Why We Built OWNx the Boring Way: An Honest Gold Company Since 2008

Go back to 2008. The financial system was coming apart, trust in it with it, and a lot of people were looking at gold and silver for the first time.

What we noticed at the time was how unnecessarily hard it was for an ordinary person to buy silver and gold at a fair price and actually understand what they were paying. Too much of the industry seemed built around high-pressure sales, confusing markups, and fear. We believed there had to be a simpler, more transparent way to do it.

I’ve spent four pieces in this series on what that industry does to people: a celebrity-endorsed dealer that filed for bankruptcy owing customers more than sixty million dollars (Part 1), the difference between owning gold and owning a promise (Part 2), the way the whole machine is pointed at retirees (Part 3), and what you’re actually paying for when the price is hidden (Part 4). This one is about what Jeremy and I built instead.

The math that bothered me

Here’s what I couldn’t get past. If you were an institution buying a whole bar, you paid a small, fair premium. If you were a regular person who wanted to set aside fifty dollars a month, you paid far more for the same metal, if you could get a fair deal at all. The people with the least room for a mistake were charged the most for it. That struck me as backwards, and fixable.

The fix wasn’t complicated. Let people buy real metal in small amounts, at an honest price, and make sure they actually own it. It just wasn’t how the industry made its money.

The boring choices

So we started building, and almost every decision we made was the unglamorous one.

We didn’t hire a commissioned sales floor. A salesperson paid on commission has one job, and it’s not your financial wellbeing. Take that incentive out and the pressure goes with it.

We didn’t pay a celebrity to warn you about the dollar. If a company spends more on a spokesperson than on disclosure, the spokesperson is the product. We’d rather the metal and the price speak for themselves.

We carried no debt, and we still carry none. Zero debt means there’s no leverage waiting to unwind, and no reason to ever lean on one customer’s prepayment to cover another’s order. That single choice is what turns a lot of dealers into an IOU when prices move against them.

We kept customer metal allocated in each person’s name, in insured, independent depositories, off our own balance sheet. If OWNx disappeared tomorrow, your gold was never ours to owe to anyone. It’s yours.

And we let people start small. Fifty dollars, fractional ownership, the same honest price a large buyer gets. That idea launched as SilverSaver.com in December 2009. We added gold in 2011, and rebranded the company as OWNx in 2015.

What “boring” actually buys you

None of it makes for an exciting commercial. It just takes away the ways you can get hurt.

Nobody here gets paid to talk you into a coin you’ll lose half your money on. Your premium isn’t quietly covering a marketing budget. A bad quarter at OWNx can’t become your problem, because there’s no debt on the books waiting to unwind. And your metal is titled to you and held independently, so the company failing and taking your savings with it is not one of the possible endings.

The earlier pieces showed what happens when those protections are missing. This is what it looks like to build them in from the start.

The honest part

I said in Part 1 that we’re not always the cheapest place to buy a single coin, and that hasn’t changed. What I didn’t say there is what building it this way cost us.

It cost us speed. A commissioned sales floor would have grown the company faster than we grew. A spokesperson would have made the name bigger than it is. Debt would have let us move quicker into more products. Every one of those was available to us, and every one of them is a lever the companies in this series pulled before things went wrong for their customers. We didn’t want the version of OWNx that came with them attached.

Why it still matters

We’ve grown slowly, and that was a choice. I wanted a company where nobody has to wonder whether the metal in their account is really theirs, and where the answer doesn’t depend on how the company is doing that quarter.

Every company I wrote about in this series failed people in ways that could have been avoided. We’re still debt free and still growing slower than we could. I’m fine with that.

Start from Part 1, then read Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

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