How to Build a Vintage Watch
Empire With Your Friends

For pop culture obsessives, a certain Los Angeles Lakers playoff game in May 2023 will forever be remembered as the night Bad Bunny and Kendall Jenner had their first public outing as a short-lived couple. But for the watch world, courtside photos revealed a separate eyebrow-raising appearance: that of a vintage Audemars Piguet Bamboo watch on the wrist of photographer Renell Medrano, who was sitting next to the couple. 

To be fair, seeing an AP courtside at an NBA game is nothing crazy. (Royal Oaks have practically become VIP wristbands.) But this Bamboo, a discontinued design from the ’80s, was special. Very special — which is, by no coincidence, the name of the vintage watch business through which Medrano sourced it. 

There’s a saying in the watch industry: “You buy the dealer, not the watch.” And Very Special is the group of deeply plugged-in individuals to get in with: DJ and entrepreneur Adrian Douzmanian, pro skater and watch collector Sage Elsesser, Supreme design director Mike Tran, and professional watch dealer Juan Lavalle. Founded in 2023 and operating out of a by-appointment-only showroom in Miami, Very Special has emerged as a force in the pre-owned watch market, where post-pandemic demand and skyrocketing prices for vintage watches seemed to turn everyone into self-styled dealers overnight. 

Thanks to a potent amalgam of industry cred, taste, and the relationships held by each of its four members, Very Special is the low-key supergroup responsible for getting some of the coolest watches you’ve maybe never heard of on the coolest people you definitely have, from Hailey Bieber to Future. Clients come to work with these four just as much as they come for the watches, which the business guarantees are 100% authentic.

“It’s all about trust,” says Awake NY founder and former Supreme brand director Angelo Baque, who bought his Rolex Presidential Day-Date (bark finish) and a 1970s Piaget from “VS,” as they’re sometimes colloquially known. “It’s literally like working with family, and you want to support your family. I have a very extensive friendship with each person that’s involved with Very Special that spans over a decade.” 

Audemars Piguet collector and DJ Zack Bia, who went to Very Special for some esoteric pieces to round out his modern collection — an AP Ellipse, a Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar, and matching Royal Oak Tourbillons for himself and the rapper Yeat — also pointed to the company’s friends-and-family feel, using the holy grail C-word that every brand is chasing lately. “It’s a community of growing collectors who appreciate the intricacies that make something individual,” Bia says. 

In major cities, it’s easy to spot a fellow “IYKYK”-er sporting the brand’s merch, including Very Special hats that layer the logos of luxury watch brands over each other in a perfect mess. “The shirts and hats Mike Tran designs at VS are my favorite things to wear currently besides vintage Guy Harvey fishing shirts,” says client Eddie Huang. 

It started, as most great link-ups do, with a group chat. The initiator was Douzmanian, aka “DZA,” aka the guy you want to know if you’re ever visiting Miami. (He’ll not only secure an impossible 12-person dinner reservation at Joe’s Stone Crab during the bustling Original Miami Beach Antique Show, he’ll also expertly order for the whole table.) 

In 2018, Douzmanian visited the Seybold Jewelry Building — essentially downtown Miami’s 47th Street — looking for someone to check out his Rolex Datejust Oysterquartz. At the time, Lavalle was working for a prominent Italian watch dealer and was the only person in the Seybold Building who gave Douzmanian and his relatively undervalued watch the time of day. 

“I remember my former boss saw you come in and went to the back room,” Lavalle says to Douzmanian, laughing. “He really didn’t want to talk to you. Not that he’s a bad guy — he’s just from a different generation. He wasn’t about to talk with someone in oversized clothing.” 

Here, Lavalle, whose experience in the secondary watch market wound up complementing Douzmanian’s hospitable maître d’ energy, touched on another crucial source of Very Special’s success. They speak a different language than the old-school dealers accustomed to high-rolling collectors: footballers and celebrities interested in “important” pieces.

Although he was a bit more conservative, Lavalle speaks of this former boss, whom he left a banking job to work for in 2015, as a mentor who shared both his knowledge and his contacts. “He trusted me with watches that most people in the world have never seen,” says Lavalle, who first learned about watches interning at Man of the World in New York before coming to Miami. “You know, a Patek 2499. He’d let me wear them, open them up, analyze and photograph them with all the trust in the world.” 

Lavalle could also appreciate less-obvious gems. “I had taken the watch to four different people in the Seybold, and they were all shitting on me,” says Douzmanian of his Oysterquartz, a Rolex design from the ’70s that gets its name from the fact that it’s fitted with a quartz, as opposed to mechanical, movement. “Juan was the first person who was like, ‘This is an interesting watch. What do you want for that?’ Every other dealer was basically like, ‘This isn’t a Richard Mille? Get the fuck out of my store.’” 

That Lavalle would express interest in a watch like the Oysterquartz, which is currently enjoying a renaissance after flying under the radar for decades, is just as important as the fact that Douzmanian bought one in the first place. It’s a different kind of watch for a different kind of client base — one largely untapped in the watch industry. 

As a friend and client of Lavalle’s, Douzmanian quickly grew comfortable talking about watches. “Honestly, I would loiter around Juan and talk his head off,” says Douzmanian. “It was one of the first times in a luxury setting where I wasn’t being fed ‘just give me your money’ type of shit. It was somebody that was actively telling me why I should buy this. After that, I was like, ‘How can I not share this with everybody?’” He started referring Lavalle to friends looking for watches but stumped on where to buy. 

