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Rumours swirl on the closure of Eleven James

An unresponsive website and no social media posts since May and June has led many throughout the watch industry to believe that the company is getting ready to shut its doors.

Eleven James, which offers a membership to people looking to rent a watch seems to be on its way out, according to a report by Hodinkee.

Earlier this month, Hodinkee received an email from a current Eleven James member explaining that the company were no longer responding to correspondence.

This prompted the American website to look into the issue further and found that the Eleven James website had become unresponsive.

This, plus no social media posts since May and June has led many throughout the watch industry to believe that the company is winding up.

Hodinkee managed to get in touch with someone at New York-based Eleven James, which shows there are still people working at the company, but only received a combative response when asking about the current situation of the brand.

The company’s head of corporate strategy between 2016 and June of this year, Robi Cai, was then contacted.

Cai explained to Hodinkee that the company had attempted to raise additional funds to continue operations, but were unsuccessful.

This means the company’s management team is reclaiming watches out on rent.

However, according to another former employee who wanted to remain anonymous, no public announcement has been made because the business is worried that if people get wind of the situation, they would try to hold on to the watches indefinitely.

The former employee went on to reveal that he understands there are bids on the table to buy Eleven James’ inventory of watches.

Olivier Reza, chief executive of Eleven James, told WatchPro in March how getting a business of this nature off the ground was difficult.

Find out what WatchPro editor Rob Corder discovered when he met with Reza earlier this year.

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