Dave Portnoy admits defeat, announces fire sale for Brick Watch Company, blaming “watch geeks” for its demise

Jamie Weiss

Dave Portnoy is no stranger to controversy. Indeed, the founder of sports and pop culture publication Barstool Sports – best known for his viral pizza reviews on social media as well as his brash online persona of “El Presidente” – seems to actively court it. However, there’s one controversy he’s shown he hasn’t been able to bluster on through: his ill-fated venture into the watch industry, which it seems he’s just thrown in the towel for. Ahead of Black Friday, Portnoy took to Instagram to announced a fire sale for the ill-conceived watch brand he launched two years ago, Brick Watch Company, blaming “watch nerds” for the brand’s lack of success but also admitting how he misunderstood the watch industry and community.

 

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“I got my ass f**king handed to me… this is me admitting defeat,” Portnoy has said in a typically macho Instagram video, where he announced he’s marking his entire range of watches down by 80% to cut his losses.

Portnoy was resoundingly drubbed by the watch community in 2022 when he launched his watch brand, which encompassed two generic white label designs selling elsewhere for US$42 that he’d marked up to US$2,400. Zach penned a great article explaining the genesis of the brand, its products (and what dubious value they represent) as well as a round-up of the criticism it garnered at the time, which you should have a read of here. It was pretty brutal. As I wrote at the time, Portnoy found out the hard way that just because you’ve launched a successful media brand, you can’t just waltz into the watch industry and expect to be successful there, too.

Clearly, he wasn’t successful – much to the mirth of watch fans. Both Portnoy’s own followers as well as the Time+Tide community have wasted no time in twisting the knife. The top comment on Portnoy’s post reads “Dave, with all due respect, everybody loves you, but nobody wants these watches.”

One of our commenters rightfully pointed out that blaming watch nerds is a cop-out on Portnoy’s part: “‘watch nerds’ = informed consumers calling out his grift”. “The fact that people still won’t buy it at 80% off should be all he needs to know,” another dug in with. Ouch. Ironically, even at these fire sale prices, these watches are arguably still overpriced…