-- Watch Gang has spent nearly a decade building what is widely described as the largest watch subscription business in the world, with more than two million members and, by the company's own account, between 7,000 and 9,000 watches shipped every month. What it has not built, at least not at the same scale, is a media presence to match. Greg Tsagris, the company's COO, is candid about the gap.
"PR is one of the missing elements that we have," Tsagris says. For a business that spends heavily to acquire customers, that admission carries more weight than it might for a smaller brand. The company runs a paid-acquisition operation that, by Tsagris's estimate, is in the hundreds of thousands per month. Media coverage, in his framing, is the layer that has been missing on top of all that spend.
Photo credit: Greg Tsagris
Scale Without the Story to Match
The numbers behind the business are not in dispute among the outlets that have covered it. Watch Gang has been around since 2016 and, by 2022, had passed two million members, with roughly 30,000 actively receiving watches at any given time. Tsagris puts current membership at about 2.3 million and describes a business split between a number of unique channels. The subscription service is its original offering, The Wheel, a gamified experience that gives customers a chance to win an upgrade, traditional e-commerce and brand distribution, with the majority of customers based in the United States.
Behind that sits a roughly 25-person operation run out of Novi, Michigan along with a giveaway engine that hands members a watch on a set weekly cadence, including a Rolex every Friday. That is a large, functioning company. The challenge Tsagris describes is not awareness in the narrow sense, plenty of people have heard of the brand, but authority. Reviews and word of mouth built the early audience. What earned media offers is something those channels do not: third-party credibility that a paid ad cannot buy, and the kind of coverage that shapes how a company is judged by partners and by the prospective members who look it up before buying.
Why an Operator Turns to Earned Media
Tsagris approaches this as an operator rather than a marketer chasing headlines. He has said the appeal of the model is that it addresses domain authority and the quality of the links pointing back to the business, a concern that sits closer to the acquisition math than to vanity. For a company competing in what Tsagris has described as a dynamic space, the argument is that credible coverage helps separate an established operator from the smaller sellers in the same category.
There is a practical logic to the timing. A business that already spends six figures a month acquiring customers has every reason to want the trust signals that make that spend work harder. When a prospective member searches the company name, what surfaces alongside the ads matters. Coverage in established outlets is one of the few things that can shift that picture in a durable way, rather than for the length of a campaign.
The company has also started building media it owns, including a podcast called Off the Clock that has hosted guests from outside the watch world. Tsagris treats that as part of the same effort. Owned media builds an audience by giving back to the collector community, while earned coverage supplies the outside validation that owned channels cannot manufacture for themselves. Run together, they are meant to do what the ad budget alone could not.
Turning Recognition Into Trust
The distinction Tsagris keeps returning to is between being known and being trusted. Watch Gang is already known. The giveaways alone have generated attention for years, including a Rolex handed to a member every Friday. But attention and authority are not the same asset, and the company is now treating the second as the one worth investing in.
That is a more mature ambition than a single product launch. It reflects a business that has the scale sorted and is turning to the part of its reputation that paid channels were never going to build on their own. For Watch Gang, the next phase is less about being seen by more people and more about being taken seriously by the ones already looking. If the company gets that right, the credibility it earns should outlast any individual placement, which is exactly the point of treating media as infrastructure rather than a campaign.
Contact Info:
Name: Greg Tsagris
Email: Send Email
Organization: Watch Gang
Website: https://watchgang.com
Release ID: 89208247
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