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

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Kobold admires the company and its watches; he just takes issue with the numbers. That level of production "runs counter to the idea of luxury," Kobold says. "It becomes a commodity. Bigger companies overproduce and discount. We do the opposite." He will build only 250 of a new watch he's developing with British racing car legend Stirling Moss. Another new model will bear the name of Philippe Cousteau, and again, only 250 will be made. With a few exceptions, Kobold retires a watch after a limited production, which not only creates demand but protects the value of his customers' investments.

Virtually every piece of a Kobold watch is made in Europe, but Kobold is proud to base his operations, and most of his assembly, in the U.S. (He's a bit of a patriot--he's stingy about discounts except to law enforcement and military personnel, and nothing makes him happier than selling a watch to a Navy Seal or a Secret Service agent.) The few other notable American watch companies are either much smaller--the tiny Montana Watch Co. and RGM Watch are developing names--or much larger and not purely makers of mechanicals, Fossil (NASDAQ:FOSL) being the most prominent example. "There's really nothing on our level in America," Kobold says. "But my theory is that when a guy collects watches, eventually he's going to end up with one of each. So in a sense there is no competition."

That may be partly true, but it's mostly just indicative of Kobold's optimism. Certainly it's expensive to start a high-end watch company, but in crucial respects the barriers to entry are low. Most important, the movement, the beating heart of a mechanical watch, is available off the shelf. (See "Very Tightly Wound,") "Anyone with a design can make a watch," says Girdvainis, of International Watch. "You can start the project on a napkin and bring it to fruition. It's basically marketing.

"There are 200-plus watch brands at Basel alone," he says, speaking of the annual Basel watch show, the industry's preeminent showcase. "And every year they pop onto the scene and then disappear as though they never existed."

And when Kobold popped onto the scene?

"I was surprised he was still here a few years later."

Just about the only thing Michael Kobold is circumspect about is money. There seems to be a watch-business code of omerta regarding sales figures--extending even to a company that sells direct to the public, publishes its prices online, and rarely discounts. But the math is simple. If you assume (conservatively) that the average sale of a Kobold watch is worth about $2,500, and if the company sold (conservatively) about 1,500 watches in 2006, then Kobold is coming off something like a $3.75 million year.

David Bowling, the associate publisher of WatchTime magazine, likes to call Mike Kobold "Big Fish," after the Tim Burton movie in which a dying father tells his son a string of exaggerated tales. As the father spins outlandish stories, they play out onscreen in wild Technicolor fancy, so that it is never clear where reality ends and fantasy begins. Bowling, who has been observing the watch industry for nearly a decade, says he has never met anyone like Kobold. They first met, he recalls, when Gerd Lang introduced him to the then 19-year-old German at the Basel watch show. Kobold had yet to produce a watch but was not shy about announcing his intentions to do so.

Over the intervening years Bowling has come to know Kobold well, as his magazine has reviewed Kobold products and run the company's ads. (In the trade magazine world, the line between ad and edit is thin and hazy and ultimately matters little since watch people mostly just like to look at the pretty pictures anyway.) Bowling says Kobold used to pop in with a bag of watches, sometimes having sold one out on the street--and often with a fanciful tale or two about his larger-than-life endeavors. Explorer, Nazi hunter, tactical driving instructor--Bowling has heard them all. He'd say, "I'm gonna run a marathon with Ranulph Fiennes…" and Bowling would find himself thinking, "No way. This guy tells some tall tales!"

"Then I turn on the television and there's Michael, and under his talking head, the words 'International Explorer.' I thought, 'Oh, my God. This is just like Big Fish."

And by that he means, maybe reality never really ends at all.

"Ever since then, everything he tells me I believe."

Truth be told, it's not that simple. The reason Kobold is now known to viewers of the Outdoor Life Network as an international explorer is that, yes, he did run a marathon with Ranulph Fiennes--the 2003 New York City Marathon. It was Fiennes's seventh marathon in seven days, a remarkable feat for anyone, even the World's Greatest Explorer, but even more so for a man who had undergone double bypass surgery just three and a half months prior. Kobold was by then Fiennes's good chum--he had even helped Fiennes track down a Nazi war criminal. His primary role was as a translator of old German documents, which isn't exactly James Bond stuff, but--you know--Big Fish, right?

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