Sholom “Chaz” Chazanow has been in the watch industry since he took a job packing boxes for a Swiss brand instead of going to college. In 2014, he and his wife, Esti, launched LIV Swiss Watches on Kickstarter, betting that people wanted bold Swiss-made watches without the retail markup. It became the most crowdfunded Swiss watch micro-brand in history. He operates from Miami, and every watch is assembled by hand in Switzerland.

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I was ten years old when my brother came back from Switzerland and handed me a Swatch. It was one of the originals, still in that plastic case. From the moment it went on my wrist, something snapped. I was hooked, and I’ve never really recovered. I didn’t grow up around fine watches. My father had a small collection of nothing particularly significant, except for one piece — a manual-wind gold watch with a Geneva label, a gift from my mother when they married in 1954. I used to take his watches apart. He was not thrilled about it. By fifteen, I’d saved up for a Tag Heuer Formula One, which for a kid without money was an enormous purchase. I wore it until after high school.

The idea that wouldn’t leave me alone came much later, after fifteen years of buying, selling, and trading watches across a lot of brands. I kept seeing the same disconnect: watch lovers desperately wanted a relationship with the people building the thing on their wrist, and the legacy brands had no interest in that relationship. They talked down to customers or didn’t talk at all. That gap sat in my head for years.

Two things finally made my ambitions actionable — 1) the smartphone, which drew a clean line between people who wore a watch for utility and people who were genuinely obsessed, and 2) digital advertising, which took the gatekeepers out of the equation. For hundreds of years, you needed newspapers, trade magazines, and billboards to reach anyone. Once that broke, a bold idea could go straight to the people who’d want it.

During my gap year, I ran into an old friend whose family had started a Swiss watch brand in the 1980s called Daniel Mink. They offered me a job packing watches. To most people, that’s the bottom rung. To me, it meant being in a room all day with the thing I loved. Then came the fork: stay with the company or go to college. I chose watches. I’ve never left the industry since. I worked up from the packing room into sales and then into production, and I eventually got sent to Switzerland to work with the manufacturers. That was the dream. Standing in those workshops teaches you something you cannot learn from a catalog — how much human imprint is actually in a Swiss watch. It also taught me how many decades a person must spend working to get good enough to be trusted with one step of the process. After Daniel Mink, I spent about fifteen years trading across a lot of brands, which is where I learned the market from the other side. That experience helped me understand many aspects of the industry: product, manufacturing, and knowing a good watch from a well-marketed one.

However, it didn’t prepare me for being wrong about my own audience. A few years in, I moved us toward smaller sized watch cases. Every instinct I had said this was the right decision — better proportions, more classical, closer to what I’d wear myself. Sales slowed almost immediately. It turned out that our fans didn’t want the watch I would’ve picked for them. They wanted big and chunky, something with presence on the wrist, and they told us so directly. We listened. We corrected. And things picked back up. Twenty years in the industry and I still had to be told by the people wearing our watches what our watches should be. That’s the education. Knowing watches and knowing your fans are two completely different skills, and only one of them is the business.

The constraint was arithmetic. We decided from the start that we’d be direct-to-consumer and genuinely Swiss Made (not Swiss-branded, not Swiss-assembled-somewhere-else). That meant over fifty handmade steps by craftspeople who’ve spent decades honing their trade; nine master watchmakers touching every piece before it leaves the workshop; and certifying our watches to ±5 seconds a day in writing. None of that is cheap. So, the question became: how do you keep all of that and still put the watch in reach of someone who doesn’t have to call his accountant first? The only honest answer was to take money out of the parts of the business that never touched the watch. We cut the retailer markup, which is typically the single largest line between a Swiss watch and the person wearing it. Every saved penny went back into the product instead. That constraint sharpened everything. When you can’t hide a weak movement behind a boutique on Madison Avenue and a glossy campaign, the watch has to carry itself. It made us better at the thing that actually matters and impatient with everything that doesn’t.

