98. The financial mechanics of scaling a high-value business | Ross Crane

0:00Welcome to All About Business with me, James Reed, the podcast that covers everything about business, management, and leadership. Every episode, I sit down with different guests who bootstrap companies, masterminded investment models, or built a business empire. They're leaders in their field, and they're here to give you top insights and actionable advice so that you can apply their ideas to your own career or business venture.

0:29Watches are emotional purchases. So how do you turn them into a data-driven asset class? Today on All About Business, I'm joined by Ross Crane, co-founder of Subdial, a platform bringing data, transparency, and liquidity to the global watch market. In this episode, we discuss pivoting from failure, applying technology to a traditional industry, and why watches are increasingly seen as an investable asset class.

1:01Well, today on All About Business, I'm really delighted to welcome Ross Crane. And Ross is the co-founder and CEO of Subdial. Subdial is described as a pre-owned luxury watch platform, which was established in 2018. So Ross, I'm fascinated by this because it's a disruption of a market that had probably been going on for a very long time where dealers would quietly buy and sell watches that have been pre-owned. You have transformed it. What made you think of this? How did you begin? So when we came into this, we were actually not coming from a watches background. In fact, both myself and Christy, who's my co-founder, were at Ernst & Young doing big data and tech projects.

1:51We'd left, or in fact, I'd left back in 2017. So you were analysts, were you? We were management consultants. Management consultants at Ernst & Young, big organization. Doing big tech projects with sort of FTSE 100 companies, S &P 500 companies, that kind of thing. And we originally left to do something entirely different. so I raised a small amount of seed funding to do a food tech startup so we did that in 2017 food tech so what does that what does that involve so I mean you going back 10 years so you kind of have to cast your mind back to how things were in 2017 what didn't did not exist so this was right at the kind of nascent point where things like Gusto and HelloFresh and those kind of businesses were just starting to get going.

2:40And myself working in professional services, commuting every day, thought there was a more interesting way of doing that that had less friction. So those were subscription-based, delivery-based businesses where you sign up for a subscription and get four meals a week in a great big box with loads of packaging and all of that stuff. So the concept with the food business was to do that but through small hubs that would be at big commuter stations. So at Farringdon Station, at Clapham Junction, that kind of thing. And the idea was there was much less of a time delay. You could get to 5 p.m., you're leaving the office, you've got nothing for dinner, and instead of going to the Tesco Express and scratching around and going like, well, what am I going to throw together?

3:24You would actually go on a map on your phone, pick from a recipe card and say, okay, I want to do this recipe, I want to do it for three people, and by the time you then get to the station 10 minutes later it's picked and packed ready to go for you just the ingredients that you need no wastage no requirement for you know big freezer blocks and all of that kind of stuff that goes along with it so i think i was invested in the idea i like it sort of felt like a very academically clean idea there's going to be less waste you could optimize for exactly the ingredients that you needed that allowed you to do the most number of recipes but you could get high quality stuff because you were doing a small number of ingredients and we got that up and running i think we probably delivered our first recipe within six weeks of getting the the company going very manual heavy lift on our behalf and in the end we only really ran it for about six months so i think we probably started in the summer and by Christmas, we said, you know what, we'll come back after a break and we'll take a view on whether we want to carry on with this.

4:31And as it happens, we both came back and we said, like, okay, you go first. I think we should call it. And it wasn't because people didn't like it, but I think people didn't love it. And I think we, for the unit economics to work, and I think for us to be really motivated to push on with it, we felt like we needed people coming back, you know, three times a week. you know saying like i love this i'm going to get stuff and the best customers were coming back maybe twice and modeling it out it was very hard to see how you could get this thing to scale and to ever be profitable with that kind of customer attention so so people didn't love it i think that's an interesting observation they liked it they didn't love it they liked it didn't love it sufficient impetus around it i think when you're when you're when you're very early on in a sort of startup journey, you almost need that energy coming from your customers to keep you going.

