$330.
That was the price of the sale that convinced three RMHS students that their hobby might be a viable business, and set the company Glacier Watches and its founders on an entrepreneurial journey that few RMHS students have traveled.
Meet Ray Borawski (‘24), who along with Liam Billingham (‘24) and Andrino Sabia (‘24), founded Glacier Watches, which has since become Clockwise Digital Solutions.
Birth of a Business
The three had known each other in middle school, but had never seriously discussed an idea for a business then. Borawski attended Pingree for two years and then transferred back, and came back with a newfound passion: watches. Borawski had been buying and selling watches on his own, but as the three of them reconnected, they began speaking about getting some sort of business in the works. Borawski said, “We decided on Glacier because I had already been independently sort of buying and selling watches on my own… and we had wanted to do something entrepreneurial. We wanted to go into business together.” This took form in Glacier Watches Company, which operated from late March 2023 to early Fall of the same year.
The business setup was simple enough at first, with Borawski running the show as point man for negotiations and also making final decisions on purchases, Billingham conducting most of the market research and doing online negotiations, and Sabia running the social media presence and marketing, especially on Instagram. Sabia explained, “Every day I would make some sort of reel that would be promoting a watch, not just about what we were going to sell, but also [about] other watches in the market, what professional opinions are, and what celebrities think about watches.” The three of them operated in tandem for a time as a small business, buying and selling watches and making a tidy profit for three 17-year-olds.
Day-to-day, the company’s operations mostly revolved around conducting market research and scouring watch dealers and websites for deals that they could make a profit off of. This worked well for most of 2023, as the company began to grow in size and influence, but mostly operating within the small sphere of the watch industry. Glacier quickly began to turn a profit, however. They even ended up selling a watch that was one of only twenty-five in the world. They also negotiated a watch deal for a CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
The buying and selling process was slow going. They conducted their early business mostly through online platforms, with the main one being Chrono24. If their bid on a watch was accepted, it could then take them weeks to months to resell a watch at a profit. While Glacier Watches was able to make considerable profit to date, in the thousands of dollars, they began to recognize an opportunity to switch gears. Borawski said, “There was definitely some real ambition that started to appear, and I have to thank both of them for that. At the end of the day I don’t think I would have been able to independently cultivate the vision that would, you know, eventually become Clockwise today.”
Evolution
Over time, the setup with the three of them did not last, as the need for a social media presence quickly shrank. They also began to run into problems with liquidity, as the watch market is not the most stable of markets. All three knew that the watch market is not exactly the fastest growing market in the world. In fact, Borawski and Billingham acknowledged that it is quite the contrary: “We could list a watch but there was no guarantee that it would sell the next week, or the next month, or even the next three months.” Because of this, they have had to continually innovate new ways to keep the company above water and running smoothly.
Glacier Watches had existed as a dealer of watches, but slowly began to expand their marketing and consulting operations. Eventually, Borawski and Billingham knew they had to make some sort of change. They decided to go from, as Borawski put it, “the very strict buying and selling as a dealer with Glacier into a more open ended consulting [business].”
This started when the company did business with a watch dealer in Cambridge, called Swiss Watchmaker. Borawski described the realization he had about a new role he could play. “A lot of these people have stuff [watches] that have been on the shelf for a while, the longest we’ve ever seen was over 12 years. And so we said, ‘We know what we need to do here. We know how to [help these companies] effectively. And we also know that in doing this, if we just took a cut off the top, then it would solve both of our problems.” From then on, the business only continued to grow and change. Due to the change in operations, Sabia left the company and began working on a solo project in music instead: “I’m composing a project, it’ll be 11 songs. A lot of the research I’ve been doing after the watch business is a lot of music based music theory, how instruments work together, sound design.” Sabia’s exit and a shift in business approach led to the foundation of Clockwise Digital Solutions in the late stages of 2023.
A New Model
Clockwise Digital Solutions has represented a monumental effort from the two entrepreneurs, Borawski and Billingham. As a result of the change to a new company, with a different vision and purpose, their new workload has increased. Borawski said about the new roles that they are “on site four to five days a week. We are building websites. We’re sitting in on meetings and giving our input on different things. We are speaking with different companies and renegotiating deals, and doing industry research.” Billingham added “I’m the guy in the chair pretty much. When we have a major client meeting or we’re trying to secure a client, I’ll be there to back him up, but for the most part, I’m there to support and aid Ray, especially on the digital side of things.” He added as well that Borawski should raise his salary, to which Borawski simply laughed.
So far, the launch of Clockwise has been an absolute success. No longer tied down by a buying-and-selling process, the duo have been free to negotiate and take on contracts with larger companies, mostly dealers of watches, in the Boston area. Clockwise’s main mode of consulting has been to help companies realize their full potential across all marketing platforms, including the internet, in places they previously had not expanded to. This has resulted in both an uptick in activity and revenue, as Borawski claimed that their strategies to help smaller companies “compete with these nine, 10 figure distributors and retailers” have proved successful. Borawski added, “I think there’s this perception of consultants that they’re just really smart people that just tell you to do really stupid things to cut costs, but we’ve always aspired to be more, which is why we have such a focus on implementation.”
This focus on implementation has led to an expansion in operations, with many new clients in the jewelry marketplace, as well as a proposed expansion into consulting in the medical field. This would represent a shift for the company, as they have stuck to what is familiar to them up until this point. The duo are ready for the challenge, however, with Borawski saying they’d “love to expand it to some other industries and really learn how things go there. At the end of the day, a lot of our skills are really transferable across industries. We learned so much from working with all these different people. And we are really looking forward to continuing that.” Borawski has also already laid down plans to continue working on Clockwise in some capacity while attending Holy Cross next year.
This year, RMHS has had the privilege to witness the rise of a business like no other in Clockwise Digital Solutions. A future in business appears very bright for these young entrepreneurs as they go on to the next stages of their lives and education.
