I started speaking with him on Thursday evening. And I said, "I can't get this watch from anywhere. It's impossible to get." And he said, "I can get the watch." I
had on an all-black Fendi crewneck sweater and it had two eyes on it—nice sweater. He's like, "All right, bet me this sweater that I'll get you the watch. And I'll get it by next Thursday." So I was like "Let's bet." No chance I'm losing.
Sure enough, he had the watch in his hand by Monday night.
It’s interesting that for four months you stayed hot in pursuit of this watch. You heard other people say that you weren't going to be able to find it. And you didn't just say, "Oh, okay, I'm just going to get another piece." What kept you from not just giving up and getting another watch?
Well, I'm the type of person where, once my mind is set on something and that's what I want, I'm just going to go after that until I get it. And if I can't get it, very rarely am I going to say, "Oh well, I can't get that one, but this one will do." So for me, that watch was so beautiful, that's the watch I knew I wanted to have.
Do you have a certain collecting style? Are there things that you are really attracted to? Or things that you avoid?
I am a huge fan of Audemars, [because they’re] super classy. Even when you get watches with sport bands, they're still classy. You can dress them up, you can dress them down, and it's sleek. They're really sleek. So I'm a huge fan of Audemars. My top three favorites in my collection right now happen to be Audemars. [There’s] the one I spoke of, I have the white ceramic Perpetual Calendar, and the black ceramic Perpetual Calendar.
Those happen to be my three favorites. And with the white, black, and rose gold, that pretty much covers anything that I'm going to wear.
After getting that first watch, were you inspired to get deeper into collecting?
Absolutely. It becomes the challenge of getting the right watches and the ones that you actually love. They're truly hard to get because the reality is AP is only producing 40,000 watches a year. And so, you start to look at the ones that you really want, and there's 500 of them or so produced in a year. And they're almost impossible to get. And so I really just enjoy the challenge of getting some of these watches but then also having those pieces, a part of my collection that one day I'll be able to pass down to my son.
My son's three years old, and he loves my watches. He comes and tries to take them off my wrist. He'll just run and put one on his wrist. I'm like, "DJ, your wrist is a little too small. You don't want that to fall off your wrist and fall on the floor." But it's a very sacred thing to me because it's something that I can pass on to my son, that I know in 20 years, those watches will still be amazing. They're timeless, and I enjoy that aspect of it as well.
Is there one piece that your son likes in particular?
He loves all of them but the one that catches his attention the most is the rose gold, the skeleton openwork. And I'm sure it probably catches his attention the most because there's so much going on, on the face of the watch that he's probably looking at it confused but it holds his attention.