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Chase Fancher

"Make no little plans, for they have no magic to stir men's blood."

- Teddy Roosevelt

Chase Fancher

Who: Chase Fancher

Where: Chicago, IL

What: Founder, Oak & Oscar Watch Company

Previous: Real estate appraiser

www.oakandoscar.com

@oakandoscar

TL;DR SUMMARY: This is a story about a real estate consultant who realized his passion was watches while taking a real estate class. He spent nearly five years studying, planning and preparing. Once he felt ready, he took a leap of faith and launched his own watch company. Today Oak & Oscar is highly acclaimed and has two unique watch designs that are wildly popular in the industry. He was recently named by Esquire magazine as one of the top five USA watch brands in the country. Oak & Oscar is the dream child of Chase and represents the culmination of years of effort and groundwork he laid while working a full-time job.

"I realized I didn't like being under someone else's thumb."

- Chase

Inside an understated, somewhat trendy restaurant in Lower Manhattan’s Flatiron District, Chase Fancher breezed into the bar area just a little out of breath. He had just met with a major watch publication, unveiling for them his second watch design, and he was obviously jacked up with excitement. Without looking at the menu he ordered a craft beer by name, sat back with a big sigh of relief and smiled.

Chase presents himself as a wonderfully eclectic combination nomad artist, horology expert and mad scientist. His ruffled beard, horn-rimmed glasses and natural smile seem to disarm a strong intensity that he carries with him. But after many long years of literally working day and night, he’s just now allowing himself to enjoy a bit of his entrepreneurial success.

Sitting at the table, rolling up the sleeves on his gingham shirt and taking a big pull of the beer, you can almost see his mind allowing the concept that he’s “made it” to creep in. “It’s been a helluva five or six years, that’s for sure,” he admits when he’s asked how it feels to look back and appreciate the success.

The “success” lies within the realization that he beat the odds by designing, assembling and releasing a critically acclaimed watch in the USA, after most told him it was impossible. The watch is a limited-edition timepiece, adored by the critics and sought after by those collectors and owners in the industry who appreciate the craft of creating a limited-run timepiece. This success is also measured by the fact that Oak & Oscar’s revenue from the sales of the first watch funded the manufacture and creation of an entirely new second run of watches, announced over the summer of 2016 and released that fall.

Admit it—“you’re not happy”

At this moment in time Chase was 25 years old, unmarried, with no kids. He was making decent money with his real estate consultant job, but he admits he just wasn’t feeling fulfilled.

Until he sketched that watch face. “It was like a light bulb went off inside of me.” Chase ended up passing the licensure class and continuing his real estate consulting career. He was finding financial success, but he felt like something was lacking. “I was getting up every morning, but the passion just wasn’t there. Imagining myself in that cubicle in five years was a very depressing thought. And I kept coming back to the idea of the watch.”

Somewhere along the way Chase was slowly coming to the realization that his dream really could become a reality—but it would all be up to him to make it happen. From the first doodle of a watch face in that margin, hundreds of additional sketches and ideas followed in the months to come. After about a year, he had a notebook full of thoughts and inspirations, and his iPhone was holding hundreds of additional digital notes, images and ideas that he would constantly add to during the day.

Time to reflect

Around this time, Chase was preparing to get married and had plans to start a family. The pull of a steady paycheck and the stability it brought with it was a strong force. That pull was competing with his entrepreneurial drive, and forcing him to take a methodical and measured approach before even considering jumping off the cliff.

It was four years between his first doodle and his official launch of the Oak & Oscar brand, and Chase worked the challenge every spare minute he had. When he wasn’t putting in a 60+ hour week at his prestigious job at a Big Four consulting firm, he was working what he calls his passion job: creating a micro watch company from the kitchen table of his Chicago loft exclusively in his off hours.

“I remember starting to consider the financial margins and wondering if making a micro-watch brand could be sustainable. I wanted to know if I could afford to make the first watch, and if the profits from that watch could fund the second watch. I knew that I did not want to be one of those ‘one and done’ kind of companies. I wanted to do it right. I did not want this to be a hobby. It had to sustain itself if I was going to do this.”

Chase kept the creative side of his brain engaged with the design and details of the watch, while he started to engage the more analytical side of the brain with numbers, finances and the details of starting a business from scratch. At this point, he started educating himself on all things about the business of watches. He contacted people in the industry, getting rough ideas of costs and time tables—all the while keeping a steady paycheck from his 9-to-5 office job.

“While this was happening, I was doing well and being promoted and given nice raises. But after every promotion, and after every raise—I kept asking myself the same question: ‘Why am I doing this?’ I was not feeling fulfilled and my emotional energy kept pulling me toward the watch company.”

