New Website, Same RedBar
Yes, it's basically an excuse for us to talk about watches even more than we already do.
by Kathleen McGivney
RedBar began, as many of the best things do, as somewhat of an accident. All the way back in 2006, when the watch community largely existed in online forums and rarely in person, a chance meeting between Adam Craniotes and Dr. Jeffrey Jacques led to them eventually starting to hang out on a regular basis to talk watches. They started this informal, yet nerdy, pastime in 2007, at a now-defunct bar in Koreatown in NYC, which was called… wait for it… Red Bar. Eventually, more watch-obsessed people found their way there, mostly through word of mouth, like a secret society, but way nerdier, and the name “RedBar” stuck. (Ed. note: we know, the name has nothing to do with watches, and sometimes we hear Swiss people say, “Qu’est-ce que… bar rouge?”, but it’s our name, and we’re sticking to it.)
Fast forward nearly 20 years later, and we count upwards of 90 chapters around the globe, on every continent except Antarctica, a fact that I will keep saying until a scientist stationed there starts a chapter. (We only need one scientist and a penguin.) It sounds like a cliché, but the best part about this entire nearly 20-year run has been the community that has grown around our shared love of watches. There are people that I count as friends that I never would have met in any other way. There have been three marriages (that we know of!) of people who met through RedBar. Our community brings together lots of folks who seemingly have nothing in common with one another until, through a discussion about what’s on their wrists, they discover that they do, in fact, have lots of things in common.
And community is fundamentally what we want this website to be about. We’ll be featuring content from members of our community, some of whom write about and photograph watches professionally, but many of whom do not. We’ll share stories that aren’t just about the watches themselves, but the people behind them. We’re doing this on Substack because a subscription model allows us to be able to pay people for their work, while providing fresh and interesting content and storytelling that we think you’ll enjoy.
We hope that through this site, we’ll be able to bring you interesting writing, interesting watches, and a look behind the scenes at the community we’ve built over the years. And there’s still more to come - keep an eye on our YouTube channel for our soon-to-be-launched podcast, where Adam mostly talks over me and sometimes I get a word in edgewise.