5:28And I think you obviously believe in your own idea. You believed in it enough to quit your job and raise a bit of money and put your own sort of ego on the line a little bit because people are obviously surprised when you leave and they ask what you're doing. But you kind of need that feedback to keep you motivated in the idea. And I think we both felt like we could spend our time better on something else. and there was also a sense of we'd raised this seed funding we hadn't really spent any of it and to get it to the next level of testing we would have had to deploy basically all of that money and at that point as you well know with you know early stage bootstrap seed funding is typically it's friends and family and not professional investors money to put that kind of money at risk when you think the chance of success is how much money we talk about here How much do you have left?

6:18It was 250K we'd raised. Yeah. And I think by the end, we'd spent maybe 30K. So all credit to you. So you decided to pivot and do something else with the money. So we - Did you have to ask for their sort of support? We returned the money. So we said, we're going to wind this up. We don't know what we're going to do next. Because a lot of times that doesn't happen. And I think it's something that I've seen in other people, both before that point and since where you've i think in your heart you know that it's not right and you know you haven't quite got the traction you want and probably it's not going to work but you're sort of stuck in the i've committed to it now so i'm going to keep going and the longer you go the harder it gets to take that step back and go yes that is good i've seen that you know the more people put into something and even more dogged you feel like you built up this sort of external pressure on yourself to make this thing work um so i think yeah in hindsight we're both very glad that we did call it so you called that your food tech business yeah and then how did you come to pivot to watches we pivoted within probably two weeks to watches and i think it was in hindsight an easy decision so we were both independently liked watches you know we had watches ourselves we'd had some experience with the watch industry in the pre-owned sense so you had a little collection a little collection you know nothing major while you were working at yes yeah you know gifts from family and these kinds of things and i personally had had bad experience with some other pre-owned players and i think it the nice thing and the thing that it still makes me as passionate about this today almost nine years later as i was back at the start is it is a brilliant intersection of all of the things that we care about so it is a passion product.

8:10Watches is something I personally enjoy, get a lot of pleasure from looking at collecting, doing all that kind of stuff. But it sits across technology and data and a type of customer who is doing this not because they have to, but because they want to. And that is, if you're like me, most passionate about building a tech product, that intersection of something where you get to build for someone who's doing it for passion, and if you do a good job, will be back on a weekly basis or even a daily basis, browsing the site, looking at new stuff, trying new features. There's not many other things I think we could think of that hit all of those kind of boxes.

8:50So you both came to this sort of... We both came to this conclusion. How did that happen? Were you in a cafe or a pub or...? We were sat in Christie's house. Yeah, we were sat in Christie's house, which we'd, through his very patient housemates, kind of taken over as the hub of the food business because he had slightly more space than I did. And so we were running the, you know, picking and packing of bags and all of that kind of stuff from there. And we, yeah, I think we probably for about a week, we sat down on a daily basis and got a whiteboard and sort of ran through different ideas and tested them out a bit and said, well, do we think this has got legs?

9:26And with watches, as I say, a lot of things clicked. And I think crucially, it's not, you have a nice idea, but you also got to think, do we have any advantage here? Is there something that we think we have or know? And what was that in your minds at that time? It was the data and the technology. So I'd done a lot of data projects in the previous six years at Ernst & Young. And so we looked at the market and said, there's something here. If you can collect enough data and process that data well enough, understand the demand for a particular watch model, you should be able to trade that almost like a commodity, but in a way that gives a better result for both the buyer and the seller.

10:10And so if you take a typical transaction that we would do where we are actually buying the watch, we do do consignments as well, but we're acting almost like a market maker in the middle. So customer submits their Rolex and mariner 2020 box and papers we would put that through the model and we would say we know or believe that that watch will sell for within this price range of let's say 500 pounds and nine times out of 10 it will sell within 30 days and if you've got those two things you know what it's going to sell for and you know how quickly it's going to sell you can decide your spread so you can say i'm confident in that and it's a tight window so i'm going to take a tight spread i can give the seller more money than for something else where I say, this might take up to six months to sell and the range is really unpredictable because there isn't the data to support the thesis.

