Q&A: Keeping a close watch on a treasured possession

Jason Lee is the co-founder, alongside Jay Zeng, of the Watch Box Co., a brand that makes premium watch winders and travel cases. Their plan is to target the market gap between cheap disposable winders and absurdly overpriced luxury ones.

Inside Small Business: Can you tell us briefly about your professional background prior to launching The Watch Box Co?

Jason Lee : I trained as a civil engineer and worked as a junior project manager inside commercial scale construction project management office. That meant coordinating engineers, architects, contractors and stakeholders, managing budgets and timelines, and making sure physical things were built on time, and to agreed requirements. It was great training for structured problem-solving, resourcefulness, time management, teamwork, and getting things done efficiently with others. Eventually I wanted to apply those skills to build something of my own, which led me to co-found The Watch Box Co.

ISB: What was the inspiration behind you starting this business?

JL: It started during my time as a reservist in the Australian Defence Force. That’s when I first started wearing a watch every day, and I came to rely on it and appreciate it as a tool. After I left, the interest stuck with me and grew, and I bought my first proper watch, a Tissot PRX. When I went looking for somewhere to store it and travel with it, I found the market split in two. On one side were cheap, generic products that didn’t feel worthy of a watch you’d saved up for. On the other were luxury accessories priced for serious collectors. There was nothing in between for the everyday enthusiast who genuinely cares about their watches. That gap became The Watch Box Co. – premium, well-designed watch winders, travel cases and accessories at a price that makes sense.

ISB: When and where did you launch the brand?

JL: We officially launched in Sydney in October 2024. We started with our Australian store and expanded into the US shortly after. Today we run both markets side by side.

ISB: What challenges did you face having no experience in manufacturing or e-commerce, and how did you overcome them?

JL: Neither of us had run a product business before, but my engineering background helped more than I expected. Manufacturing is ultimately about specifications, tolerances and quality control, which is how engineers think. The hard part was finding suppliers who could hit our standard consistently. We solved that by building close relationships with our overseas manufacturers, being very precise about materials and fit, and rejecting products that weren’t right.

E-commerce was the bigger learning curve: product, social media, logistics, and customer service. I approached it the way I’d approach any project. We broke it into workstreams, set clear requirements of how it should look like, the deadlines, and executed quickly. My co-founder’s finance background complemented that well. Between us we covered the operational and the commercial side, and we built a small but capable team.

ISB: Can you tell us about the bespoke software system you developed to replace off-the-shelf inventory tools, and why you deemed that necessary?

JL: We were with a large inventory planning software company, which was a solid platform, but it was expensive for our size and didn’t fit how we operate. Coming from engineering, my instinct was to build the tool we actually needed. Starting with the actual problems that needed solving, and some help from AI models, our operations app manages inventory and purchase orders, tracks COGS properly, and connects directly to our accounting software to pull live P&L data, then adjusts it to show our true cost of goods and gross profit. It costs less than what we replaced, and it answers the exact questions we need to make good decisions.

ISB: How has the market received your products, and what plans do you have for the business in the next 12 months?

JL: The response has been fantastic. We passed 10,000 customers across Australia and the US in our first year, which told us the gap we saw was real.

The next 12 months are all about going from a successful hobby store to a genuinely great brand. The companies I look up to are ones like Secretlab, Aeropress and Made In – businesses known for making the best version of their product rather than riding short-term trends. For us that means two things. First, lifting product quality even further, including better motors and fit across our winder range. Second, launching the Meridian, our new flagship watch case. It’s a premium aluminium case and the most ambitious product we’ve built so far. The goal is simple: when someone buys a watch they love, we want The Watch Box Co. to be the first name that comes to mind for looking after it.

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