy and the subscription economy are way past the point of being trends,” says Brandoff. “It is becoming much more the norm.”
He considers luxury watches very rentable for a simple reason: They’re expensive.
For the average millennial, “the thought of committing to something that is five figures is inconsistent with his life,” says Brandoff. “They don’t have a collector mentality. It’s a consumption mentality.”
Brandoff says his service “gives customers more variety. They can try watches. It’s a chance to date watches before they marry.”
As part of the service, members earn ... "
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