11:02Right. And so the idea... So the more watches that you sell, the more informed you become. Exactly. And the more data we collect. So it's not only our own data, although the first party data is always the best kind of data, but it's everyone else's data too. So we collect on a daily basis about 750 ,000 listing records. Pull those down. From all over the world. From all over the world, yeah. From every major platform, every major dealer. And we pull that down and we process it to say, what watch is this? Because you need to pin it back to something. But on your site, if you're looking, the watch is a price, as I understand it, a specific price.

11:43Yes. So it's not like you're making a bid for them. No. So you decide that price. This is what we're using to inform our buying. So when someone offers us a watch, they say, I'd like to sell this. We're using that data to say, okay, we could pay you X to buy that today. Or if they were looking to consign it, or if we would advise them to consign it, then we're using that same data to say, put this with us. It's a£200 ,000 Patek. Our previous transactions and the market says this is the right point to price this watch. And if we price it correctly, it will sell within, let's say, 45 days. And that's very different to how most people in this market approach it.

12:25So you can really categorize it into two buckets. Either you've got traditional dealers who are purchasing, and the first question they will ask when you bring your watch in is, how much do you want for it? Which for us had always been the entirely wrong question. The question is, how much am I willing to pay for it? I'm the professional, or I should be, with all of the data. And so I should be telling you, the client, what it's worth, and therefore what I could pay for it. And we've always tried to be transparent about those two things. I understand you have a good story about that. We do. Tell me that story.

12:59Yeah, so this was actually very early on. So it was still just the two of us back in our first office. We're now on our third. and we were approached by a gentleman who had seen an advert that we placed in print media in a magazine called The Oldie. And I think the advert said something like, got an old watch, you know, question mark, call Sabdal. And he'd, I think initially dropped us an email and the email had a photograph attached. He said, I've got this watch. I saw your advert in The Oldie. I love that magazine. What do you think? And I thought initially someone was pulling a leg because I looked at the picture and I recognized the, not the exact watch, but I recognized the model and the configuration from a Philips auction, which had happened maybe eight months before.

13:52And that watch had gone for big, big money, hundreds of thousands of pounds. As I was saying, the chances of someone just having this watch is so slim. And the pictures weren't very good, but it's worth a while at least following up. So I'd send a polite response and said, oh, can you send me some better pictures and give me a bit of the background of the watch? And he'd come back with a very long email with all of the context. And at that point, I started to think, this might actually be real. And so the long and the short of the watch is it's a Rolex Daytona from the 70s, which in and of themselves are already a pretty popular, a pretty valuable watch so with no backstory to it it probably would have been a 60 000 pound watch anyway um but what was particularly eye-catching about this one is it had the amani uh red kanjar symbol printed on the dial which is something with rolex you you never see because they're very reluctant to customize watches for individual clients in a way that a lot of other brands would but they had in that period done a number of customizations for the Imani royal family.

15:02And this particular one, this already sought after Daytona reference with this Imani Kanja on the dial, you know, maybe there's 10 in the world. And one of them had gone to auction, but the location of the other ones wasn't known. And the story of the gentleman who brought it to us was he was part of the British sort of force that had gone out there after the change in leadership in the royal family. And I think the father had come over here, the son had taken over, and the son had then requested that a number of the British Armed Forces go out there and help train up their first fighter pilots because they had no air force at that point.

15:41So they bought the planes. This guy was a commander in the RAF and had gone out there to train the pilots and had been sort of in charge of that division. And then towards the end of his, I think his second tour, received a telegram from the royal family saying, would you come to the palace? We'd like to present you with a gift at the end of your service, and this watch he'd be presented with. And this gentleman had kept everything. He had the telegrams. He had the epaulettes with the can jars. He had photos of him in a barn. But this is important keeping everything, isn't it? I mean, because it never happens.