Eventually, Tran, the branding expert, became connected with Lavalle through Douzmanian, and the vibes were similarly different from what he’d felt with watch dealers in the past. “I’ve had a couple weird experiences being iced-out at shops, not feeling welcome in places,” Tran recalls. “I’m not trying to trash the industry by any means, but I’m just reacting as a client realizing I didn’t have as much access as I wanted.”

What bonded the three of them was a shared frustration with the watch industry, wherein exclusivity was not just an image. You could be an NBA player, you could be high up at Supreme, you could have all the money in the world for a new, let’s say, Rolex Daytona from a Rolex boutique or an authorized dealer on the primary market. But odds are, you still might not be able to purchase one. Low supply and high demand either lands you on a years-long waitlist or leads you to the secondary market with its own breed of politics. 

“You work to get the dough, you get the dough, and then you don’t know where to spend it,” Tran says, putting into words what my grandfather would call a “high-class problem” experienced by many of us newly entering the watch world. It can feel isolating. As a result, Tran himself was not a self-professed “watch guy” until he met Douzmanian. “With DZA, I was able to talk about watches in a way I talk about anything else: cars, records, food. That’s really what broke the barrier for me,” Tran says. “It wasn’t about the watch’s value or the resale.” 

In his own collecting journey, Sage Elsesser had a similar realization. “Once I got rid of this idea that a watch has to be an ‘investment piece,’ things started opening up,” he says. “You get some money and you want a gold [Rolex] President, the symbol of success in this country. But you do your research, and you realize there are watches at a more accessible price that are almost cooler in their niche way.” 

When his sister — model Paloma Elsesser — connected him with Douzmanian, he found a kindred spirit. “We both share the same passion for vintage Stone Island, vintage football jerseys; we’re both big football fans,” Elsesser says. “Our knowledge of these things was expansive so I was already like, ‘Okay, this guy can teach me about watches in a way that makes it feel less of a lesson.’ It wasn’t like some old white dude saying, ‘You need to know this reference number.’” 

By that point, Douzmanian had racked up so many clients — including Elsesser and Tran — for Lavalle that the idea of spinning off and dealing watches together was becoming a real possibility. “I’d been doing business without really even thinking about it as business,” Douzmanian says. Together all four of them formed a group chat called “The Watch Report,” which would officially transform into Very Special.   

“We’re really about putting special pieces on special people,” Tran says of the name, which he started elegantly packaging in 2022 as a branding exercise after coming home from his day job at Supreme. The Harry Winston–esque logo, the signature shade of royal purple, the mysterious vibe online — it’s all supposed to embody luxury with an edge and match the tone of their clients, who may not feel at home in a more traditional setting or with a standard Patek Philippe Nautilus, but who are paying attention to what tastemakers and pro skaters like Elsesser are into.

“I don’t want to call him, like, a ‘trendsetter’ or anything,” Douzmanian says of Elsesser, “but a lot of the watches that are hot right now, Sage was into very early on. He’s generally ahead of the trend. I’m not going to tell you that we ‘broke’ the [Audemars Piguet] Bamboo or that we made it cool, but Sage was the first one to be like, ‘I really like this watch, and I think Renell should buy it.’” 

The watch industry notoriously moves at a glacial pace, but trends in the vintage world move like lightning. In its short time operating, Very Special has managed to catch them before they strike, thanks in part to Elsesser’s insight. There was the Bamboo, of course, and a tiny vintage Audemars Piguet Royal Oak that VS sourced for Hailey Bieber the summer before the brand officially re-released a similar version. 

“The majority of things I obsess over have a nostalgic connection,” Elsesser says, recalling his grandfather wearing a watch on the inside of his wrist, much to young Elsesser’s fascination. “It wasn’t a luxury watch, but I always thought that was a cool detail that resembled who he was: a low-key gentleman figure. And my dad’s side of the family comes from Switzerland, the watch capital of the world, so I felt an inevitable connection to this industry.” 

VS is now inching into the establishment with their hard-to-ignore client base and a writeup in the publication Hodinkee, which pretty much grants any newcomer an official endorsement. “This was a group of people whose approach to collecting was so closely aligned with my own that, for the first time…I felt a sense of relief and acceptance,” style editor Malaika Crawford wrote. “This distinct feeling was yet another reason for me to confront the reality that there is very little room for diversity of thought in the watch space.” 

There’s been a touch of backlash — “We’ve gotten support from some established dealers, but there’s one who’s iced me out a bit,” Lavalle says — but Douzmanian insists there’s room for a few new kids on the block. “We respect what everybody does. It’s not that their viewpoint is wrong. It’s just that there are not really many other viewpoints, and we’ve been able to create our own lane.” 

And they’re just getting going. 

“If there’s anything I’ve learned from working at Supreme and being in that family for so long, it’s just about authenticity,” says Tran with a knowing look, as if he’s hyper-aware of his own use of an overused buzzword. And yet, “authenticity” is the parallel between those who’ve transcended ephemeral success in the streetwear world and the watch brands that have sustained relevance since the literal 1800s. No one’s ever been able to fake it in fashion for long. 

“Trust me, we’ve considered bringing other people in,” Tran says. “Should we get funding? VC? But in the end, we’re doing it in a very homegrown way because we love it, and we want to go at our own pace.“ 

“I don’t need to come home from work and spend the rest of my night talking to these guys about T-shirt orders,” he adds, “but I’m going to because I believe in it.”