For luxury watch retailer Danny Goldsmith, it’s important he dresses his part. “I’m a suit-and-tie kind of guy,” he says. “I feel like when I’m wearing a suit and tie, I’m ready to take on the world.”
Yet when he sat down for an interview with Delray magazine, he let his hair down, so to speak. It was inventory day at Goldsmith & Complications, his second-story boutique in downtown Delray Beach. With no other appointments on the docket, Goldsmith, a youthful 50, sported a backwards baseball cap, a Grateful Dead T-shirt and shorts. A tattoo of an octopus splashed around on his left leg; classic hip-hop piped from a speaker in the customer lounge. It gets his blood pumping.
Part of the appeal of Goldsmith & Complications is the juxtaposition of luxury and geek-chic, of lowbrow and highbrow. In the lounge, shoppers can enjoy an array of single-malt whiskies while perusing an elaborate desktop timepiece that resembles the title space station in “Deep Space 9,” a Lucite baseball bat filled with vintage watch parts, or a table clock shaped like a Ferrari. In an adjoining room, on purple wallpaper, a neon sign blazes with the phrase “tick tock mothaf***a,” a reference to a colorful quote from a Samuel L. Jackson movie. He says his suppliers from Switzerland love to take pictures with it.
For all of its eccentric touches, Goldsmith is serious about his business, which can involve serious profits. That Swiss Ferrari clock is one of only 100 on the planet, and it retails at $42,500. Goldsmith moves wristwatches, new and pre-owned, for upwards of six figures. His coup de grace? In 2019, he sold an Urwerk AMC atomic clock-powered wristwatch for $2.75 million. It’s one of only three in existence. A picture of it, housed in a case that looks like it could contain the nuclear codes, hangs proudly in Goldsmith & Complications.
“I’m all about relationships,” he says, of his sales success. “You treat people the way you want to be treated. I don’t know any other way.”
The son of New York jewelry merchants, Goldsmith developed his interest for watches in his early 20s at a trade show, when he noticed a Rolex Daytona on the wrist of one of his father’s clients. “It was one of the holy grail watches in the industry,” he recalls. “It sang to me. It shook me at the core.
“But it wasn’t until my mid-30s that I really started getting a passion for the lesser-known brands, like the independents—the smaller guys that make 30 watches a year. … That’s my passion—to find that unknown watchmaker and cultivate them, introduce them to everyone, help them grow.”
Goldsmith started his business on the wholesale side as a traveling salesman, at one point working 88 accounts in 14 states. Despite a lack of a marketing budget, he ended up selling luxury watches to athletes and celebrities—George Lopez and D.L. Hughley among them—on the strength of Instagram posts and word of mouth. “It snowballed from there,” he says. “I started building up a clientele.”
It took the pandemic reset for Goldsmith, a native New Yorker, to shift just about everything in his life. Now married with a son, he decided to switch to direct retail, and wavered between a move to Santa Monica, California, or Delray Beach. He chose Delray, inspired by a memorable visit to the city back in 2019.
“We rented a house, sight unseen, FaceTiming,” he says. “It just felt different. I felt there wasn’t a weight on my chest. I fell in love with it. … It was the wildest thing I’d ever done.”
He occasionally holds public events at his boutique, complete with European exhibitors touting their latest watches, all part of his efforts to “put Delray on the map as a watch destination.”
And watches, so far, have proven to be a recession-proof business. “The last six years have been something we’ve never seen in this market before,” he says. “If you walk to a Mayors, their watch showcases are empty. Watches that retail for $10,000 can be going for $70,000, $80,000. It’s been a wild ride.
“With a watch, for a gentleman, it’s a staple,” he continues. “I could easily look at my cellphone for the time, and sometimes I do. But there’s nothing like having that wristwatch on. … It’s definitely here to stay.”
This article is from the January/February 2023 issue of Delray magazine. For more like this, click here to subscribe to the magazine.