16:15So these watches come up to market. Now, because the watch market has become more and more established, and these types of watches are super collectible, but it'll be the third collector who's owned that watch. And so it's sort of known. And they know it's an example, but they might be worried that someone sort of almost tried to make it better and they sort of added bits in. This is coming from original owner with all of the... You could not dispute it given the telegram and everything else. It just never happens. So that made it particularly special and we ended up selling it to a collector who, as part of the deal, said, would it be possible for me to take the gentleman out for lunch and just hear his story and do all of that stuff?

16:58And he was very, very happy to do it. In fact, I think he loved the whole experience. So how much was it worth this watch? We were not allowed to, part of the agreement was also that we would not disclose how much it went for, but it was well into the six figures. And I think it was a life-changing amount of money for... Very good for his pension. Very good for his pension. and I think at that point his wife was actually able to retire and they took us out for lunch in London to say. A lot of happy people involved. A lot of happy people, yeah. It was fantastic, yeah. So what you said earlier, which struck me, it wasn't how much do you want for this watch.

17:34You were establishing what it was worth. And he benefited from that approach. He said to us through the process that he'd taken it to his local Rolex service centre, where he'd been wearing this watch at the pub. not knowing what it was. Right. And he'd taken it in for its sort of regular service. And the guy at the, I don't know whether this was an authorized Rolex retailer or not, it was just some local guy, but he had offered to buy it from him. I think he'd offered him£8 ,000. Right. And maybe he didn't know, but I would be surprised if he didn't know. Yeah. And that, I think, is the thing that we absolutely wanted to fight against the whole way through is this mindset of using information as power.

18:21Because we've got probably more data around trading than anyone else. And there's a temptation to say, well, great, we can use that to our advantage because we know something that you don't. So I was very struck looking at your website about the variety and number of watches that you have on Subdial today for sale. And the amount of knowledge that you must have about each particular brand and watch specifically is incredible because they're all priced specifically. So this is from your data analysis days back in Ernst & Young, you've built this. It's a mixture of both. It's a mixture of two things.

18:58It is incredible the amount of information there. On the data side, I think there is a real joy to having that data to hand because it does allow us to buy more confidently than most people. And so the fact that we have more variety is a direct consequence of that. So you bring me something that's a little more esoteric than a Rolex sports watch, we still have the data on that. And so even if it trades less frequently than a Rolex, we can say every time that it's sold globally for the last seven years, pretty much, other than transactions that are happening offline. And so we can still price that with a fair degree of confidence.

19:37And that means we will pay more for stuff that other people would say either way i can't i can't buy that or i'm just gonna you know really lowball you because they're hedging their bets and fair enough if you don't know you've got to take a safe position um so that's one benefit of it for sure and i think it's why we over you know the sort of last eight years have really shifted towards a more enthusiastic collector market because we have that breadth and we're happy to trade that breadth the other side is the team so we absolutely pride ourselves on hiring people who are watch nuts. And most of the people who come to us, a lot of people who come to us are not coming from the watch industry.

20:18So they're actually similar to Christian and myself. They've worked in finance or law or professional services, but they love watches. And so they see an opportunity to do a bit of a career shift and do something that they really love every day, which is great for us. They bring some different kind of expertise into the business, but also they take that intrinsic joy out of coming to work every day because they're doing something that they love and so it's a mixture of the two i think the human side particularly on the sort of rare and more collectible pieces is incredibly important you know not you can't tell everything from the data and the sudden things that i think uh people within our team are very good at spotting which is trends that are emerging in the market things that are becoming more talked about more interesting and you won't necessarily see that in the numbers yet that's really interesting so i mean i feel that for people who don't know sub dial it deserves a little description i don't know who better to do that than you ross i mean so first of all where do people find you at sub dial is the brand dot com sub dial dot com yeah so tell us what's there just quickly so so people might want to go and have a look it's it's buy sell collect is really the the three things that we're about so buying we've got uh probably up to a thousand watches live on the site at any given time a huge variety as you said we are not necessarily selective about what we buy we buy everything from our customers so we don't go out to wholesale and buy up from other dealers and do that kind of thing.

