admin The shop’s spotlights reflect cabinets overflowing with diamonds—heavy chains and fully set Swiss grails, Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe and Rolex, alongside a few cases containing unmodified classics, Pepsi-bezel GMT Master 2s, and enough colouful Richard Milles to make Rafael Nadal break a sweat. A young man whispers to a member of staff about collecting something for Skepta. I’m handed a bottle of water and ushered into the VIP suite—cushioned walls, mounted TV screens, and Louis Vuitton luggage from Virgil Abloh’s tenure—where Abbasi waits for me.
Growing up above a pizza shop in Northwest London, Abbasi wasn’t exposed to the rarefied and often obfuscating world of watches until a friend of a friend offered him a Breitling. “I was selling sportswear at the time,” he says, reclining in a leather chair. He’s wearing a bleached denim jacket, hair freshly faded, a lightbulb flash of diamonds on his wrist occasionally catching the light as he gesticulates. “Around 2008, I started buying and selling watches on a very small scale. I didn’t know too much about them, so I did my research. Naturally, when you’re buying and selling, you learn bits and pieces from each deal.”
His chance paid off and the Breitling turned a profit, which led to another watch, then another. “I kept searching, looking for deals—the internet, different group chats—and over the years I started building a brand,” says Abbasi. “I started to think that I could make it into something big. Celebrities started to notice us through social media. We gave good service, we did things fairly, we gave good prices, and I was always out and about, networking and meeting people. I introduced jewellery into the business, and then diamond custom watches about 10 years ago. I saw there was a market for it. I diamond-set a few watches, we sold them, then I searched for dealers and factories for high-quality sets. Now we’re known for offering the best of the best.”
After building a following from his phone and a tiny office, Abbasi needed a proper base, somewhere with an expensively clad VIP room and polished marble counters. He’d caught wind that a dry cleaner on Hatton Garden might be looking to sell their space, so he put in an offer. “That’s how I ended up here,” he says, palms open to the ceiling, his own immaculate kingdom. “We had a portfolio of celebrity clients. The only thing we were missing at the time was having a shop, somewhere in Hatton Garden. It drove me to make it great.”
