It was a Tuesday night in March, and 87 people were watching a stranger hold up a watch I helped design.
The stream was a collaboration with Coop's Time — one of Whatnot's most popular watch sellers. She'd reached out to us a few weeks earlier, curious about the artist-collab watches she kept seeing in her feed. We shipped her a case of pieces, she put them in front of her audience, and something clicked.
Over four and a half hours, 17 Mad Hudson watches found new wrists. People from her chat crossed into ours. Bidders who'd never heard of us were suddenly asking about Brad Podray's design process and whether the creature on the dial was a dog or a cat (it's a creature — we don't define it, and that's the point).
That night was the first time a Mad Hudson stream felt like a self-sustaining ecosystem. Not because of the numbers, though $1,600 in revenue from a single session is meaningful for a three-person brand. It was because the energy in the room was different. People weren't just buying — they were discovering.
What Whatnot Actually Is
If you haven't been on Whatnot, here's the short version: it's a live auction platform where sellers go on camera, hold up products, and people bid in real time. Think eBay meets Twitch. There's a chat. There's energy. And unlike a product listing that sits there waiting, a Whatnot stream is a moment — you're either there or you missed it.
For a brand like ours — artist-collaboration watches made in small batches — that format is almost unfairly well-suited. Every watch has a story. Every collab has a designer behind it. And the live format lets us actually tell that story while someone's deciding whether to bid.
Why It Works for a Brand Like Ours
Mad Hudson isn't a volume play. We're three people in Chicago — Connor, Brad, and Mad — designing watches with artists and manufacturing them in small runs. We don't have a marketing budget. We don't have a warehouse. What we have is a product people get excited about when they see it up close.
Traditional e-commerce is a product photo and a description. It's fine. It converts fine. But it doesn't capture the thing that makes people actually care about what we're doing: the craft, the collaboration, the personality behind the brand.
Whatnot gives us a room full of people who showed up because they're interested in watches, and a camera to show them something they haven't seen before. The customer acquisition cost is zero. The conversion happens because the product is right there, live, and the person selling it is the same person who built the brand.
The Discovery Energy
Here's what I've learned about live selling that nobody tells you in the e-commerce playbooks: the best moments feel like discovery, not promotion.
When Coop's Time held up one of Brad's designs and her chat started reacting — "wait, who makes these?" "is that hand-painted?" "where do I follow them?" — that wasn't marketing. That was people finding something real in a sea of dropshipped junk.
That energy is fragile. You can't manufacture it. You can't buy it with ad spend. It happens because the product is interesting and the person presenting it gives a damn. The moment you try to turn it into a billboard, it dies.
We've started thinking of our Whatnot presence like a speakeasy. If you know, you know. The door is understated. The experience inside is the thing that earns the reputation.
What's Next
We're leaning into collaborations — both on Whatnot and in the studio. Artists from Connor's previous company, Projects Days, have started reaching out. New colorways are in development. The catalog is growing not because we're chasing scale, but because the collaborations keep producing work we're proud of.
If you've found us through a stream, welcome. You found the back room. The watches on our site are the gallery versions — full retail, the complete brand experience, the story behind each piece. The streams are where you see them come alive.
And if you haven't caught a stream yet — keep an eye on our Whatnot page. We don't announce much. That's by design.
Mad Hudson Watches is a Chicago-based artist-collaboration watch brand. Every timepiece is designed with a different artist. Learn more at madhudsonwatches.com.