Carat$230,000 bid on a moonwalker's Omega: Joopiter opens its watch room
Keeping Measure, the first sale from Joopiter's watch department, closes on a rolling basis through 11 August. The top lot, an Omega Speedmaster engraved for Alan Bean, carries a $250,000 to $350,000 estimate against a $230,000 bid.
§1One priced watch offering, and it is not a saleroom.
The summer auction calendar has one priced watch offering running, and it belongs to a platform that did not have a watch department three weeks ago. Joopiter, the digital auction house founded by Pharrell Williams, opened Keeping Measure: Watches and Timepieces, the first sale under the standalone department it announced in July, with lots closing on a rolling basis through 11 August. This desk filed the department's creation on 14 July, when Joopiter hired Nate Borgelt from Bonhams to run it.
The top lot is an Omega Speedmaster tied to Alan Bean, the fourth man to walk on the moon, estimated at $250,000 to $350,000 with bidding already at $230,000. Thirty examples of the reference were produced after the first moon landing and distributed to President Nixon, Vice President Agnew and astronauts of the period; this is number 26, engraved to mark Bean's later command of the 1973 Skylab mission. Provenance of that specificity is the one thing a new auction room cannot manufacture, and it is what the estimate is priced on.
§2Provenance is the thing that cannot be manufactured.
The rest of the catalogue is a deliberate argument rather than a run of blue chips. An HYT Moon Runner Red Magma from 2022 carries $50,000 to $70,000 and a Ulysse Nardin with a Gay Frères bracelet from around 1960 carries $15,000 to $25,000, alongside Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Piaget, Cartier, Ressence, Speake-Marin and Ōtsuka Lotēc. Borgelt's stated aim is to reach seasoned collectors and newcomers in the same sale, which is a different proposition from the Geneva model of one perfect consignment per rostrum.
Provenance of that specificity is the one thing a new auction room cannot manufacture, and it is what the estimate is priced on.
§3The timing is the strategy.
The timing is the sharpest part of the strategy. Watch auction sales reached $680 million in the first half, up 45%, with 73 lots clearing $1 million against roughly 25 a year earlier, as this desk reported on Tuesday. The traditional houses are dark until autumn, with the next priced offering of note Sotheby's Gem Drop in New York from 10 to 13 August. A rolling online sale in the first week of August competes with nothing, and a new department gets its first result printed without a Geneva evening sale sitting on top of it.
An online-native house with rolling closes and a celebrity founder is not a novelty any more, it is a distribution channel with a lower cost base than a saleroom. What Joopiter is testing this week is whether provenance sells without a podium. If the Bean Speedmaster clears its low estimate on a screen in August, the calendar stops being the constraint on when a watch can be sold, and the houses that own the autumn dates lose part of what those dates are worth. Watch the hammer, not the headline.
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Watch auction sales rose 45% to $680 million in the half.