21:55Everything that we have has been offered to it by our customers. But the nice thing, if you've got great customers, you get great watches. And the more great watches you have, the more great watches those customers bring to you. So there's a kind of positive cycle that goes on there. It's a virtual circle, yeah. We offer two routes to sell. So you bring a watch to us, we will offer to buy it off you directly or we can consign it for you and because we've got this focus on the lifetime of the collector so most of our customers are thinking about buying a watch pretty much 100 % of the time maybe they maybe they buy a watch once a year maybe they buy a watch 10 times a year maybe they do it more but always they're thinking about what would be my next watch they've got watches in their collection and so to buy that next watch often they're looking to sell right and so there's a lot of um trading that goes on and so we put a lot of effort in the platform to making that process as seamless as possible so you find a listing you like you've got your watches that you're looking to sell you upload those and you can kind of build a virtual uh trade where you say okay it's going to kind of 60 000 pounds to buy the one or two watches that i like but i've got 40 000 pounds in my collection so i can trade those out top up the difference and make it as easy as possible so the platform is really built around the the buying process the selling process but the collection sits in the middle so you have your collection on the platform your collection leverages the data so when you say you have your collection on the platform what do you mean so if you buy from if you buy a watch from subdile tomorrow it will go straight into your digital sub-dial portfolio and it will be tracked the the price will be tracked through our market data portfolio for your customers yes but you don't have to buy a watch from sub-dial so if you bought a watch from someone else or you bought it directly from rolex new you can still upload it and you say okay it's this model it's this year it's got its box and papers and the pricing still gets pulled in so regardless of where you got it you might have a big existing collection you can add it there have the prices tracked for everything you can also ensure your collection do various other things request servicing right um but really what it is about for most people is then having it there ready to go when they see the next watch that they want so you see the next watch that you want and you've already got your collection there you've got indicative pricing because you've got the market data and so you say okay it's going to be this one this one this one these are the ones i haven't worn for six months but it's sort of sitting there virtually isn't it because you've taken the watch home i imagine you might be wearing it to the pub yes exactly Exactly, yes.

24:34So to sell it, you have to bring it back in. So at the point where you're happy with the proposal, so you say, okay, let's say you're doing a trade. I'm happy with what I'm paying. I'm happy with what I'm being offered for the stuff that I'm selling. You click book, and then either you're making an appointment to come in, drop everything off, pick up what you're collecting, or we arrange the shipping. So we would have shipping packs sent out, bring those watches in, inspect them, approve them, and then ship your watch out. so there's a lot of logistics involved there so you also have as as well as this being online on a wonderful website you also have a shop is that the right word what do you call it house clubhouse yes so what happens there how does that work so the clubhouse we launched uh pretty recently so we launched in uh may last year uh so about one year in to the new space in farrington and that That was really a reaction to two things.

25:33So one, we'd just outgrown our previous premises, which was in Hoxton. Had a lovely space on the canal, which was lovely for the team, great for me living in Hackney. But we did not have a dedicated customer space, so we hosted people there. But every time someone came down, we'd basically be apologizing because we're bringing you into our office, and it may be chaotic, and there's dogs running around, and all of this kind of thing. so the move to to farrington was to facilitate the growth and the additional team but it was also to for the first time have a proper dedicated customer space and that is by appointment only anything you see on the site that you like and one of you you can book an appointment and come in and see it anything that you are selling you can book an appointment come and drop it off or do both.

