In late December, Jessica Owens, who has been collecting watches for more than a dozen years, decided she wanted to create a website devoted to them that would be, as she put it, “a platform that really welcomed everybody.”
With that in mind, she left her job in January as a marketing coordinator at the online magazine Watchonista and on Feb. 27 she unveiled Daily Grail, a website about watches with a direct approach and colloquial tone, and frequently a bit of cheekiness. (Its web address is dailygrailofficial.com because dailygrail.com, which includes topics like “Alien Nation” and “Cryptozoology,” was already taken.)
Some Daily Grail features are straightforward, like tips on watch collecting and a piece about Jaeger-LeCoultre, which is based in Le Sentier, Switzerland. Others are quirkier, like a scheduled video series featuring well-known chefs who are watch enthusiasts preparing their favorite snacks.
“I want to bring a bit of fun and joy back into the industry,” said Ms. Owens, 26, who is known as J.J., a childhood nickname. “I don’t want to intimidate. So many of my peers, and people who have come up to me, have said, ‘I want to get into watches, but I don’t know where to start.’ It is a foreign language.”
From its initial content, it seems as though news on Daily Grail will be handled in an authoritative but lighthearted way. Information about watch collaborations are being presented as marriage announcements, for example, and posts about discontinued watches as obituaries. Those pieces, with others, appear in a section called “Page 6 O’Clock,” a nod to Page Six, The New York Post’s well-known gossip column. But, Ms. Owens said, she is using a number in her title because there are numbers on watch dials.
