The Greatly Improbable, Highly Enjoyable, Increasingly Profitable Life of Michael Kobold

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It is quite possible that Michael Kobold is one of those inexplicably lucky people, one for whom good things just seem to happen, the kind of guy who wins the lottery twice. Let me give you an example. One day in 2003 he's sitting at his desk at Kobold Watch, where he and three employees make and sell high-end mechanical wristwatches from a quiet industrial park in Pittsburgh. The phone rings, and Kobold answers it. The man on the line is from New York and he's gruff; he apparently owns a Kobold watch and likes it enough that he wants another one. Kobold, thinking the guy with the gruff New Yorky voice is a cop, offers the guy his standard 10 percent police discount. "Finally," Kobold will later recall, "he told me he was an actor and that he was in something called The Sopranos." Keep in mind here that Kobold does not watch TV. He could not name a single artist in the Billboard Top 20 and would be hard-pressed to recognize a film actor who isn't Tom Cruise or Mel Gibson. Pop culture references sail wildly over his head.

So Kobold says, "This Sopranos thing--is it a musical?" And the guy, who by now recognizes that, for whatever reason, this European fella on the phone honestly has no idea who he's talking to, answers back: "It's a show about a big fat guy, and I'm the big fat guy."

By now you've figured out who the man was: James Gandolfini.

Kobold hand delivered the watch to Gandolfini on set in New York City--a service he sometimes performs for celebrities and other important buyers--and the two hit it off. The first thing Kobold said was, "You're not as fat as I thought you'd be." To which Gandolfini replied, "You're not as old as I thought you'd be." Today Kobold weekends at Gandolfini's Jersey beach house, shacks up at his New York apartment, and refers to him as "one of my best friends." Gandolfini is not an easy man to reach. He loathes the media and doesn't even bother to employ a publicist to reject interview requests. But after six months of cajoling, Kobold finally managed to get him to speak to me for about a minute, by phone from the set of The Sopranos. "I saw one of the watches in a magazine and I called the number," he told me. "I just liked him. He was this odd guy."

Kobold's first call from Gandolfini has since become so much more than a good story; it was the third random but crucial encounter of Kobold's young life and a pivotal moment in the history of Kobold Watch. Because not only does Gandolfini not talk to journalists, he also doesn't endorse products. With one huge exception: He is now Kobold's most famous brand ambassador, as the official faces of the company are known. And, like all the others, he does it for free.

It's a crazy story, but the sort of thing you keep hearing when you spend time with Michael Kobold, 27, of Pittsburgh via Frankfurt. He's a handsome fellow, slim with short hair, good posture, and excellent diction. To hear him talk you'd know he wasn't American-born but you'd have a hard time placing the accent; it might put you in mind of those movie villains who sound like they come from a place where all the European borders come together. Kobold drives a 15-year-old Porsche and lives in a $700 one-bedroom apartment a short walk from the University of Pittsburgh. He is the founder and president of the company that bears his name. As for the watches that bear his name, they now start at $2,450.

I am by no means a watch collector--I own seven watches, not one of them worth more than $200--and so, before I set upon the mission to understand this man and his marque, I had never once heard mention of Kobold Watch. Practically speaking, most Americans have never heard of it either. Kobold is a microbrand, producing a maximum of 2,500 watches per year and residing in the rarified air of mechanical timepieces, a niche of the market based almost exclusively in Europe.

And yet, slowly and almost impossibly, with a number of missteps and a healthy dose of luck and circumstance, Michael Kobold has fashioned a brand that competes with esteemed names such as Omega and Tag Heuer (OTC:LVMUY). Granted, no one at either company is quivering in fear at the name Kobold, but the fact of the matter is that thousands of men willing to spend $2,000 and up (way up) on a watch--a well-studied constituency that does not waste time or money on poor quality--are buying from a quirky immigrant who sells watches from an industrial park in Pittsburgh.

I don't know why watches," Kobold says, by way of explaining of how he got here from there. "But at 12, I got my first good one, from my dad. It was the first year he didn't spend Christmas with us, so he got me a Cartier. I loved that watch. It was mechanical. It was high end. I thought this was my one watch for the rest of my life. But that got me thinking--which is the problem with me. I'm compulsive. I thought it was the perfect product. You buy one for life. I liked that it was built by a human. The robot thing freaks me out."

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