Cool, calm and collected: How Silas Walton and A Collected Man cornered the high-end collector market
Silas Walton, founder of WatchXchange, explains his decision to rebrand as A Collected Man and how he has come to specialise in the scarce
By James Buttery
Sat in the meeting room of his penthouse office in London?s Clerkenwell, Silas Walton has little time to appreciate the near-as-damn-it 360-degree views over the fast-changing skyline of London?s financial and creative districts.
Walton has just introduced the world to his new brand, A Collected Man, which represents a considerable tweak to the business previously known as WatchXchange, which offered a retail platform for the upper echelons of the preowned and vintage watches.
?The brand needed to change,? he recalls. ?I saw that the underserviced end of the market was the very rare end, the independents. No one was giving them any attention before two years ago, and the watchmakers themselves were furious because they weren?t consulted about various sales. They were often thrown in with other watches and no-one took the time to explain that an independent watch that took a year to make by hand was very different from a mass-produced watch with a nice tourbillon that took three weeks to make.? Walton?s understanding of that difference, as well as his willingness to dedicate time and resources to conveying it to his customers, quickly earned him the respect of some of the world?s most respected watchmakers, with Kari Voutilainen, Roger Smith and Philippe Dufour listing WatchXchange as their preferred preowned part...
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