Bold. From the beginning, we wanted the watch to turn heads, and we got pushback constantly: “the colors are too loud; we should play it safe for a first product; serious Swiss watches have black dials and steel bracelets and nothing else.” I held the line because a safe watch has no reason to exist. There are a hundred of them already, and they’re all made better and cheaper by someone who’s been doing it since 1860. The only reason to start something new is to make the thing nobody else will make. The brand is named for exactly that; we built a word cloud about the person we wanted to reach, and the same words kept coming back: nonconformist, does things differently, dares to live on his own terms. LIV came out of that.

The other decision I’ve defended for years is refusing to become a mono-brand. You see this happen all the time. A company gets so hemmed in by one famous case shape that everything after it is a variation on that theme. We deliberately don’t do that. It’s harder. It costs us the easy repeat sale. And I’ll make that same call again and again.

The retailer. That’s the biggest one. And it’s the one everyone told us cutting was insane. I also refused to put my own name on the watch. It felt pompous. You’re asking someone to wear your ego on their wrist for the rest of their life? It was never about me. That’s why there’s no Chazanow on the dial, and there never will be.

And we removed the tone. From day one, we made a decision that shaped everything: we would never speak down to the people who buy our watches. The industry has a long-standing habit of talking to people like they should feel grateful to be allowed near the product. We talk to our fans at their level because they’re putting their heart and their money behind our vision and giving us real estate on their wrist. We call it “wrist estate.” Those aren’t customers. They’re fans, and a lot of them became ambassadors, and some became advocates who’ve been here since 2014.

2014. The first Kickstarter for the GX1 — a Swiss-made, 1/10th-second chronograph that didn’t yet exist. Almost everyone told me that I was crazy. Not politely. The only people who stood behind it were my wife and co-founder, Esti, and one industry leader willing to help us get it off the ground. That was the entire vote of confidence. I had a product that nobody had seen from a brand that nobody had heard of, and I was asking strangers on the internet to pay for it before it was built. I kept repeating a sentence that helped get me through: “This could be done, and if everybody could do it, they would have done it already.” That’s still the line I come back to.

We used virtually no advertising spend and raised close to $200,000 from people who had never heard of us. They saw what we were building and decided they wanted to be part of it. But the money wasn’t the thing. The thing was the proof — there were people who wanted creative Swiss watchmaking, bold colors, and bold designs at a price you didn’t have to negotiate with yourself over. Everything since then has been built on that.

First, the watchmakers in our workshop. Nine master watchmakers put hands on every piece before it ships, and some of them have spent more years perfecting one step of the process than most brands have been alive. When I get frustrated with the business side, I go stand in that room. It resets my priorities immediately.

Second, our designers. In 2013, we ran the LIV Design Challenge and invited over two hundred designers to compete; no legacy Swiss brand had ever done anything like it. The response was so good that we had to expand the winning slots from three to six. Those designers still work with us today (more than a decade later), and their instincts still push me somewhere I wouldn’t have gone alone.

Additionally, I also learn from cautionary examples. I watch brands with enormous talent get trapped by their own signature—one case shape becomes their whole identity, and then there’s nowhere left to go. That’s a constant reminder to keep making things that don’t look like the last thing we made.

What never changes is how the watch gets made—same processes, same suppliers, same partners that we’ve used since day one. Under no circumstances will I change that. We get pieces sent in for service from the very first production runs, and they still look terrific. That’s the proof the standard was right the first time. We will never compromise on the watchmaking — not for margin, not for speed, not for scale.

What also doesn’t change is who we build for and how we talk to them. Small batches. Limited editions. Fans, not customers. A huge number of our best colorways exist because fans asked for them, and that’s not a marketing gesture; it’s how we actually decide.

What’s next is depth rather than width. The Trekker GMT took thirteen months and was built entirely from scratch. That’s the direction: fewer things that are made harder, rather than more things that are made faster. It’s the less efficient path, and it’s the only one I’m interested in.

My father's manual-wind gold watch from 1954. It was my mother’s wedding gift to him, and it’s the reason for all of this.

Not a book. It’s a Swatch my brother brought back from Switzerland when I was ten. Everything I think about design started there.

I’m on my bike by 6 AM, riding over the Rickenbacker causeway in Miami with a group that’s been riding it for years. Starting the day with something hard sets the tone for everything after; biking also enables me to connect with people outside the watch world.

Be consistent and don’t stop when you experience failure.

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