While Chase fundamentally understood the tug-of-war between the emotional and logical brain, he still found himself unable to fully commit to the concept of jumping off the ledge. Asked how he knew when it was time to take the leap, he considered the question for plenty of time, and allowed it to work in his brain before he answered.

Put up, or shut up

“It was a slow maturing process for me. I thought that I had to convince myself that the project was doable from a financial and practical standpoint. I also knew I had to move it forward for real, or put it aside. I couldn’t continue to pretend it was going to happen, and I couldn’t go any further without making an even more significant financial investment. I felt kind of stuck, because I had real money in the gamble, my money - not kickstarter dollars.”

At this point Chase had spent about 750 hours of his time and $15,000 of his own money. Most of this investment was tied up in research, travel and help with the mechanics of the watch. But he was still hesitating to make the jump and couldn’t understand why.

“I remember the Thanksgiving dinner in 2013 when I pulled my dad aside and told him my idea. I shared what I had done so far, told him I really wanted to make the leap—but was unsure if I should take the risk. I had just gotten married, and knew I wanted to start a family, but I felt this pull to do this now.”

The advice that set Chase free

“He told me to think ahead 30 years, and ask myself what I would tell my son to do if he asked me a similar question. At that point it became so obvious to me. Of course, I’d tell my own son to go for it. I knew then that I had to really fully commit to the project and take a leap.”

According to Chase, that was the moment that unleashed him and it was “full steam ahead from then on.” His doodles became 3D renderings, and his handwritten plans became financial spreadsheets. Contacts became suppliers and friends became early customers. Chase was now focused on lining up each of his sourced components and materials for assembly. He traveled multiple times to the watch epicenter of the world, Switzerland, to learn the details from the masters. He’d get himself invited into offices of the leading watchmakers of the world and pick their brain for knowledge. (Oh, BTW, he did all this in his off hours, not spending one minute of time during his regular work time on his project.)

“I really was focused on making the highest quality watch I could. But it also had to be the most well-designed piece. In the end, I came to the realization that I was making the watch I would really be proud to wear, and hoping there were enough people out in the world who liked what I liked,” he admitted.

That is exactly what happened, as his first-edition watch, the “Burnham,” sold out well ahead of schedule, and put him on the path to fully commit to the company on his terms and without the help of outside money. The money from the pre-sales and deposits capitalized Chase’s manufacturing process, and allowed the remaining profit to fund the second edition watch, the “Sandford.”

The Burnham sold out in less than a year, and as we spoke, his second watch, The Sandford, was in the planning stages for a fall of 2016 release. All this from a very small office in a Chicago loft. (Author’s note & full disclosure: The Sandford was sold to equally rave reviews as The Burnham, and this author owns both watches, which were purchased at full retail price, and worth every penny.)

“I wanted to create a watch I could be proud of wearing. Well designed, and well made. The value has to make sense. I love that my lifestyle changed. I get to play with my son and play with watches and I make money doing it. I feel like I cracked the code to life in a way. Really having a lot of fun doing it.”

A few of the "personas" Chase found and applied on his path for success:THE PLANNER

The vision was the easy part for Chase. He could literally see the watch face in his mind, but how to turn that into a plan was the difficult challenge. He admits that his key goal was to continuously refine his vision so that it would be viable to quit his day job. Having passion and determination are incredibly important. But those traits are useless without the discipline of making and then working the plan.

But Chase, like many other successful risk-takers, was confident that he would just know when the time was right. He would feel and intuitively know that he could not wait a second longer, and it was the research and data points he had collected that gave him the confidence to take the leap.

He describes his process as small, little bits of critical information that he accumulated over time. Pulling out his iPhone, Chase points to several hundred entries in "Notes" that contain more than five years of ideas, thoughts, and suggestions to himself. "This was my constant thinking process. I wanted to do it right, and not rush this. I keep these notes with me to this day. They remind me of the process and the time I took to make this right. I keep scrolling and I bet there are more than 50 screens full of notes here. And some of these ideas are going to be part of my next watch."

THE COACH

For Chase, his support team began with his family. His wife and his father were huge advocates for his success. Support is crucial to the success of any risk-taker. Your immediate family, mentors and others will guide you along the way. The best success stories always have an amazing team behind them.

In addition to the emotional support from his family, he found technical support from craftsmen who specialized in the unique elements of watchmaking. "What I think I was really good at was building the team that helped create the watch. I started a watch company, but I was smart enough to know that I'm not a 'watchmaker.' I found the right people who were great at the different elements of the watch process and brought them together.

"I did this to respect the art of horology as a whole. I want to be part of that. I wanted to create something amazing, that people in the industry would respect. I'm not in it to do a marginal watch. They realized that I'm exceedingly honest about who I am."