26:21And it's been absolutely transformational for us. I think when we set this up, we did see it as an online-only business, and it is still primarily. It's 75 % takes place online. But there is a really important place for face-to-face in this market in particular. I think in most luxury markets, there's still an important place for face-to-face. And we try to make that experience a special one for customers when they come in it should feel a bit unique it should feel a bit subtle it shouldn't feel like going to a bond street boutique not that there's anything wrong with the experience when you go to a bond street boutique but that's not who we are as a company and so when you come in the first thing that you see you walk over a bridge where you know you've been to the office you walk over that bridge and you've got the workshop down below you with a glass floor and you see the watchmakers working on the watches and that i think was something we used to have at the old office because we were quite compact and we didn't want to lose when we moved here.

27:20Because I think when you're buying a pre-owned watch, you want to know that the people selling it to you care and that they're not just flipping these things as quickly as possible for a profit, but they're actually taking the time, they're inspecting them, authenticating them, working on them, servicing them, all those kinds of things. So we invested in the workshop, got accreditation now from most of the major luxury groups, which is incredibly helpful for sourcing parts and all of that but it's also an event space so outside of the day-to-day appointments people buying and selling we host events in that space we've got one coming up which i don't think i can quite announce yet but with one of the big swiss brands where they will be launching or relaunching one of their product lines in the space and that's a kind of collaborative effort and it's a way for us to utilize the space amazing for us to be selected by the brand to do that but it also gives them the opportunity to tap into our collector customer base which is slightly different to what you would get as a primary retailer you know these are people who might not have your brand or might not be that familiar with your brand but they've got other brands which absolutely mean they could be a good customer for you so what is your primary customer base you mentioned that i mean who are they it's um it's anywhere from someone who's got one or two watches and is just sort of starting out and they bought their first watch maybe they never thought they would be a enthusiast but they find that they actually quite like that watch and they so they start looking around and seeing other other things that catch their eye all the way through to people who've got you know multi-million pound collections of watches and they've got pretty much every patek that's ever been made and i think every patek was ever been made how many are they well there's there's many there's many but i think but people actually have collections like that yeah it's it's it's a labor of love and a labor it's a big investment to work your way up that food chain yes with the big brands to be offered the pieces.

29:24So when Patek released the 5811, the new white gold Nautilus, there's only so many made, they are genuinely limited by production, and there's an awful lot of people that want them. So everything is sort of by allocation. So the price must go up almost immediately then? For a lot of these pieces, it does. Yeah. So for the most sought after Rolex, for the most sought after Patek, the day that you leave the showroom, the watch might be worth double what you paid for on the secondary market. It's the opposite of buying a car. It's the opposite of buying the vast majority of cars. Unless you're getting one of these one-off collector's items again.

30:01Exactly, yes. Yeah, and so the watch market does, I mean, it fits in both categories. Some areas behave more like the car market. You know, if you buy, I'm not going to name and shame any particular brand, but you might go in and pay retail price for a£6 ,000 sports watch. And the day that you leave, the VAT is gone for sure. but really like if you're going to sell it you probably you've lost 30 40 percent of your money and so there's a there is a certain pool of customers who will go pre-owned simply to save that money because exactly like you would in cars you buy at six months old but i'd say the majority particularly of our customers it's not it's not really about saving money it's about getting the watch that you want and most of the watches that are the most interesting are not in production you know so there's it's almost like the art market in that sense there's certain new watches that are being released every year, but there's 50 years of watches that have been made, which people collect, which are not in production anymore.

30:56And so if you're only collecting the things that are coming out every week, you're missing a big chunk of the market. And so I think that's where it sort of blends into collectability and it's not just about pre-owned and making a discount or the grey market, I think, as people would have previously handled it. You talk about your customers. I'm imagining they're mainly male. yes and could often work in the city yes is that right i mean people have certain sort of focus i mean we have we have all absolutely all types i would say we are very well represented in that demographic that you've just described and we're well located for that demographic yeah well that's why you're in faringdon i guess they can come easy to see yeah faringdon's brilliant for connections to almost everywhere um but i just think that's similar the world over isn't it i I mean, people who collect watches in Japan or America would be similarly discussed.

