The $24 million résumé: Pharrell's Joopiter builds a watch department
Joopiter hired Nate Borgelt — the ex-Bonhams Americas watch head who helped sell the $24 million Graves Supercomplication — to run a standalone watch division. A celebrity auction platform just staffed up like a major house.
By The Saleroom Desk
What changed
Joopiter, the digital auction house Pharrell Williams founded in 2022 to sell culture-adjacent objects with editorial polish, announced on July 9 that it is launching a dedicated watch division — and hired a two-decade specialist to run it.
What it means
- Celebrity auction ventures usually fail because they treat expertise as a garnish. Joopiter is doing the opposite — buying the expertise and letting the celebrity be the distribution.
- In a market where the buyer base is getting younger faster than the incumbents are, that ordering is correct, and the majors' watch departments should treat this as a genuine competitor for the next great single-owner consignment.
Key figures
| APPOINTMENTNate Borgelt, two-decade watch specialist | |
|---|---|
| FROMBonhams — head of the watch department, Americas | |
| PEDIGREESotheby's; the $24M Graves Supercomplication sale, 2014 | |
| MANDATEstandalone and multi-consignor watch auctions |
Source: The hire · Joopiter's watch division
A celebrity platform staffs up like a major house
Nate Borgelt arrives from Bonhams, where he led the watch department for the Americas; before that he was a senior international watch specialist at Sotheby's, where he played a role in the 2014 sale of Henry Graves Jr.'s Patek Philippe Supercomplication for $24 million, then the most expensive watch ever auctioned.
The Art of Time · top results, US$
Source: The hire · Joopiter's watch division
The platform is not starting from zero
The platform is not starting from zero. Joopiter's first dedicated watch sale, The Art of Time, spanned pieces from the 1930s to the 2020s and produced results a traditional house would happily publish: a Richard Mille RM 65-01 split-seconds chronograph signed by Williams at $375,000, a Patek Philippe Celestial ref. 6104R at $387,500.
Under Borgelt the category becomes a standing department running standalone and multi-consignor auctions in the coming months.
| Figure | |
|---|---|
| Patek Celestial 6104R | $387,500 |
| Rm 65-01, Signed Williams | $375,000 |
Results a traditional house would happily publish Not starting from zero: the platform's first dedicated watch sale already cleared major-house numbers. Carat Capital graphics desk.
The new bidders arrive through culture, not collecting
The hire reads as a statement about where the watch-auction market is going. The spring season, as this page reported, closed with Phillips setting a $235 million record on a 99.8 percent sell-through, with thirty percent of bidders new to the saleroom and thirty-five percent under forty.
Those new, young bidders arrive through culture — music, sport, design — rather than through decades of collecting. A platform fronted by one of the most credible taste-makers alive, now staffed with establishment expertise, is engineered precisely for that pipeline.
For the incumbent houses, the competitive question is consignments, not clicks. Estate executors and collectors choose salerooms on trust and results; poaching a respected Americas department head transfers a book of relationships along with a name. Bonhams loses a category leader in the same season Phillips proved how much category leadership is worth.
The story so far
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Method
Results a traditional house would happily publish