For the past seven years, I’ve helped collectors buy, sell, and build thoughtful watch collections, always with a focus on trust, transparency, and long-term value. Fog City was my home for that work: a place where I built relationships, refined my taste, and navigated thousands of transactions with integrity.

But the deeper I looked, the clearer the opportunity became: an industry ready for transformation, hungry for clarity, and desperately in need of better tools.

That’s why I co-founded Collected, a visionary platform designed to bring verified identities, robust infrastructure, and definitive provenance to a $26B+ market still stuck in spreadsheets and handshake deals.

Collected isn’t just another marketplace. It’s the infrastructure upon which trust, clarity, and meaningful value will flow in the new era of watch collecting. It provides dealers the ability to buy and sell efficiently, empowering them as watches increasingly become financial assets. This evolution benefits everyone: collectors, dealers, and the broader market.

T.J. Bender is my personal brand, pioneering a new approach to watch dealing defined by a fiduciary responsibility to clients. Built around strategic guidance, transparent curation, and genuine advocacy, my mission is to redefine how watches are bought, sold, and valued, always placing my clients' best interests at the forefront.

As my day-to-day increasingly shifts toward building Collected, I’m narrowing my focus to what I care about most:

• Working with a small group of collectors in a more strategic, advisory role

• Taking on only the watches I truly believe in

• Building deeper, long-term relationships instead of chasing volume

I’m not trying to be everywhere. I’m trying to be exactly where it matters.