31:50It is dominated by that sort of demographic. It is changing, which is brilliant. How is it changing? So I think we've seen more younger customers of late. So, you know, mid-20s through to mid-30s and more female customers. And I think those two things are two areas that have been historically quite underrepresented. Now, there is obviously for a younger buyer, a price point that you've got to get over. And if you're early in your career, that could be more challenging. But I think the nice thing about watches is actually it's not a particularly expensive hobby if you can get over that initial purchase price.

32:29And I'll tell you what I mean by that. So it would be crazy to buy a watch for£1 ,000,£3 ,000 or£30 ,000 if you believed that that money was gone. You know, that was consumption. but I think almost all of our clients absolutely do not think of it like that you think of it as well this thing is a is a is an asset in its own right maybe I'll sell it for less maybe I'll sell it for more maybe I'll sell it for the same but you know that you can get your money back and I think a big part of the buying decision is that is having that confidence that the price is right and that when you come to sell it you can sell it with with relatively low so it's a sort of alternative to having cash in the bank or having a few shares in a company exactly bonds or something like that you have watches.

33:09Yes and I think that there's a healthy way of looking at that and there's an unhealthy way of looking at that. Most people are in a fairly healthy place. What's the unhealthy way of looking at it? The unhealthy way of looking at it was what happened post-COVID. What happened? Where I mean it was in watches but it was in a lot of other asset classes as well where people were at home they had more disposable income maybe they're getting some government checks and all assets were going up and I think a lot of people felt like they were all they were always go up. It followed a lot of the tech stocks, the crypto prices.

33:45Watches probably came to it one of the last. So if you trace the curves on the different asset class, I think Watches would have been one of the last to go up. But they all popped, right? They reached a peak post-COVID. I can't tell you the exact date, but you can see it on our data page when it hits the peak and it's a fairly sharp inflection point and then prices came right down so you had a bubble there was a bubble and it was i think it was it was brought about by a few things a lot of new people coming into the market so new buyers who saw it and previously been into watches but thought well this is a quick way to make some money and that for a period was true you could buy uh nautilus on one day and you pay 40 000 pounds for it maybe you sell it in a month and it was 60 ,000 pounds and that you think well that's brilliant I'll just do that but you're not going to earn a living like that forever I suppose because at some point the bubble burst bubble bursts yeah and indeed it did there was also a lot of inter-dealer trading at that point so because actually it's a relatively scarce commodity although sometimes it can seem like there's a lot of watches out there it doesn't take that much of a change in buying behavior for prices to suddenly move quite quickly.

34:58And so if you imagine a particular model reference, and this was focused in on certain models, probably like 50 models that were really the brunt of this bubble. If someone is buying at every given point on any given day the cheapest on the market as a dealer, they go like, well, we need one of these. So I'm going to go out and see which is the cheapest, and I'm going to buy that. Now the reference price is the next one. And then the next dealer comes along and goes, well, I'm going to buy that. and now the reference price has gone up and if that's happening quickly enough it snowballs quite quickly we were fortunate enough i guess that we weren't heavily invested in those particular models we were taking a slightly more cautious and data-led approach and not buying we never buy from other dealers anyway um so when that bubble burst we were not particularly exposed but i know it was a it was a it was a rough time for the market um i know a bunch of dealers went out of business and a bunch of actually well-backed venture watch companies went out of business through that period because they were sat on a huge amount of inventory which was now worth you know 40 % less than what they paid for it yeah so that's quite high risk so this is this is interesting to me though that you track the like it's like a market footsie tracker for watches and you do this i believe with bloomberg yes um so what's it doing at the moment where are we at the moment or so which market looking like with all this going on in the world we're back to a fairly healthy market actually so the the post-covid bubble is well in the rearview mirror we had steady price deflation for probably two years after that right and the last 12 months, we've seen a return to a steady and gradual level of price inflation, so 5 % a year.