Founder of Gebauer Watches 1.7M vertical feet 57 countries 3 foreign languages
I'm 15 and I've lived in Steamboat Springs for 9 years. Gebauer Watches is a milestone gift brand with dials cut from real wood, and I was the youngest person ever accepted into the High Country Accelerator.
Written about by Steamboat Pilot & Today and SnowBrains.
The dials exist. The first cut samples arrived this week in all three woods, oiled and unoiled. There's no finished watch yet, and full samples are scheduled for the end of October. I'm planning to launch on Kickstarter in February 2027, with a 300 watch production run if it funds.
This section needs updating. Email me and I'll tell you exactly where production stands.
At first, I wanted a watch because I wanted to get off my phone when I checked the time. When I was in Milan, I walked into a Seiko store and walked out with a Seiko SRPE53, with 310 euros I had saved up over months. As I thought more about watches, I was inspired to start my own watch company.
I cold emailed manufacturers in 5 countries and decided to pair with one in Japan. I've done over 60 interviews, and 24 people offered to pay after hearing me talk about it and seeing photos. 3 people have reserved a watch so far.
In mass production there will be 300 watches total, with 100 of each wood, numbered within every variant. The coolest thing is that no grain ever repeats, so each one is different, like a fingerprint. Every watch is slightly unique.
Gebauer Watches is a gift giving brand because I decided to combine my love for watches with the problem that there isn't a very modern, meaningful milestone gift out there.
Two decades ago, about 65% of high school sophomores got a class ring. By the 2010s it was 20 to 30%, according to a Jostens representative. It's almost certainly worse now, because the pandemic shut down the schools these brands were selling through. I've never seen anyone have a class ring at my school.
In 2025, graduation gift spending hit a record $6.8 billion. Cash showed up in more than half of those gifts and gift cards in another 31%. So the money is still there. The object is what went missing, and that's the part I'm trying to put back.
In the 2024 to 2025 season, when I was 13, I skied 1.7 million vertical feet. If that number doesn't mean anything to you, it works out to about 322 miles of descent, or 59 times the height of Everest. My 3 siblings and my dad took the family total past 10 million. I finished the season #23 on the Steamboat leaderboard, which is one of the most competitive in the country.
I skied 8:30 to 12:30 every weekend and every school break, all season. That's the whole method.
Over the past 4 years, since 2022, I've traveled 3 to 6 months every year, usually from mid summer well into the first semester. Here is every one of them, grouped the way the trips actually ran. The three I lived in are marked.
Where Spanish stopped being a school subject and started being how I actually asked for things.
Close enough to Switzerland for road trips. I spent 5 hours in the Omega museum in Biel and didn't want to leave.
I won a scholarship in my freshman year to study Arabic and I'm living here now, with a Moroccan host family. It's been a great time.
Spanish, French and Arabic, on top of English. These are CEFR levels, the European standard, because saying you're conversational in something doesn't tell anyone anything.
I answer every email myself.